No, it is insane. Gruber positions himself as a voice of Apple/Design authority and is in a position to do so. For him to make the claims he does and title this article as it is, and then ignore the actual design trends is ridiculous. Another reason why he comes across as more Apple shill than journalist, which is a shame.

You clearly don't know what 'insane' means and I wonder if we even read the same article.

Gruber has been a very vocal critics of Apple's hard on for skeuomorphism for a long time. When he says the "timing of this trend, and the fact that iOS — and the iPhone in particular — is its leading edge, is not coincidental" he is most certainly not talking about the OS itself. This should be obvious because in the very next paragraph he says that "the whole default iOS look" is made up of "phony effects". But I guess if you're just here to get your HN rubber stamp upvotes by calling Gruber a one dimensional Apple shill you might have missed that.

yep he should have used the word dishonest or flat out lying...

Downvoted for the last sentence: Gruber explicitly writes that the "whole default iOS look [...] is optimized for non-retina displays", as in: Apple is doing this all wrong. If anything, his insane statement makes him a shill for third-party Apple developers.

(And I would agree that he overestimates the universal love for Letterpress, but basically all of the blogosphere was fawning over it. How much $$$ has it raked in compared to Carcassonne, which is almost a parody of skeuomorphism?)

A little late with the reply here, but I think that his thesis is bogus. So-called "retina" displays are not the reason for flat / modern UI designs moving away from skeuomorphism. I would argue it's just a new trend that naturally developed both from a wont to get away from the old, and from the relatively new sophistication of on-screen design tools (like CSS3, HTML5, etc).