What Fadell says is more or less irrelevant.
What Ive says about skeumorphism is irrelevant.
What happened with the maps feature, and whether or not Forstall chose to apologize for it is irrelevant.
It appears to me, that there is a move towards consensus-based management at Apple, which is a shame. Consensus is, and always has been, the refuge of scoundrels -- for the plain reason that 10 poorly informed opinions are never as good as one really well-formed informed opinion.
You need a good manager who can cut through all the ******** of the so-called "consensus" to manage large technology products.
I think the Apple maps app is a good upgrade to what was already present. And so what if every address listed wasn't correct? It's not a show stealing feature anyway; more just coming up to standard with what has already been available elsewhere.
I wouldn't pan skeumorphism either. In some form or another, it's been the bedrock of all of Apple's revolutionary products in software, and what has always made its best products revolutionary and widely accepted. Consider the concept of the "desktop" in the original MacOS. The "Trash can." The icon for the "folder" (as opposed to "the directory"). The "document" (as opposed to the "file.") Consider the concept of an animated "button" on the computer screen (a graphical representation of a physical button). Consider Steve Job's long-held affection for classical typography, which is one of the few things he remarks on learning in school, and which formed the basis of much of what was unique about MacOS.
Discarding these classical notions for real-world objects which are familiar to people may be attractive to a select number of nerds who form a small proportion of the population, but is a dangerous path for Apple to go down as a consumer-oriented company.
Also, you should read a very widely read book in design called "The Design of Everyday Things", which is about how the physical appearance of objects gives users an intuitive sense of how they should interact with them. As arbitrary as these rules may seem, these are not concepts that individuals easily unlearn.
In iOS, it manifests in many ways as for example the slide switch, the "bounce" motion that gives users intuitive feedback that they have reached the end of a list (as opposed to accidentally touching a finger to the screen to cause it to inadvertently stick), the envelope icon for e-mail, etc...
The combination of Ive's industrial design and Forstall's classical and intuitive software design are part of what made iOS so great. The physical design of the computer is a sleek, simple and unintrusive as possible. This is as it should be. Why? Because the shape and appearance of the hardware does not change depending on the task at hand. Whether one is using a Calendar program, a word processing program, or watching a movie, the hardware will appear as always, so the design should be simple and unintrusive.
But the software of a computer is another matter. It *has* to communicate to the user what task is at hand. The appearance of a physical-appearing calendar or planner communicates this *very* easily, intuitively and simply to the user.
I wouldn't presume to what Ive has in mind when abandoning skeumorphism in software design, but for example using simplified, OS-wide similar geometric layouts and rendering the calendar screen in blue, e-mail screen in red and checklist screen in yellow, may *seem* simple, but is actually a lot harder for a person to acclimate to. They would have to constantly remember which color belongs to which appilcation, as opposed to looking at the surface of what appears to be a calendar, which pretty much anyone can understand and recognize in a split second without any instruction or learning whatsoever.
As great as Ive-style modern design may look aesthetically, designers of his caliber have conceived of a great many awesome-looking, but hardly useable products in the past. They may be of interest to a select few with a particularly discriminating eye, but most people abhor actually using them, and in most cases, owning them.
How does one sit at this simple looking table that is spare in the number of legs?
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/home_blog/2011/03/wright-auction-henry-glass-corbusier.html
Is it easy to see what you're cutting? If someone handed one of these to you outside of the kitchen, what would you think it was for?
https://www.momastore.org/museum/mo... Board_10451_10001_17610_-1_26669_26670_17611
Without fiddling with this first, how would you operate it?
https://www.momastore.org/museum/mo...Kettle_10451_10001_63595_-1_26669_26671_63596
This **** looks great, but they're a pain in the ass to use.
Ive's hardware design is great. But software, having no edges or curves, needs to communicate to users reliably and immediately how to use them. Skeumorphism has for the last 30 years been the most reliable and intuitive way to accomplish this in software. Just look at windows 8 and how hard it can be to figure out what their tiles actually do. One wonders how nutso the execs have to be at Apple to consider discarding it.