The ironic thing about icons losing their color and detail is that it happened right as high DPI displays began to become commonplace in consumer hardware. We have these amazing screens with barely visible pixels and excellent color reproduction being wasted on rendering monochrome lines.
There's also an increasing prevalence and popularity of e-ink displays. Though some of these are colour-capable, most are monochrome, and I've definitely had challenges negotiating apps and content which use colour as a key differentiator.
Is there actually an increasing prevalence and popularity of e-ink displays? I know there technically exists some "high refresh rate" e-ink screens these days (meaning you can get 10 FPS if you're comfortable with a whole lot of ghosting), but aren't e-ink screens still pretty much only used in dedicated e-book readers?
Personally, I think it's just that monochrome icons are fashionable. I can't imagine that the GIMP developers for example chose to make GIMP's icons monochrome because that works better on e-ink screens.
There's a wide range of e-ink tablets and displays available. Many of the tablets run Android and are largely the same as any other Android device. The displays can be used with any OS, obviously. There are also e-ink phones (smart and otherwise), watches, and other devices.
For text and graphics, you'd generally want to use a higher-quality, lower-refresh-rate mode. Which is to say that there's quite a bit of established UI/UX knowledge that wants a refresh. I've distilled a set of basic principles: persistence is free, pixels are cheap, paints are slow, colour is (mostly) nonexistent, and the more ambient light the better. Paginated-navigation (whole screen changes in one go), line-art, and dithered or halftoned images work relatively well, raster images not quite so much, though can be acceptable.
My argument here (<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37869476>) is that across all OSes, and for the Web generally, being mindful of monochrome, low-refresh-rate displays is something that should be front-of-mind for UI/UX teams and design.
Many of these issues already exist, e.g., for documents which are likely to be printed on monochrome devices. Colour is useful where available, but it is not universally available.
(And that's before addressing issues such as colourblindness or other disability / accessibility considerations.)
My original comment was not at all specific to Apple (you'd introduced them to the discussion), other vendors, or any specific OS or application. Simply that monochrome and e-ink are increasingly concerns.
But since you raised the topic of Apple, and since, contrary to your initial statement that, broadly speaking, monochrome was "a display technology they never used", I'm both correcting the record, and noting that should there be a monochrome or e-ink prospect on Apple's roadmap, and further noting that Apple rather famously does not announce such roadmaps in advance, that flat/white would in fact fit with e-ink remarkably well.
What that has to say about whether or not Apple is contemplating any such move I am, of course, entirely ignorant.
Since decades being mindful of monochrome displays and color blindness meant selecting appropriate colors and using different shapes along with different colors. Removing color where available is not useful.
Any explanation of the anti color trend must explain Apple's participation. Especially because Microsoft and GNOME appeared to imitate Apple.
I did not say monochrome was a display technology Apple never used. You named e ink. And monochrome is not a display technology.
Other trends included more transparency in content areas, links almost unidentifiable without color, and other reliance on small shade differences. And Apple made all app icons the same shape. All worse for e ink.
Monochrome lines are cool tho, ink or charcoal can be gorgeous, and “barely visible pixels” are genuinely needed to get them.
That aside, high dpi displays are still a rare sight on desktops, there’s not many of them and the aspect ratios and ancillary features are extremely limited.
>That aside, high dpi displays are still a rare sight on desktops
No, they aren't. ALL displays these days are high-dpi, when you compare to the 640x480 and 800x600 screens that were normal in the late 1990s. But the window managers back then were FAR better (in functionality and appearance) than what most of us use today.
> ALL displays these days are high-dpi, when you compare to the 640x480 and 800x600 screens that were normal in the late 1990s.
Leaving side your wilful misunderstanding of fairly standard concepts, no they are not: the monitors you are talking about were generally tiny, and the minor increase in median pixel density was largely counteracted by the blocky precision of LCD pixels.
In modern parlance, "high-DPI" or "HiDPI" does not refer to your 24" 1080p screen. That's solidly a "low-DPI" screen; it's perfectly usable with UI elements rendered at "1x".
