Apple iOS7

My iPhone 4 has been pestering me the last few days to upgrade to the latest operating system iOS7. A friend, who’s much more confident in messing around with these things visited on Saturday, so it seemed a good opportunity to upgrade while I had the benefit of his expertise.

So we upgraded to iOS7.

It puzzles me why software companies, such as Apple and Microsoft, have spent the last 15 years or so evolving the polished (glass) look of their user interface and suddenly there’s a mad scramble to abandon it and get their operating systems to look as much as possible like Windows 3.1 looked over 20 years ago.

It also puzzles me that I would have expected successive versions of an Operating System to get more and more efficient in its use of processor resources. I can understand applications getting more and more sophisticated that they need more resources but, when the operating system isn’t running any user applications, I can’t understand why successive versions use more resources, not less.

I can’t help thinking that foisting the new ‘flat look’ on us is more an attempt to stop the operating system grinding the processor to a halt rather than for any aesthetic reasons. Clearly, the iPhone 4 is struggling with iOS7 when no apps are running which is proof enough to me that the Operating System itself is less efficient that iOS6 was.

Whatever the reason – and I’m sure I’ll get used to it – I can’t help feeling they’ve made changes for change’s sake and, in doing so, will have alienated a lot of previously loyal Apple users!