oddly, I am in almost complete disagreement with this article. The only point of agreement is I hate the camera icon (the full camera looks clunky. they should just use a diaphram shutter.) The other icon I hate is the new music icon. The music notes look wrong. The note heads aren't the correct oval shape, but more of a blobish rectangle. iOS6 wasn't great either because the beam was too thick, and the noteheads were too horizontal (the left of the notehead should be a bit lower than the right), but for some reason it just wasn't that noticeable.
Had to scroll down a long way to find this comment, but I agree with you that these suggested alternatives are not necessarily improvements.
The "poor color choice" Calculator, for example, his alternative is worse than iOS 7 which is worse than iOS 6. Dark keys with a colored totals key are recognizable as a calculator at a glance. No idea what his suggested alternative is smoking.
My main takeaway from this article, like the many other "here's what they should have done" write-ups is: "This is harder than it looks."
Just like the camera and other elements in the design https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5883125 the shape of the notes is a pastiche of an (I think) roughly mid-'60s commercial-art style.
