Apple held its annual World Wide Developer's Conference on Monday where it unveiled a slew of new products including the Mac Pro, the MacBook Air and OS X Maverick. However, despite the new innovation announcements, the biggest thing to come out of Apple's WWDC keynote address was the long-awaited announcement of the new iOS 7 for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.
Hailed as Apple's head of engineering, John Ive's intellectual creation, the new iOS 7 is flatter and cleaner looking than its predecessors. Apple CEO Tim Cook called the new redesign "The biggest change to iOS since the introduction of the iPhone."
However, many developers have called this statement to be a bit of an oversell on the new operating system, which is mostly a reskinning of the old system rather than a "revolutionary" redesign.
"The biggest change to the iOS was the introduction of the App Store, one year after iPhones launch, in 2008," said Dylan Tweney of Venturebeat.
Ryan Katkov of Medium.com called the new iOS 7 "design by committee."
"All of the signs are there. Unnecessary complexity, inconsistency, logical flaws, banality and, above all, no unifying vision. I believe [John] Ive did not lead the design team by example and vision," Katkov said. "Instead, I believe Ive laid out key concepts and showed his design team a mood board of flat design examples, but told them to innovate. Then he let them loose as a committee."
There are also those who feel the new iOS 7, aside from not being innovative enough, is just plain unattractive.
"Am I alone in thinking the iOS 7 home screen icons look ugly, poorly balanced and of an unattractive color (palette)?" Circa CEO Matt Galligan tweeted.
Overall, the biggest complaint insiders seem to have with the Apple's new redesign is the fact that it's a glorified new paint job. People were promised real innovation that would revolutionize the system they'd been working with since 2007 and, instead, were given a new color scheme and a handful of new features.
Only time will tell if the iPhone's new look will be able to give it an edge over its newest competitors, namely the HTC One and the Samsung Galaxy S4.
