Like insisting that notes look like a leather bound notebook?
It served its purpose: It introduced millions of people to taking notes on a portable electronic device by making the use of the device familiar and welcoming.
Remember, this is at a time when people had to be taught how to "swipe to open," how to scroll on a touch screen, and how to pinch to zoom. All of this was unfamiliar territory to the masses.
If the iPhone's initial operating system looked like Android's current design, it would have been much harder to get people on board.
(I still have my launch day iPhone. I fired it up a couple of weeks ago, and aside from the horrible pre-retina screen resolution, it was very familiar and comforting.)
“I'm confident he had good ideas. I'm also confident he had plenty of horrible ideas...”
... as you walk along you path you meet a man. 50% if the time he tells you sage advice that makes you a multimillionaire and 50% of the time he tells you sage advice that doesn’t make you richer. What do you value the mans afvice as?
It’s not a cult or a conspiracy when what the other part is selling actually materializes.
Given how much easier I've seen older relatives use iPhones in the skeuomorphic days vs now: I mostly lean towards skeuomorphic being preferable. It's not as fashionable now, but it is way more approachable and unambiguous.
I really don't understand the push against skeuomorphism besides "fashions change." I mean, I get that using so many physical world metaphors could be limiting, but the subsequent shift to everything just being circles, boxes and triangles, without any words, was so much more confusing and unnecessarily faddish in my opinion.
Like insisting that notes look like a leather bound notebook?
Is this objectively worse than the current practice of removing or hiding every visual cue and affordance, leaving the user to guess what they're supposed to be doing?
I feel old, but honestly this was just, what? 10years ago?! does nobody remember how everyone in the entire mobile industry proclaimed Apple would fails because touch interfaces weren’t tactile. yet today every single phone is basically a copy of the first iPhone just with better chips and random stylistic touches to differenciate?
For a moment, I thought you were referring to the authoritarianism/hierarchy as the “anchor of familiarity” - and everything Steve Jobs did in mass-tech as the “wildly new concepts” - you would still be right in the context of the executives and engineers he led.
I'm confident he had good ideas. I'm also confident he had plenty of horrible ideas... Just like most intelligent humans.