They could have toned down the affordances and gloss without totally removing the cues. They went to far to fast IMO. The market is not techies in Silicon Valley.

What happened to the Don't fix what isn't broken mantra?

Said no one at Apple ever?

I'm being facetious of course, but really, Apple changes their designs up on the regular, even if it isn't "broken". See: the iMac product line.

I absolutely disagree. The whole reason I'm using Apple products is that their software has always been incrementally refined, never "revolutionised", like Windows 8 or Ubuntu's Unity or whatever. OS X 10.0 and OS X 10.9 look almost the same and so do iOS 1 and iOS 6. If the form factor of my Mac changes, it does not make any app on the system look ancient, and it does not negatively affect usability.

Ha! Those exact words are going to bite Apple so hard when iOS 7 is released.

Old people love ornamentation. My 91 year old grandmother can barely distinguish buttons on her iPhone 4, I pity how she'll use iOS 7.

"Well, to be honest, she can always sign up for One to One if she needs to learn how to interact with iOS 7's magical new interface." - Apple employee's response in a few months.

It's cold, but "old people like it" is not a compelling reason to maintain something if there are no other good reasons to do so.