Maybe it was on purpose? Those fancy textures and icons are probably a lot more expensive to produce when they have to look good with 4x the pixels.
iOS 4 on an iPhone 4 and OS X whatever-it-was that was on the initial retina MacBook Pros are still very clear in my memory. Everything looked so good it made you want to use the device just for the hell of it.
At low resolutions you need quite heavy-handed effects to provide enough contrast between elements, but on better displays you can be much more subtle.
It’s also why fonts like Verdana, which were designed to be legible on low resolution displays, don’t look great in print and aren’t used much on retina interfaces.
To choose a relevant counter example: the Macintosh System Software prior to version 7 was also very flat. System 7 to 7.5.5 introduced depth in a subtle way and a limited manner. It was only around System 7.6 when they started being heavy handed, something that I always attributed to following the trends in other operating systems.
They’d have to be implemented perfectly every time, otherwise the whole thing becomes a mess. Not everyone will bother to do this.
Also, often when creating designs, things look better the more you take away rather than add.
I too prefer more distinction between different UI elements than is fashionable in recent years - and, make no mistake, that’s all it is: fashion - and don’t see why higher resolutions preclude that. That’s not to say we have to ape what was done 10 or 15 years ago, but we can certainly take things in a more interesting and usable direction than we’ve chosen to do since around 2013.
I find myself clicking the wrong window by mistake a lot more frequently than I did back in the day due, I think, to current design trends.
It looks _just fine_ on a Retina display.
When Retina displays were introduced with the iPhone 4, gel-style iOS also looked just fine.
In print, we're interacting with paper and a fake reflective style looks odd. On a computer, we're interacting with glass and something reflective or high-detail feels very suitable. It matches the look to the medium.
That's an interesting observation. If it was indeed on purpose, I wonder whether they were weighting it based on the effort on Apple's designers/developers/battery usage or the effort it would have drawn from 3rd party developers.
I might have an alternative explanation.
I often think about something I saw, a long time ago, on one of those print magazines about house decoration, which also featured sample house blueprints. That particular issue had a blueprint for a house which would be built on a terrain which already had a large boulder. Instead of removing the boulder, the house was built around it; it became part of the house, and guided its layout.
In the same way, the restrictions we had back then (lower display resolutions, reduced color palette, pointing device optional) helped guide the UI design. Once these restrictions were lifted, we lost that guidance.
All flat boxes is easier to do with 1,000+ different screen resolutions.
It’s hard to say why. Clarity in the UI is a big one (placement and interaction, not the theme, ie what we’d call UX today). But the look of the UI (colour, depth) really adds something too. Seeing a blue gel button sparks a sense of joy.
I don't know who the hell had the original idea to do that, but I'll curse in my head for eternity.
You may be thinking of Tiger, because Apple already started removing color from Finder icons and such in Leopard.
Leopard also introduced a transparent menu bar and 3D Dock.
[0] https://www.macintoshrepository.org/1706-kaleidoscope
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20191021204432/https://twitter.c...
Maybe I'm a bit too negative but for example when people romanticise stuff from the middle ages I can't help but think of how it must have smelled.
Apple's software today is poorly optimized. They're depending on hardware to do all the work.
It's also worth noting that some points mentioned either didn't matter as much, or aren't true in an absolute stuff. Slow networking wasn't as much of an issue since computers as a whole didn't have the capacity to handle huge amounts of data, while limited functionality depends upon the software being used. On the last point, I find a lot of modern consumer applications far more limiting than older consumer applications.