I was at a Tableau Software conference last year. It was shortly after Apple announced Forstall's departure. Apple came up at several cocktail party conversations. I'd say nearly everyone I talked to made fun of Apple's software UI. Especially note pad and that silly marker felt font. I'm sorry but people don't need a note taking app to look like a legal pad of paper to know its for taking notes.
Those guys from Tableau are probably weenies. Never ask and IT guy or any nerd what's cool, because generally speaking they don't have a clue. Or at least, even if they are right, what they say has no meaning so far as the rest (99% of the planet) is concerned. Nothing Apple has ever done that was wildly successful ever had weenie-appeal.
You saw it with the mac. All the weenies said the mac was stupid and a waste of money, all you needed was DOS. They mocked mac users and their cute little garbage cans and said DOS was what real computer users use. Then Windows 3.1 came around. The UI sucked. The weenies said that to be a cool computer user, you had to know how to fool around with Regedit, and it was still better than Mac. It wasn't. It sucked. Then came windows XP. It was basically a mac. Then the weenies immediately went to their control panels and changed their OS theme to the old Windows NT one, instead of the slicker XP one, because real nerd don't need fancy color and they believed it was essential for the ordinary user to save a couple GPU cycles on rendering. Which is a load of crap.
Then came the iPhone. The consensus among weenies was that to have a good smartphone, you had to have a physical keyboard (like the Blackberry), or you had to have a pen input device (like the Palm). Because all weenies know, any serious person types on a keyboard where you can feel the keys with your fingertips, or, if writing, uses a more precise instrument to point like a pen than your finger and learns to write in a heretofore never described hieroglyphic (Palm). Nerdy little guys everywhere were keeping little plastic pens for their Palm computers in their pocket protectors, and they felt this was important to have the finest pointed pointing device possible. Because precision is very important! Then the iPhone came out, and someone decided that all the weenies were just weenies, it's much easier to just point with a finger. They didn't include a pen, because to do so would have been a problem for a capacitive touch screen, and because they knew that if they included a pen, all the weenies would write programs for the iPhone with 50 or a hundred tiny buttons the size of sprinkles on every screen that you could only press with a very tiny weenie-pen that the ordinary person didn't want to bother to keep around. As always, the weenies were completely wrong about what ordinary people wanted. Weenies wanted a precise technological device. Ordinary people wanted something with the lowest intimidation factor possible that could be used without frankly having to engage their brain any more than possible. Because really, they've got other things to do.
Then came the iPad. Once again, weenies thought this must have a keyboard or some other sort of physical input device, because obviously if you're going to pay more for something more useful, it has to be more powerful and allow for faster, more efficient input. Once again, the weenies were wrong. Apple released the iPad, which was basically just a big iPhone. One of the biggest weenies of them all, Steve Ballmer, laughed. Then Apple sold a gazillion of them, and it wasn't so funny anymore. Engineers were disappointed to see such a "stupid" product sell so well, since it would be so much more engineering-chic to have a lightweight device with a tiny keyboard to type on at their engineering meetings. Meanwhile, ordinary people sat on their couches using their iPads, slovenly chowing down Cheetos and spilling crumbs all over the impervious surface, poking their fingers around the web for an hour or two before falling asleep with their more or less indestructible panel-shaped ipads falling between the cracks of their couch. Little two-year old kids poked around at their ipad screens giggling, spilling juice on them, and watching reruns of Barney the Dinosaur.
Weenies are almost always wrong about what 90% of the world wants.
GRANTED, I do think that the iPhone skeumorphism could use some refreshment. From my perspective, the most important thing would be to update / regionalize it in some way. For example, I'm pretty sure that everyone in the US knows what the general use of yellow lined paper is, but that may not be the case elsewhere in the world. In Japan, I seriously doubt they use yellow lined paper for much of anything. But that's a regionalization problem, not a general interface problem.
And since you can do more with software than you can a pad of paper why not make the notes app more capable.
Because it's a notepad. For taking notes, and clipping and pasting little bits of information from here and there into one place for future reference. Having a notepad that uses multiple fonts is actually a pain in the ass, because then every time you cut and paste a little piece of information from the web into your notepad, it comes out with a different font and a different font size, designed for a web page ten times the size, looking quite retarded and illegible. Then, you'll find when you continue on typing, you're typing with the same font as the last letter of the last thing you pasted into your notepad, which is probably huge and taking up 10 times the space that you want it to. Then you have to dick around trying to get the font back to some semblance of something uniform and orderly (organized). It's a huge pain in the ass.
Unfortunately, the genius who made the NotePad for OS X didn't get this, so if you cut and paste things from elsewhere it comes out looking like crap.
Eventually people start to remember what app they're in based on the color scheme. White and black/gray with color as an accent looks a lot cleaner than the mishmash we have now.
Eventually? Why should a UI adopt something that people will "eventually" get used to, rather than something that is immediately apparent and uses little or no thought?
Frankly, I'm not interested in wasting any brain cells to have to remember what color scheme is more in-keeping with a calendar than an e-mail. I have better things to do.
... Clearly, kids love skeumorphism, older people love skeumorphism, and probably the majority of people in between would rather use it. In my opinion, mostly, the people who find it offensive are probably weenies.
I'll reserve judgment on the new UI until I see it. But, if remembering colors are an important component of thinking about how to use it, I can tell you, that already pretty much sucks. I'll hope there is something else to go on.
