Rounded Rectangles Deprecated

They Used to Be 'Everywhere'

I was reading through the pre-release documentation for iOS 7 and came across this gem:

The rounded rectangle button has been deprecated in iOS 7.

Why is this amusing? Because rounded rectangles were one of the big user interface innovations of the Macintosh and were demanded by Steve Jobs himself:

Steve suddenly got more intense. “Rectangles with rounded corners are everywhere! Just look around this room!”. And sure enough, there were lots of them, like the whiteboard and some of the desks and tables. Then he pointed out the window. “And look outside, there’s even more, practically everywhere you look!”. He even persuaded Bill to take a quick walk around the block with him, pointing out every rectangle with rounded corners that he could find.

Nearly every button on the Mac and on iOS has been a rounded rectangle for the past thirty years. So there’s something charmingly radical about a modern day Apple engineer calmly stating that they’ve been discontinued.