The trend of choosing minimalist styling over usability has been obvious for some time. Apple is one of the worst offenders - particularly in light of their previous commitment to usability - but sadly not the only one.
My personal pet peeve is when both Apple and Google started removing colour and textual labels from the icons in their interfaces. Fortunately textual button labels are back in Gmail, but Google Docs and Aperture are still hampered by black-and-white-only icons. Surely it is obvious that it's going to be harder to quickly locate the desired icon if they are all black-and-white silhouettes instead of coloured illustrations?
(I can appreciate in the case of Aperture that there might, very occasionally, be cases where the coloured icons could affect the user's perception of the colour of the photographs they are editing. A global UI-desaturate switch would be more useful than enforced B&W icons, however, since colour is still used in other parts of the UI.)
This was also one of my biggest issues with Windows 8 (became slightly better in 8.1 and so far seems much better in 10).
There were so many things that were hidden behind what I would call "right-click in the middle of nowhere" and had no other way to access them (I assume that's supposed to be equivalent to the long press in a touch UI) that I never figured out until I gave up and went to youtube to figure out how the hell things work. Apparently you were intended to just go around right clicking on anything until something happened? I don't necessarily mind that they changed the UI, but I shouldn't have to go wade through a morass of bloated youtube videos just to figure out how to do anything. Even the Microsoft website never had instructions. And of course using builtin search (which used to be great on Windows) never explained shit about the modern UI.
My personal pet peeve is when both Apple and Google started removing colour and textual labels from the icons in their interfaces. Fortunately textual button labels are back in Gmail, but Google Docs and Aperture are still hampered by black-and-white-only icons. Surely it is obvious that it's going to be harder to quickly locate the desired icon if they are all black-and-white silhouettes instead of coloured illustrations?
(I can appreciate in the case of Aperture that there might, very occasionally, be cases where the coloured icons could affect the user's perception of the colour of the photographs they are editing. A global UI-desaturate switch would be more useful than enforced B&W icons, however, since colour is still used in other parts of the UI.)