You'll find a lot of people, myself included, that point to the 10.6 era as peak OSX aesthetics. I personally prefer "steel and grass," some people prefer space, the specifics vary person-to-person but a lot of people agree on the trend. Skeuomorphism has an uncomfortably high skill floor, but it has an astronomical skill ceiling. With Apple, it shows. It really shows.
In contrast, flat design has a skill ceiling so low that it can turn the most creatively bankrupt troglodyte of a non-artist into a hunchback.
No, growing up was OS9 with lime green highlights on a lime green iMac playing Bugdom. I'd argue that it was still better than flat design, but I would have to concede that nostalgia goggles might play a role in blinding me to how garish it all was. In contrast, the "I love 10.6" crowd extends considerably beyond my cohort in both directions. It's pretty clearly a skeuomorphism thing.
One thing I'll give flat design: it's better than the Fischer Price design that happened between the era of skeuomorphism and present day. Also, it brought dark mode mainstream.
No, the old icons are objectively better. I’ve used iPhones since the iPhone 1 and I still keep the original as a music player. I have to hunt down apps on current iOS but astonishingly they all look somewhat different in the old days, which means they are easier to find. It’s easier to find my way around an old iOS I use once a month than one I use every hour.
Are you a UI Researcher? If you are, your approach to gathering research by rebuking everyone else's opinions seems less than optimal. FWIW I prefer skeumorphic design. Flat design won because it made scaling everything easier. It doesn't need to be this way now that SVG support has become widespread
Half the "well-recognisable" imagery seems to be of things that are long gone from the world. How many kids these days have ever seen a typewriter, a rotary-dial phone, or a point-and-shoot camera? The "save icon" has long overtaken the actual floppy disk. Many folks are even too young to know that the folder icon is modelled on physical file folders.
I don't really know what you're trying to say, but my child seems absolutely able to pick up modern UI design, including the hamburger icon and others, and use it very happily and with joy.
Kids would be able to pickup CLI if that were the only way to start their favorite game. Kids also share knowledge even when your attention is away. We had a drive to learn MK combos and used that to win fights, but as adults, barely anyone in a random-100 group knows how to :q Vim.
Give your kid a phone with zero interesting activities in it compared to other toys, and he/she would “pick” nothing out of it.
> Kids would be able to pickup CLI if that were the only way to start their favorite game
This is not merely hypothetical! Like many on HN, no doubt, I learned at least how to launch and close my favorite toy programs from the DOS command line before I went to kindergarten.
Not sure why the fixation on "kids pick it up just fine". The OS caters to a wide variety of people. If kids start with these design elements, by observing what parents do, they will do just fine. A similar argument can exist for why CLI when most devs can simply use graphical apps with same functionality. There is a subjective choice to what tool is most comfortable to use.
The reason this MBP was running 10.7 is because my elderly relative found it jarring with the new iconography and context menus (hamburger icon, share icon etc). This MBP was hard reset to its initial OS. For many people, including my relative, the glass effects and flatter icons were simply too high of cognitive confusion to get mundane stuff working.
The spirit of the comment was to demonstrate usability among absolute beginners. It is well established that people connect with visuals which are descriptive of inanimate objects in the real world. Some people find it comfortable, while some - simply don't and want futuristic interface. There are people who swear by Metro UI till today. This was not an argument for the sake of an argument.
I grew up with a 386 which was locally available. Then Windows 95 & 98. I shifted to Mac OSX around 10.4. I still feel the skeumorphic iconography was simply beautiful. And by saying that I am saying it as a subjective opinion. And an aggregate opinion which I observe, specially among elderly, is that the icons and UI layout is hard to navigate.
In contrast, flat design has a skill ceiling so low that it can turn the most creatively bankrupt troglodyte of a non-artist into a hunchback.