[pfranz]

I think the reason raster icons have stuck around so long is the proportions of icons need to change as the scale gets really small to keep them recognizable (I think formats like svg has support for this now). Any vector icons also need to be rasterized before drawing to the screen which can take up memory and make things less speedy.

Vector icons were the new hot well before the original iPhone was released. Here's an article about OSX 10.4 Tiger released in 2004, 3 years before the first iPhone[1].

[1] http://forums.appleinsider.com/t/45544/mac-os-x-tiger-to-sup...

[mpweiher]

> Any vector icons also need to be rasterized before drawing to the screen which can take up memory and make things less speedy.

Well...any raster format needs to be read from disk, decoded and drawn, though there are special optimizations for the drawing step.

[pfranz]

...any vector format needs to be read from disk, decoded and "rendered" (bezier, gradients, transparency, etc calculated), too.