In defense of the hamburger menu, it's singular, nearly universal and well understood, I can deal with that just fine. This is very different from rows of icons in something like word where there's a huge array of functionality hidden behind obscure hieroglyphs.

> For what?!

I can think of several things: - more breath space in the UI - easier recognizability - less information overload (four character glyphs vs three plain lines) - consistency with other applications

And it's not like the hamburger menu symbol is particularly obscure.

In 1995 you needed to save 10px, they're just not as advanced any more.