I disagree strongly. If you were new to a machine, is there anything in the new Photos icon that tells you that it anything to do with images, photos or image manipulation? No.
The new icon for Pages is fine by the way,
Looking at my desk and my habits there are actually very few objects that I use for work most of it happens on screen. All in all, I think good icon design will become harder.
Someone that, right now, actually honestly has no idea what a camera looks like.
EX: http://www.buttonsoundbook.com/site/595626/product/ISBN%200-... (Recommended for ages 3 years and older.)
Also, young people don't live in some sort of post-technical isolation. When they go to school, they will probably see the photography students walking around with cameras. And kids still burn music CD's for each other. Because it's cute and sentimental, and it feels a lot better than texting someone a link to a playlist.
Who are these supposed people who are buying Macs but have never seen a camera? This set of people must be miniscule if not empty.
Cameras are still in use, even if most people have replaced them with smartphones. Walk around any city and you'll see gobs of people taking selfies on their phones, but you'll also see a decent number of people carrying dedicated cameras.
Now the question is: should the icons represent something "iconic" or something that most people use?
I don't know what you mean by "iconic". If you mean "abstract and without independently-identifiable meaning", then I think in general, no. Icons should be immediately identifiable when possible. The overlapping rainbow paint chips that make up the current photos icon seems utterly meaningless. The camera was meaningful. A stack of photos would be meaningful. An abstracted "photo" like Windows 10 uses (and like Google uses in the sidebar of their online photos app) would be meaningful.
For the record, I think Android/Google's photos icon is also utterly meaningless to most people. I think it's supposed to represent a camera aperture (same as Apple's icon?), but most people probably don't know what a mechanical aperture is.
For example, in the current world maybe 10% of the people are taking pictures with actual cameras but we still represent the camera as a "box with a huge lens". Few people use land lines but the phone icon is still a banana. To send and e-mail in general we use an envelope but we send way more electronic messages than snail mail.
So you either use something "iconic", or every icon is just a small screenshot, or I guess you make something up that is meaningless.
Yes, it says "Photos" below it
Going back to the original article, it doesn't really matter what the icon looks like, as long as it's unique. You're not looking at each icon and asking yourself "is this a camera?" to get to the Photos app. You know it's a circular array of colors, and your finger goes there.
Back in 'teh day' when my icons were all cutesy skeuomorphs, my computer came with maybe a dozen apps and most of them were on my desktop. Now, I have over a hundred sitting in my global Apps folder alone - never mind user Apps, sub folders, etc.
This gets compounded even more on phones - on my iPhone, I've accidentally placed 1Password next to the Settings app - both have a grey background with a circular center. Settings' center is grey gears, 1Passwords is a blue ring with a keyhole. On examination, they're not similar at all, but I can't even begin to tell you how many times I clicked on when, meaning to click the other - even _knowing_ the differences and kicking myself each time.
I think a lot of what the designers are trying to do is create an icon that stands out visually, and is easily found from amongst a large set of other icons, rather than trying to impress upon us what its functionality is from a metaphor.
Really? Because when I used an iPhone, I most definitely didn't know where most of my apps' icons were. I knew most of them on the first screen and the rest of the screens were a mix of random stuff.
I'm far faster at picking text labels from a list than picking the icons. I see the text label as an icon.
The text "icon" is simple and unchanging. I can pick it out much faster than funny pictograms that change with each OS version.
Tell that to my muscle memory that types ⌘A > iP for iPhoto and ⌘A > iCal for iCalendar.
But what has actually happened is a mess of inconsistent designs. Older apps still use skeuomorphism. Newer apps copy the flat look.
Skeuomorphism implemented a design principle - discoverability. You could argue with the choices made for specific icons, but there was a consistent goal - to make the OS as usable as possible.
The flat look is an anti-pattern - fashion over discoverability. The point seems to be to allow Sir Jony to impress everyone with his aesthetic skillz. User experience has become secondary to internal politics.
That's a huge problem for a company like Apple, because it'a fundamental shift in focus.
And there have been obvious effects. Watch isn't doing brilliantly, precisely because the user experience is nothing special. iOS is creaking under the weight of new features apparently added with no overall strategy, many of which remain invisible to users because the literally never find them.
MacOS is going the same way. Some of the new features are certainly welcome. But the Apple UX generally is suffering badly - from bugs, from questionable design choices, from popular products like Logic and FCP that have been cut down, then more or less abandoned.
There's no one in charge to obsessively fine tune the conflicting needs of product momentum, reliability, UX, and aesthetics.
Jobs was very good at that. Cook doesn't even seem to realise there's an issue.
Icon can help later in quickly locating this program, but I do not really care what it is. Does firefox, chrome icon or internet explorer show you that it will display websites? Internet explorer icon became "Internet" icon for a lot non technical users I think.
The rest of the aticle's arguments seem like personal, subjective distaste for flat/minimal design and a yearning for the good ol' days of skeumorphism.