[spacedcowboy]

As someone who still misses the skeuomorphic design of things like "Books", the first icon is dramatically more expressive than any of the others.

These days I do a search for an app by learning its colour, and using that to narrow down the options. There's much less visual associativity of "this icon" === "this app". I really oughtn't have to execute a hash-table search just to find the damn app I want.

[just6979]

I don't think skeuomorphism applies to icons. The early pen-and-inkpot icon isn't trying to act/feel like a pen and inkpot. It's not like there is an inkpot in the program's UI and you have to move the cursor to it every once in a while to keep typing. It's just a very unique and recognizable symbol to indicate which program is which.

On the command line it would be "Pages", something fairly meaningful. The equivalent to the latest icon on the command line would be just calling it "P". And then everytime you want to launch it you must select which P program you want among all the others; equivalent to searching the launcher for which "black blob with a couple orange lines on it" you want.

I have a feeling the icons tried way too hard to trend toward "minimal", but minimal is not the same as bland generic blobs like the latest ones are (and not just Apple, generic icons claiming to be minimal are everywhere). The middle one seems to be the best of both: fairly minimal, still unique, still indicates "writing", as opposed to either end which both seem to be more about the pen itself and would be better suited to an icon for the Apple Pencil section of Settings.

All of the pen-only ones are terrible for something called Pages, the middle-to-older page-based ones actually fit the brief.