This is an interesting little elaboration of skeuomorphic design in Apple's iOS. There's two basic parts to it. The first, that Apple's hardware and software designs seem to have gone in very different directions. The second, that maybe Retina displays are going to change this. I would proffer a different reason for any move away from skeuomorphic design though. Quite simply the old folk are dying off.
It’s curious how Apple’s hardware and software have taken such divergent paths. Looking at iOS hardware and software separately, one might think they were produced by different companies. The drop-shadows and textures of iOS stand in sharp contrast to the clean lines and invisible seams of Apple’s hardware. Comparing major models of either the iPhone or iPad line, Jony Ive’s industrial design team seems to be on the march, creating devices that feel ever more like they’re carved from a single block of magical stone. So why is it that Apple would ship these devices with software featuring deep shadows and visible stitching?
Yes, that's entirely true.
The trend away from skeuomorphic special effects in UI design is the beginning of the retina-resolution design era. Our designs no longer need to accommodate for crude pixels. Glossy/glassy surfaces, heavy-handed transparency, glaring drop shadows, embossed text, textured material surfaces — these hallmarks of modern UI graphic design style are (almost) never used in good print graphic design.
And that could be true. But I don't think it will be the reason for a change in design if one indeed comes. Rather, think about what the point of skeumophism is in the first place. It's to make something new, a new way of doing things, look like the older object or process that it is replacing. The reason that a computer diary looks like a paper diary is that the designers are trying to show you how it works. You already know how a paper diary works: thus using that form and factor will ease your task in learning how to use the electronic one.
One can carry on: bookshelves we "get". Thus use an image of a physical bookshelf so that we get what and electronic one does. And so on and so on.
But this is only important in the transition from one way of doing things to a new one. You've only got to appeal to memories and habits of older technologies when people still have those memories and habits. Once you've a new generation of people, people who have grown up only ever having used the new technology, you simply don't need those reminders of the old.
Thus, I would argue, we'll see skeuomorphism constantly: each and every generation does indeed face new technologies after all. But we'll see it disappearing from established technologies all the time as well. Indeed, that's how we'll know that they have been established for a generation: because they no longer use skeuomorphism.
