One thing that I hope Jony Ive and his team of Human Interface designers fix in iOS 7 is the playback controls used across their apps. The style, icons, and placement of controls are inconsistent across the Music, Podcasts, and Remote apps. And sometimes there are inconsistencies within the same app.

The Music app controls are not bad when compared to the overly precious design of the entire app. There is a seam that visually separates the buttons and the icons appear to be etched into their surface.

The quirky full-screen mode of the Music app loses the precious textures of the normal mode but retains the overall design with clear visual separation of the buttons. The icons appear as if printed on the surface of the buttons.

The buttons of the Remote app are of a clean design with slight texturing to separate the elements rather than an explicit visual separator.

There are no button separators in the Podcasts app and the icons appear on the surface with a gradient. You can also see that the icons for next and previous are different from those used in the other apps.

It gets even worse once we look at the full toolbars of the same apps. Check out the three different progress indicators for the three apps.

This is one of Apple’s worst designs. Those wooden sides! The inset control surfaces. The vizard appearance of the display. And orange highlights! Blue is the typical highlight color in iOS and this is the case in the Podcast and Remote apps as well. The highlight color isn’t even consistent within this one app–both the AirPlay and Replay icons are highlighted here.

Some improvements are made with the odd full-screen mode of the Music app. The highlight color is consistently orange and the wood is gone. The display still looks odd.

The Remote app toolbar is clean and has enough visual distinction between elements.

Now you can see how the placement of the media playback controls are inconsistent across these Apple apps. Unlike the rest of them, the playback buttons are not at the top with the rest of the playback controls.