In January 2007 Steve Jobs pulled the first iPhone out on stage. For the audience of the time, 'tapping glass with your finger' was completely unfamiliar — so Jobs gave everyone a bridge: everything on the screen pretended to be a real, physical object.

Notes was a yellow legal pad, Calendar was a thread-bound paper diary, Game Center was a green felt table, Find My Friends was stitched leather, and the Calculator had real plastic keys. Apple's engineers even flew to Japan to buy real wood grain and scan it into a texture.

It carried an entire generation across from 'I don't know how to use a smartphone' to 'I stare at my phone five hours a day.' But in 2013 iOS 7 shipped — Jony Ive stripped away every texture and replaced it all with Flat. Skeuomorphism was banished from then on, treated as a synonym for 'old-fashioned and tacky.'

But today it still lives in three places: music apps (the knobs of GarageBand and Logic Pro), children's-book apps, and a growing number of hardware control interfaces (Tesla, specialist instruments). When a digital interface genuinely needs to 'feel physical,' skeuomorphism has no substitute.