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Tahoe's Terrible Icons
- Thread starter turbineseaplane
- Start date
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Interesting article made me rethink again to upgrade.
The loupe now looks like a flying saucer beaming something up
This is getting ridiculous now. Complain complain complain
The icons have changed, so what? It’s not as if it’s ruining your life all of a sudden.
The icons have changed, so what? It’s not as if it’s ruining your life all of a sudden.
This is getting ridiculous now, it's not as if complains are ruining your life all of sudden.
This is horrible. Very bad and plain stupid. I expected them to return to skeuomorphism, and instead they removed last bits of it from the OS.
Feels about as fugly as Windows now. Good job Tim Cook, might get a CEO seat at Microsoft after getting booted from Apple🤦♂️
Existence of this is a sign companies must shake up leadership once in 10 years to prevent these sorts of things.
Fugly UI/UX is just a tip of this whole iceberg that’s destroying Apple’s ship. It is for the first time since 2000s when something made by Apple doesn’t feel like it was made by Apple.
Form over function is all over the place… UI is meant to guide and comfort user, so it is easy to navigate. Instead their icons would glow and distract, to the point you just hide Dock altogether.
I am not saying most previous icons were much different, they had changed them long ago and I am much more of a fan of “lickable” aqua than this “UI slop” minimalist nonsense.
If Apple wants minimalism, ok… time to make interface Terminal again with built-in ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever, anyway Apple engineers are so lazy they cannot even make their own LLM🤦♂️ “MUH MINIMALISM!!” Tim would be so proud, could invite Ive back on board, “Simplicity 2”…
Feels about as fugly as Windows now. Good job Tim Cook, might get a CEO seat at Microsoft after getting booted from Apple🤦♂️
Existence of this is a sign companies must shake up leadership once in 10 years to prevent these sorts of things.
Fugly UI/UX is just a tip of this whole iceberg that’s destroying Apple’s ship. It is for the first time since 2000s when something made by Apple doesn’t feel like it was made by Apple.
Form over function is all over the place… UI is meant to guide and comfort user, so it is easy to navigate. Instead their icons would glow and distract, to the point you just hide Dock altogether.
I am not saying most previous icons were much different, they had changed them long ago and I am much more of a fan of “lickable” aqua than this “UI slop” minimalist nonsense.
If Apple wants minimalism, ok… time to make interface Terminal again with built-in ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever, anyway Apple engineers are so lazy they cannot even make their own LLM🤦♂️ “MUH MINIMALISM!!” Tim would be so proud, could invite Ive back on board, “Simplicity 2”…
OP, it must be the "negativity" from these forums only, nothing to worry about.
No matter how bad they currently look, and I'm not a fan, they're still so much better then the windows icons and windows UI
I genuinely have struggled to pick out icons from my apps folders for the last few iterations of MacOS. It's just a riot of colours, needless effects and oddities. An icon is meant to be an enduring symbol. Something that stays in your mind for quick recollection but they have become far too detailed and complex. Many of them are similar at a glance. Even in Alphabetical order it still takes 5-10 seconds to find the one out you want. When you're trying to work quickly its a pain in the ass.
In Tahoe some are better some are worse but all are ineffectual as an 'icon'. Too fiddly and detailed.
In Tahoe some are better some are worse but all are ineffectual as an 'icon'. Too fiddly and detailed.
Next big thing: Apple allows custom icons and sells packs of them in the App Store.
That used to be the case, back in the OSX days, Pre-Panther, we could theme the OS, but then at the release of Panther, (give or take a version), Steve Jobs and company largely shutdown and prevented the burgeoning theming market.
Icons are conventions. They only become meaningful by familiarity. If I give a look at my dock right now, I can't honestly say that there are more than 2 or 3 icons which unmistakably suggest which app they represent.
Mail maybe, despite all the loathe that people seem to have for the glassy aspect, clearly represents an envelope which is still a common object in everybody's life, I guess.
That button with a smiling face, a Finder, you say? And what is a "Finder" anyway? It makes sense only for a long-term user of Mac, i.e. it has an acquired meaning.
I guess that the notes immediately suggest an app somehow related to music, even for users who have never studied music: it's another universally acquired association, because otherwise it would be just another strange symbol.
And then there's AppleTV which is actually a text icon. Others are comically outdated: the stylised floppy disk for saving.
I still confuse the most used app of all, Safari, with Maps, and neither of them clearly represent what their corresponding apps do.
But that's it, really. all other icons make sense only after you learn about it. Which brings me to the point I'm trying to make: there's nothing immediate, innate about their meaning, rather it's the result of familiarity layered year after year, decade after decade.
Of course it's fundamental for a platform to preserve some continuity when updating icons and UI, to reduce the user's disorientation. And users, especially aging users (sorry, but I had to say this...), inevitably become more and more resistant to any change which force them to retrain their muscle memory. With some good reasons ("This is only disrupting me, I want to get things done!") but also a lot of delusional thinking when they try to convince themselves that icons were "instantly recognisable". They have never been. On any platform.
Mail maybe, despite all the loathe that people seem to have for the glassy aspect, clearly represents an envelope which is still a common object in everybody's life, I guess.
That button with a smiling face, a Finder, you say? And what is a "Finder" anyway? It makes sense only for a long-term user of Mac, i.e. it has an acquired meaning.
I guess that the notes immediately suggest an app somehow related to music, even for users who have never studied music: it's another universally acquired association, because otherwise it would be just another strange symbol.
And then there's AppleTV which is actually a text icon. Others are comically outdated: the stylised floppy disk for saving.
I still confuse the most used app of all, Safari, with Maps, and neither of them clearly represent what their corresponding apps do.
But that's it, really. all other icons make sense only after you learn about it. Which brings me to the point I'm trying to make: there's nothing immediate, innate about their meaning, rather it's the result of familiarity layered year after year, decade after decade.
Of course it's fundamental for a platform to preserve some continuity when updating icons and UI, to reduce the user's disorientation. And users, especially aging users (sorry, but I had to say this...), inevitably become more and more resistant to any change which force them to retrain their muscle memory. With some good reasons ("This is only disrupting me, I want to get things done!") but also a lot of delusional thinking when they try to convince themselves that icons were "instantly recognisable". They have never been. On any platform.
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Command+Space. "Disk Utility" (usually just need to type "Disk" and it's the first result).
Done.
Edit: Just saw another commenter wrote the same thing yesterday. That's what happens when I don't skim through all the replies first.
@JoeSilver
Lots of good points there.
I would just say that I think most of the icons flat out look bad.
It’s less about loss of familiarity and change and more just subjectively bad looking icons, in my view. I thought the piece that I linked got at that somewhat as well.
Lots of good points there.
I would just say that I think most of the icons flat out look bad.
It’s less about loss of familiarity and change and more just subjectively bad looking icons, in my view. I thought the piece that I linked got at that somewhat as well.
Yes, but subjectively is key. But I agree that some choices are odd and almost contradictory: Preview looked more "Liquid Glass" before than now.
But maybe because I bought my first Mac in February, although of course I had an idea of how previous versions of Mac OS look like (I also had the chance of using Macs at work in 2014 and in 2019), I really don't find Tahoe uglier than Sequoia. In fact, I find it refreshing.
In fact I think that the primary motivation behind Liquid Glass is to make Mac OS (and even more, iOS) look very different from the competition. It's almost a manoeuvre aimed at disorienting Microsoft and Android vendors. Google Pixel, in particular has taken a complete opposite direction: look at the Material icons, how extremely simplified they are: https://m3.material.io/styles/icons/overview
I bet that Apple will revert to a flatter design only when Liquid Glass will be imitated again.
Change can be different and a backwards step.
Many of the designs are unnecessary. New does not mean better.
As someone who is almost completely blind, the complaints about new interfaces never, ever get old.
The leopard menu bar is transparent, how awful!
The lion calendar is leather, what was Steve smoking?
The Mountain Lion notifications have linen behind them, Steve is rolling in his grave.
iOS 7’s icons look like they were designed by children, Johnny has lost it.
The Yosemite icons are bad, the Mac is dead.
The windows are too round, Apple basically is on the verge of bankruptcy again.
The windows are too square, Steve would never.
The icons are too colorful.
The icons are too boring.
The icons are too distracting.
There’s too much glass.
The glass doesn’t go far enough.
The leopard menu bar is transparent, how awful!
The lion calendar is leather, what was Steve smoking?
The Mountain Lion notifications have linen behind them, Steve is rolling in his grave.
iOS 7’s icons look like they were designed by children, Johnny has lost it.
The Yosemite icons are bad, the Mac is dead.
The windows are too round, Apple basically is on the verge of bankruptcy again.
The windows are too square, Steve would never.
The icons are too colorful.
The icons are too boring.
The icons are too distracting.
There’s too much glass.
The glass doesn’t go far enough.
of course! but we're talking about aesthetics, so this is all opinion, not fact. it's an icon preference, not an OS bug...
Yup, and its also possibly why its so divisive as well. There is no real right and wrong. I really wanted a return to skeuomorphism, but instead we seemed to have moved away bit further. Personally, I don't care if the corners are rounded or not, but I do care if the icons are conveying less information
I do care about the rounded corners, only because it's become too much.
It's almost comical how over rounded they are now.
Then again... dock icon still has date on it instead of these "generic" dots - thus it could have been worse.
Welcome to having the UI be the same across iOS, MacOS, TvOS, WatchOS and iPadOS. Annoying, sure. I can deal with it. First world problems I guess? Does not impact performance just visually unappealing.
This feels like it could be the tagline..
"macOS Tahoe: Hey! -- It could have been worse!"