Ars Technica reviews Apple’s iOS 7: Delivers genuinely useful new features and additions

13 years ago

“In one sense, iOS 7 changes nearly everything about iOS,” Andrew Cunningham reports for Ars Technica. “A couple of wallpapers have made the jump, but otherwise you’d be hard-pressed to find anything in iOS 7 that looks quite like it did in iOS 6. In another sense, iOS 7 is the latest in a string of incremental updates. It adds a few new features and changes some existing ones, but this doesn’t radically alter the way that you use the OS from day to day”

“Apple’s redesign of iOS is all-encompassing. In very large part, the new design is iOS 7. Even the Apple logo you see at boot, and the screen you see when your device goes into Recovery Mode have discarded texture in favor of flatness. The changes are large, and a lot of people are going to have a lot of things to say about them.,” Cunningham reports. “If you’ve ever participated in a design overhaul of basically anything—a logo, an operating system, a website—you already know how complaints about iOS 7’s design will go. First, the gripes that stem from unfamiliarity (or a knee-jerk, negative reaction to change) will fade with time as people become used to the new look and feel. After that dies down, there will be a settling-in period where Apple looks at the most frequent complaints and actual usage data and makes further tweaks based on that feedback. I’ll be surprised if a hypothetical iOS 7.1 doesn’t bring a few small but noticeable UI changes with it — this has already happened over the course of the iOS 7 developer betas, but with a wider user base comes the opportunity to respond to a wider (and more nuanced) range of feedback.”

Cunningham reports, “That said, I wouldn’t expect backtracking on any of the major new design elements introduced here. No matter what you think of the design, if you’re an iOS user and you want to keep up with the newest features, you’ll have to come to terms with it. And even things that still bother me (the animations, first and foremost) can be tolerated because of the genuinely useful new features and additions that arrive with the update.”

Much more in the full review here.

MacDailyNews Take: One of the side effects of us having used iOS 7 since beta 1 is that we’ve forgotten somewhat what we felt/experienced the first time we ran it. Plus, of course, it was beta 1, with thinner fonts and frequent crashes. Now, it’s definitely ready for prime time (some tweaks will be required, as with any new OS). If you’re running it for the first time today, let us know what you think below.