It is so so rare to read a blog that shares the many of the non-mainstream views. Especially for naming Forstall. Firing him was a power play. And the quoting that iOS 7 design decision from Ive.

>“When we sat down last November (to work on iOS 7), we understood that people had already become comfortable with touching glass, they didn’t need physical buttons, they understood the benefits,” says Ive

Along with Federighi's comments. I still remember reading it at the time saddens me. They then spend the next three version of iOS trying to walk back all these flat, glass, no button decisions. Another 6 years before they rework all icons to the old circular proportion.

One thing to nitpick though was that Steve was well aware of the iPhone Plus or iPhone Phablet market condition. As it was in shown in the one of the court case email. And he was willing to go with it so he is not too stubborn about the size. / width.

I also think it was the turning point of his philosophy. Steve always wanted the iPhone to be an "smart" appliance. Hence it could be small, and used one handed. It was first and foremost an appliance, easy to use devices, Apps on top are something extra. Except the model has shifted to your Phone being the computer. And Apple no longer has his intuition to guide them.

I think it was particularly egregious when macOS Big Sur came out. It was abundantly clear that they no longer cared enough to even apply a basic sense of unified style in their artwork, with a weird mix of 2D-ish and 3D-ish icons, every color combination imaginable, etc. And on top of it, so many of the “new” icons were just plain ugly and some were outright weird, and many had really basic problems like improper shadow effects. Frankly they should have delayed the entire OS release by two months just to fix the icons, and it’s still in that bad a state.

It is even more frustrating that the OS is slowly being locked down so much that you basically can’t “fix” UI annoyances anymore, not without rebooting into Void My Warranty mode. You can’t fix bits and pieces of apps because they’ll no longer pass code-signing and fail to launch. In the old days you could pretty much hack any cool icons you wanted into any part of the system, and it was really amazing what people came up with.