Ars Technica Reviews iOS 7

Ars Technica has posted a pretty thorough review of iOS 7, which brings a few radical changes to at least the visual design of the system. From the article: "In one sense, iOS 7 changes nearly everything about iOS. A couple of wallpapers have made the jump, but otherwise you'd be hard-pressed to find anything in iOS 7 that looks quite like it did in iOS 6. In another sense, iOS 7 is the latest in a string of incremental updates. It adds a few new features and changes some existing ones, but this doesn't radically alter the way that you use the OS from day to day." Breaking with the design trajectory of the last few releases of most of Apple's software, the oft maligned skeumorphism of the interface has been considerably toned down.

Comments

Its lipstick on a pig

[TheSkepticalOptimist]

Apple just put lipstick on the pig and expect everyone to embrace iOS 7 as some significant leap forward.

While I am sure there are some efficiency improvements in iOS 7 UI and features, overall people should be keenly aware that not much has really changed under the hood. I mean turning on 64bit when compiling iOS 7 is not innovative, neither is a 64bit CPU. Apple is pulling the wool over everyone's eyes and making it seem like iOS 7 and iPhone 5s are significant upgrades, when in reality they are barely incremental updates. Apple needs this deception if they want to improve their stock performance.

Basically iOS 7 represents the first divergence of the legacy left by Steve Jobs. Once he left the planet, the internal rifts between skeuomorphism vs UI simplicity shifted weight over to Jony Ives, who simply ripped all the leather, glass, metal and felt out of iOS free from any repercussions because Tim Cook is a spineless half-wit who is barely aware of anything Apple does these days except what he is told to regurgitate in a keynote.

Look, Apple is even aware of all this. They spent exactly 5 minutes talking about iOS 7 at the iPhone release. No real weight to its release. They spent the next 20 minutes talking about the beautiful colors if plastic (again, the ONLY thing new about iPhone 5c), and then raved about how fast and 64 bitty their new CPU is and how they brought their camera into the 21st century by focusing on quality rather than simply "having a camera" on a phone like their competition has already realized. Finally while the iTouch is cool, without support for User Profiles iTouch is just a useless contrivance for people too-stupid to remember a 4 digit passcode. There is no point "knowing" who is using the iDevice when there is no simply no iOS feature that is aware of who is using the device.

So, while everyone is tripping over to glow about all the "new" things Apple released last week, investors are pulling out of Apple because they can see past the lipstick and realize Apple hasn't innovated since Jobs passed away.