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You're complaining about icons when they spent a decade on Swift instead of modernizing ObjC and keeping the performance improvements and dynamic capabilities and we still have a WIP language where most of the OS is still ObjC/C/C++ as it should be.

Hell, Fortran is now en vogue because we need it for HPC and AI. Too bad Apple has spent jack on incorporating Flang into the OS and providing some compelling HPC and AI developer tools with such language that all applied sciences need on Supercomputers and more.
 
Tahoe icons aren't really all that healthy either...

Tahoe serving size.png
 
Paul Kafasis with a wonderful breakdown, icon by icon.

Some of my favorites:

Contact’s icons old and new

The left-side tabs on the old Contacts icon were odd, but this new icon is even odder.
Is the cover of that book made of glass?
Font Book’s icons old and new

Hey, look, it’s Contacts, but far worse! This no longer looks like a book at all.
It’s just a gray “a” blob.
Preview’s icons old and new

Look at the beautiful photorealistic glass on the loupe in the old Preview icon.
They sucked the soul out of it, and ironically, the new Liquid Glass version barely looks like a loupe at all.
It could just be me, but the previous versions of the icons look old and out of date. Adobe and Microsoft updated their icons for Tahoe and they're an improvement.
 
The main one that truly blows my mind is the drive icon. The perspective is objectively incorrect. We are clearly looking at the front of the object, but the back is... wider somehow? What is happening here?

I know it's "just" an icon, but it really makes you question what's going at Apple, a famously detail-oriented company, for them to release something this aggressively wrong.
View attachment 2576800
That's an optical illusion, it's actually the same width. That being said back in the day this would have been thought about and optically aligned so that the illusion was not apparent. There are so many design fundamentals broken at Apple today.
 
I don't think they're that terrible. I personally wasn't a fan of the Big Sur icons which were like iOS but some had the odd bit poking out. Then you had a weird mix of symbol iOS style (like Safari for example) paired with other icons which had a photorealistic realistic pen on them. You also had some apps, like Spotify, that didn't adhere to the guidelines at all.

Tahoes icons are at least all now consistent with iOS. There are still some weird quirks (what's a 3D loupe for Preview doing in there when the design is supposed to be flat layers of glass material?) but overall fit together much better than the previous ones.

I also really like the new Contacts icon!
 
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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
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Is this for real?! Is iOS the same? (Obviously I haven’t moved yet. I usually wait for the second update on macOS.) If so I doubt it will last. I liked having the date there, and thought iOS, showing both day of the week and day of the month was best. Is there a setting for it, to change it to show the date?

Aesthetics are subjective and I’ve found I can adjust to almost anything, but I’m always interested in people’s reactions to visual changes.
 
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Yes, for what is worth, pasting that image into images.google.com didn't return any source other than MacRumors.
What's crazy is someone in the other thread corrected him before he posted it in this one... is he intentionally ignoring reality to try and get a cheap shot in at Apple? There's plenty to criticize them for without making stuff up!
 
That's an optical illusion, it's actually the same width. That being said back in the day this would have been thought about and optically aligned so that the illusion was not apparent. There are so many design fundamentals broken at Apple today.
The problem is that the hard drive appears to be positioned in front of you, like the old icon was. You can tell because you can see the front side of it, with the, well I don't know what those are. Holes? Since the sides are parallel, this means that the the real object is actually getting larger as you go backwards.

The fact that the icon's lines are parallel is the problem--they shouldn't be.
 
The problem is that the hard drive appears to be positioned in front of you, like the old icon was. You can tell because you can see the front side of it, with the, well I don't know what those are. Holes? Since the sides are parallel, this means that the the real object is actually getting larger as you go backwards.

The fact that the icon's lines are parallel is the problem--they shouldn't be.
You have to remember that Liquid Glass is 'magical'.
 
It's just neumorphism. Better than the hyper-flatness heralded by the iOS 7 era, but not as soulful as iOS 6 and before. Ultimately, in my humble opinion, it's a natural progression of/successor to Big Sur's preliminary neumorphic design overhaul, while uniting much more cohesively with iOS, iPadOS, visionOS, and tvOS.

Can we quit using words like “soulful” to describe icons? That rubs me as so silly

Anyway, these icons suck and they’re worse than any previous iteration because they’re all lower contrast and more blurry. It looks bizarre on today’s high resolution screens and many of them are hard to differentiate because they’re just white blobs on top of the same shade
 
The problem is that the hard drive appears to be positioned in front of you, like the old icon was. You can tell because you can see the front side of it, with the, well I don't know what those are. Holes? Since the sides are parallel, this means that the the real object is actually getting larger as you go backwards.

The fact that the icon's lines are parallel is the problem--they shouldn't be.
Assuming that they are trying to mimic a realistic 3D perspective. But maybe this icon can be seen as an example of oblique projection.
I have to say that I'm not an expert of technical drawing, but I know for sure that icons are meant to convey an idea, not to represent objects realistically.
 
Can we quit using words like “soulful” to describe icons? That rubs me as so silly

Anyway, these icons suck and they’re worse than any previous iteration because they’re all lower contrast and more blurry. It looks bizarre on today’s high resolution screens and many of them are hard to differentiate because they’re just white blobs on top of the same shade

Feels so at odds with all the focus on retina screen quality, doesn’t it?
 
Who cares how the old icons looked like. We’ve seen them for 10 years. We just want something new and fresh. Kudos to Apple

Forum is complaining like usual

People who want change for the sake of change are as bad as people who resist all changes

Some changes are good, some are bad. Some are subjective

In the case of these icons, there are some subjective reasons the majority dislike them (“ugly” etc) and some objective reasons they’re worse (lower contrast makes them harder to interpret, lower detail makes them harder to interpret, etc)
 
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