8 ms·

Sweet Jeebus, macOS 27 Golden Gate Removes the Dumb Icons from Menu Items

322 points by epaga 3mo ago

Razengan 3mo ago
I liked those. It should be an option. Stop trying to assume OS UI can ever be one-size-fits-all.
hegelguy 3mo ago
Meh - these icons were bad, but I don't see the disaster
- MattDamonSpace 3mo ago
  Dead canary
  - JumpCrisscross 3mo ago
    Dyed canary.
    - CoastalCoder 3mo ago
      You're just parroting the GP.
      - DonHopkins 3mo ago
        Is that the hill you want to Dye on? https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/bad_dye_job https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/bad_dye_job
- torben-friis 3mo ago
  It was death by a thousand cuts. I am not a designer and Tahoe bothered me enough that, after trying it at work, I've been actively stopping my personal Mac to update, and it was a factor in moving to android.
  - Grombobulous 3mo ago
    Liquid Glass motivated me to sell my Mac. But also, Linux becoming genuinely amazing and being able to play all my PC games played a role there as well. I don’t find Android nearly as compelling, and Liquid Glass seems at least a bit less of a disaster on the iOS platform. My suggestion to you is follow the Panther Lake laptops that are coming out as your potential future Mac off-ramp. I have a Framework 13 Pro on preorder [1] but some other laptops are also showing impressive results on battery life and GPU performance. If I had more money to blow I would totally grab a Zephyrus G14 2026 with the panther lake CPU and RTX 5070Ti. Although as a programmer’s laptop, the Framework is excellent and the 13 Pro looks like it’s shaping up to be a dream system. [1] Unfortunately you can’t get the kind of RAM deal that I got for my 13 Pro anymore. As soon as the 13 Pro was announced I pounced on some new old stock of Crucial LPCAMM2 memory, which isn’t available anymore. I paid about $250 for 32GB, which is a “deal,” apparently. As of now you pretty much have to buy it from Framework as nobody else has it at a more reasonable price.
    - torben-friis 3mo ago
      Thanks for the suggestion! For the moment I'm dual booting, since the m1 MacBook is still a decent piece of hardware for my needs and asahi Linux offers good support. Given the current market I intend to hold on as long as possible, but I'll probably be eyeing the Frameworks when it's time to change. Apple's change of direction makes me hopeful that they'll recover, but the current trends in tech have moved me away from corporate platforms a bit.
      - Grombobulous 3mo ago
        Holding as long as possible is a good play. I like the YouTube channel Just Josh Tech for laptop reviews. They also have a price tracking website. Something that’s perhaps hard to get used to with switching to a non-Apple piece of hardware is that Apple sales are not the same as Windows laptop sales. If you watch retailers like a hawk there are sometimes pretty incredible discounts. In other words, lots of Windows laptop MSRPs are just completely not real prices and it makes them look really bad against MacBook hardware. That said, with Apple’s stable pricing, alternative laptops being the “cheap alternative” to a Mac is pretty much over. Your next upgrade might just be a newer but still used MacBook when the newer hardware gets better Asahi support.
- xdennis 3mo ago
  You have to make accommodation for designers, that's simply their language. If something is misaligned by 1 pixel, it's not an annoyance, it's a catastrophe. The icons were bad, but the real issue with the new theme is the waste of space and wasting time computing transparencies.
librasteve 3mo ago
good - I have resorted to a config setting to suppress these bad icons on Tahoe
- xandrius 3mo ago
  Can you share it?
  - SoKamil 3mo ago
    In terminal: defaults write -g NSMenuEnableActionImages -bool false
triyambakam 3mo ago
This is also what's annoying with most model generated artifacts. They want every bullet point with an emoji. Even worse is an HTML artifact will be littered with chips/pill style "informative" boxes. So much useless distraction. I need something fine tuned by Tufte
rsynnott 3mo ago
Aw. I may have been the only one, but I kind of liked those.
- foobarian 3mo ago
  Same, my brain is pretty visually oriented so I kind of like the icons. To be clear I don't really use the icons to pick out a particular item, but they just look nice. It's kind of like pleasant background music in a hotel lobby.
  - hbn 3mo ago
    If you're visually oriented it's easier to quickly find what you're looking for when there's only occasional icons as visual anchor points rather than everything being a bunch of tiny icons you have to parse
dlcarrier 3mo ago
You'd think they'd go the other direction and remove the text. I installed VLC on my phone, and I couldn't figure anything out, because it was covered in vague post-skeuomorphic icons without text.
- philistine 3mo ago
  VLC has atrocious UI, but don't complain, everybody loves the story of the app so it must be perfect in every way!
  - bloomca 3mo ago
    VLC does have atrocious UI but it works great, while macOS stuff both looks bad and does not work well, so I would take VLC easily.
  - skhr0680 3mo ago
    VLC has the best UX in the world. Yes It Will Play That Video! It has a ton of cryptic options, but at least it lets you mess around with them and maybe get something usable, where other apps would just give up and shake their head.
    - al_borland 3mo ago
      But that’s all I want it to do… play the video. Now it adds those videos to a media library for some reason. I never want this and I never found a way to turn it off. I moved to IINA to finally get back to a video Swiss Army knife that just plays video and doesn’t force me into an experience I don’t want… after tweaking a bunch of settings. A miss Perian, the codec pack for QuickTime, which gave QuickTime and QuickLook that play-anything experience. It played the video and got out of my way.
adriand 3mo ago
I’m still on Sequoia because of all the Tahoe complaints. Not so much the rounded corners, but I heard performance was poor. Have updates to Tahoe improved things?
- Shank 3mo ago
  I’m on an M1 Max device and the GPU performance drops have not gotten back to Sequoia levels on Tahoe patches. Golden Gate hasn’t changed anything either.
  - nottorp 3mo ago
    They toned down the effects in Golden Gate but the backend is doing the same amount of work to blend all that pointless stuff in. You'd get the performance back if they gave up on the translucently to the point of removing the code.
    - LoganDark 3mo ago
      I'm so upset that Liquid Glass is visibly pixelated now. Like, it's barely even blurred at the least transparent setting -- it just looks like a very obviously downsampled background. Like distractingly/annoyingly downsampled. Ugh!! Screenshots: https://logandark.net/files/3SQ5P9OP-PP373NQ7-RS6RP2QR-P772S289/least.png https://logandark.net/files/3SQ5P9OP-PP373NQ7-RS6RP2QR-P772S... https://logandark.net/files/3SQ5P9OP-PP373NQ7-RS6RP2QR-P772S289/middle.png https://logandark.net/files/3SQ5P9OP-PP373NQ7-RS6RP2QR-P772S... https://logandark.net/files/3SQ5P9OP-PP373NQ7-RS6RP2QR-P772S289/most.png https://logandark.net/files/3SQ5P9OP-PP373NQ7-RS6RP2QR-P772S...
      - nottorp 3mo ago
        I'm upset that Apple is wasting my shader transistors on it.
        LoganDark 3mo ago
        They're trying to waste it less. For example, it's now very common for me to see it simply not update when I move a window that's behind another window. Which kinda ruins part of the magic for me.
nsbk 3mo ago
"But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough can you see the stars"
mieses 3mo ago
[flagged]
- dwb 3mo ago
  What? Almost everyone who has a Mac uses macOS.
quartzink 3mo ago
[dead]
michelb 3mo ago
A good correction. But think about the months of work that has been wasted on creating those icon iterations. What a waste!
- antran22 3mo ago
  that's just sunk cost fallacy. The icons are also publicly available and can be used on projects conforming to the Apple branding, so it's not truly a waste. https://developer.apple.com/sf-symbols/ https://developer.apple.com/sf-symbols/
  - saghm 3mo ago
    If anything, the waste would have arguably been putting people to work on a feature that needed to get removed in the first place. If there's any post-mortem to be done, it's "why did this get released in the first place, and how do we make sure we don't spent time on something like it again?"
  - michelb 3mo ago
    That is true. I thought this was funny to see as well, although these icons redesigns happen with every MacOS release I think: https://basicappleguy.com/basicappleblog/macos-golden-gate-icon-comparison https://basicappleguy.com/basicappleblog/macos-golden-gate-i...
eviks 3mo ago
No good reason to be excited about the old garbage UI returning after the new garbage had been trashed. > This updated advice in the HIG is perfect. > Use an icon to highlight the most common actions and key features of your app Saving a document is the one of the most common actions in your average app, but I * never* need an icon there in the menu, there is no benefit in focusing my attention on an action I always do with a shortcut! The perfect advice would be easy and powerful user customization, so that, for example, I could right click on the app's File>Save menu and select an option to hide the icon, reformat the rich text field and have this change propagate in all the other apps. Or click on a web link from someone who has already done it better and add the theme. Then I wouldn't even care about the back and forth design changes between major OS releases. And that could also fix another sin in the screenshot - the text is not vertically aligned! "visual consistency" misunderstood
- DonHopkins 3mo ago
  The garbage that threw itself out was "the untalented magazine-designer hacks with clout and influence [who] all left with Alan Dye" and that's worth celebrating. Especially because Meta collected the trash. https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/bad_dye_job https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/bad_dye_job >My favorite reaction to today’s news is this one-liner from a guy on Twitter/X: “The average IQ of both companies has increased.” https://x.com/shipulin/status/1996318006335401997 https://x.com/shipulin/status/1996318006335401997
talkingtab 3mo ago
"it’s proof that the rot has been rooted out of Apple’s software design team" I know little about Apple, but have quite a bit of experience with how software products get "designed". Goofy and offensive things happen when corporations decide not to pay attention to customers. The decision to ignore customer and focus on market wow is not the software design team. It is a systemic and structural thing.
- michelb 3mo ago
  "it’s proof that the rot has been rooted out of Apple’s software design team" Weird sentence given that three staunch supporters of liquid glass are still in that team, including Lemay. I highly doubt it's going anywhere, hopefully it gets a few more improvements before it will be replaced for The New Thing in MacOS 29.
  - hbn 3mo ago
    Liquid glass isn't inherently bad, it just needed someone to dial it back when the prettiness is hurting legibility/usability. There are lots of things (well, in iOS) that I think are a big improvement, like menus spawning from the button you tapped instead of a bottom sheet popping up from the bottom of the screen. And the nested list menus are very nice. But completely eradicating toolbars and replacing them with a fade that still doesn't allow buttons legible in all cases was clearly a mistake. And it's something they're backtracking on!
garyrob 3mo ago
The icons in menu items is one of the reasons I'm still on Sequoia. This settles it; I'll just stay on Sequoia until Golden Gate is released. I can't say the following for sure, but there's evidence of it: One of Apple's real strengths and differentiators is that it listens to customer feedback to the point that it will say: "Hey, this was dumb. Customer feedback proves it. Let's just get rid of it like it never happened." Other examples include getting rid of the earlier getting rid of Magsafe. I don't know whether it's something taught in Apple School, but in the absence of not doing dumb things in the first place, which seems to be unavoidable in the real world with real people, it's probably the next best thing. And it may be enough better than the norm from tech companies that it's a real cultural differentiator.
- philistine 3mo ago
  People tend to ascribe to Apple only the Jobs years. That Apple might have reset after he came back. The truth is far from that. The people in the company were great, they just needed a massive amount of refocus. Apple has people who have been there decades and have had to reverse incredibly stupid decisions.
- ChoGGi 3mo ago
  The butterfly keys were around five years before they changed them. Which may have been related to the lawsuit about them? I also vaguely recall issues with their magsafe connectors and lawyers.
  - joeblubaugh 3mo ago
    Hardware timelines are long. I doubt they could have switched in less than three years regardless.
randallsquared 3mo ago
TIL about the proliferation of menu item icons in Tahoe. Perhaps I missed the outcry when Tahoe came out, but I got around to upgrading to it only a couple months ago, and this was not a change that stood out.
foo12bar 3mo ago
Sometimes who can't be bothered to make the text on their website not extremely tiny when viewing on mobile shouldn't be writing multi-page rants on the other people's UI.
- mkl 3mo ago
  Just double tap the text you want to zoom to, as has been the way for nearly 20 years.
  - NetMageSCW 3mo ago
    Though it’s been broken for ten.
- baggachipz 3mo ago
  Thank god for Reader Mode.
  - port11 3mo ago
    I remember Instapaper, that made text look good. Apple’s Read Mode settings are a bit lacking.
- al_borland 3mo ago
  Isn’t he just serving up the desktop website? This goes along with the original intent of the benefits of the browser on the iPhone. It was able to run the normal Internet, not a separate “mobile” version of it. I found a simple double tap on the text sized it perfectly fine to read the text. What I find to be a UI problem are sites that force me into a mobile view, which often loses features, and which removes my ability to zoom and pan as I wish. Apple had to add an option to “Request Desktop Website”, which I assume spoofs the user agent, to try and get around this issue. But for site that use other means, this still doesn’t work and the user is locked into a crippled mobile page… the exact problem modern smartphones were supposed to solve. I’ll take Gruber’s model every time over the crippled mobile sandbox with no way out.
  - 3mo ago
JSR_FDED 3mo ago
This is great news. Apple never reverses course this quickly, so this is a clear signal that Stephen Lemay is making his presence felt.
randusername 3mo ago
Glad for the change, but a lot of the criticism overlooks that at some point we won't be the target audience of UI/UX anymore. Flyouts, dropdowns, and other text menus make sense to me, but I could see how they might be alien and uncomfortable to someone that has only ever experienced mobile interfaces. The reverse is true for sure, nowhere do I feel more frustrated and old-brained then trying to make sense of a new mobile app that everyone else seems to think is great.
- skydhash 3mo ago
  > but I could see how they might be alien and uncomfortable to someone that has only ever experienced mobile interfaces They are different devices. Just because you can drive a sedan does not means you can drive a bulldozer. Or playing piano qualifies you to play the organ. So going from touch and a small screen to keyboard/mouse and a bigger screen, you should expect that the interactions will change.
  - spinningslate 3mo ago
    Exactly this. The “one UI to rule them all” paradigm has been a persistent, recurring flaw for decades. It probably hit its lowest (to date) with the exhortations to “mobile first design”. The motivation for that was reasonable: conventional desktop UIs of the time didn’t render on mobile. However the ensuing “mobile first” instead became “mobile only” - and consequently wide screen displays with buttons the size of elephants. Phones and desktops are so radically different that your sedan/bulldozer analogy seems like shades of grey. It’s more like taking a Saturn V rocket to the local shop for a pint of milk.
  - _diyar 3mo ago
    true, but ~all new users have a stronger mental model of how their phone works vs. big-screen devices.
    - preg_match 3mo ago
      The solutions is then them building a mental model for the desktop. Using phone strategy on larger screens is a usability issue, because it doesn’t translate well or take advantage of a mouse and keyboard. We went through this with windows 8. It’s a nice idea, but in practice it makes the desktop much more cumbersome to use. It might have a benefit for very new users, but it’s temporary in nature.
projektfu 3mo ago
Is this a case of "removing the duck"? https://bwiggs.com/notebook/queens-duck/ https://bwiggs.com/notebook/queens-duck/
- dormento 3mo ago
  I'd guess no because in this case the whole system is the duck.
  - projektfu 3mo ago
    I'd think it's like, the whole Tahoe version had a lot to complain about, but enough people focused on the menu icons that they didn't focus on other things. Look how relieved they are the icons are gone!
    - saghm 3mo ago
      There's a whole flock of aquatic poultry flapping about, but at least now it's duck-free! Too bad about the swan, goose, loon, egret, and heron though
    - pseudalopex 3mo ago
      More people complained of Liquid Glass than menu icons. And many of these comments continued to complain of Liquid Glass.
reddalo 3mo ago
I'm just sad that Intel MacBooks will be stuck with Tahoe, which is essentialy a botched beta for Golden Gate. Bad customer experience for a company like Apple.
- roysting 3mo ago
  Considering that Intel Macs will still be more than functional and provide a great user experience for many years afterwards even with Tahoe, not something that can be said for Win/PC machines, strikes me as being rather good customer support even if the breakpoint does seem like a bit of a short EOL. But I now plenty of people who bought Win machines and with the next update they basically turned into molasses, all while dealing with horrible trackpads and bad performance. Just get a new Mac Neo for ~$500
  - SwellJoe 3mo ago
    Or install Linux for free and have a better OS than either.
    - roysting 3mo ago
      Your tone deaf suggestion precisely underlies why Linux is not dominant. Obviously the question is about the MacOS environment, whether good or bad. No amount of installing any of the tens of thousands of quirky Linux distros will e.g., give you Continuity, cross-device calling, let alone the simplicity of setup. You try simply opening the case of some headsets that immediately connect using Linux. It’s like suggesting a Cummings tractor will pull a load all day long, but the majority of people are looking for comfort and being able to navigate city streets and the school pickup line. Is tone deaf. Yes, but I don’t think anyone here is in need of being told about Linux. “Do you have a minute to talk about your lord and savior, Linux?”
      - SwellJoe 3mo ago
        Sorry, it's just on my mind, as I bought a Mac recently because it's the best hardware, but boy does the software suck.
whicks 3mo ago
For those that haven’t seen this very well done write up about Tahoe’s use of icons, I would definitely recommend it: https://tonsky.me/blog/tahoe-icons/ https://tonsky.me/blog/tahoe-icons/
- ninju 3mo ago
  or this one https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2025/icons-in-menus/ https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2025/icons-in-menus/
- dewey 3mo ago
  Also linked in the second sentence of the blog post.
- pseidemann 3mo ago
  Is pixel golf a thing? Apple definitely did it.
- andai 3mo ago
  Great article. Main lesson seems to be, it's good to put icons on the standard, most frequently used actions. And make them colorful. That helps the eye find them. Edit: also consistency and legibility. So basically "don't design it so it's bad!"
- RetroTechie 3mo ago
  Holy sh... That's ehm, 'impressive'! "On the upside: it’s not that hard anymore to design better than Apple!" Good one to keep in mind.
nalekberov 3mo ago
Probably no one caused more damage than John Ive to Apple (post-Jobs period). Removal of skeuomorphism, removal of essential ports, making MacBooks so thin that they wouldn’t work without overheating to name a few. I am so glad he is gone now, it’s not all bells and whistles for Apple now, but at least it’s way more pleasing to own Apple devices any more.
- hilariously 3mo ago
  I agree with you on everything but Skeuomorphism - seeing that leather address book made me genuinely repulsed every time, it felt like I was using a child's computer.
  - nalekberov 3mo ago
    Taste is subjective indeed, but for me they were more expressive and visually appealing than ironed out icons.
    - hilariously 3mo ago
      Genuinely glad someone liked them!
- kstrauser 3mo ago
  I hated - hated - skeuomorphism. It’s not just the appearance, which I can take or leave, but also the idea of making software model the behavior of physical items. Frankly, the old Mac first party apps sucked for it. For example, for the longest time Calendar didn’t have an event list view, only a day or week or month view (IIRC; it’s been a while). Why? Because desk calendars don’t have an event list view, so neither should this. Or remember the old QuickTime Player where you had to adjust the volume by clicking the edge of a volume wheel and dragging it because that’s how an old portable TV worked. Skeuomorphic icons can be pretty. Skeuomorphic UX sucks because it inherently brings physical world limitations to software where it’s unnecessary.
- wwalexander 3mo ago
  I strongly dislike Ive's influence overall, but skeuomorphism made it incredibly difficult and cost-prohibitive for a single indie developer to make an app that felt like a polished first-party experience for iOS. I'm glad it's gone. You're still welcome to do it if you want and you have the whimsy and artistic talent (or design team) for it.
JKCalhoun 3mo ago
I'm happy to see the HIG (Human Interface Guidelines) referenced in the post. I was unaware Apple still maintained such a document? There was a time when TOG's HIG [1] was the Bible for the Mac interface. UI nerds at Apple (and likely elsewhere) would enjoy debating/interpreting them for some project or another. (I don't recall anyone being burned at the stake but there were definitely discussions that could reach a heretical pitch.) The HIG preached a kind of nuance and balance—when it allowed for somewhat less "staid" UI elements it would advise moderation. This came about in an era when the graphical user interface was a fairly new thing to the public and inconsistency (Do What Thou Wilt) would only have destabilized the gentle adoption Apple was treading. It was a marketable advantage for Apple as well. Consistency on the DOS side, as far as I know, came about only as companies tried to adopt familiar patterns from popular apps of the day. (Related: I talked to an engineer at Adobe about the hideous UI (my opinion) of Adobe Acrobat on the Mac and was told they wanted it to look like it belonged alongside the suite of Microsoft Office apps. le sigh.) From 1992, see Page 72 for menu widgets: [1] https://vintageapple.org/inside_r/pdf/Human_Interface_Guidelines_1992.pdf https://vintageapple.org/inside_r/pdf/Human_Interface_Guidel...
- troupo 3mo ago
  > I was unaware Apple still maintained such a document? They kinda do. For a long time HIGs were well researched documents with great examples and explanations. For the past few years they've been used as post-hoc justifications (or just examples with no justifications) for whatever designs vomits out.
- brontitall 3mo ago
  Page 12 (PDF p36) seems almost written for the people who did the Tahoe menus
  - dewey 3mo ago
    It would've been very funny if the left side is an actual screenshot of a system app from Tahoe.
mc32 3mo ago
Random icons for the days of the week don’t even make much sense. If they at least iconified the moon, Tyr, Woden, etc., it would at least have a leg to stand on, but here it’s like the randomized avatars so many services assign user accounts.
mwexler 3mo ago
Got a vote just for the wonderful title, which captured my feelings exactly and was SFW.
trollbridge 3mo ago
MacOS 27 Beta seems to actually fix a lot of my complaints with Tahoe. I had cynically been believing Apple was simply going to let macOS rot and not fix these major annoyances. (Rather interestingly, menus still have icons if a menu option will simply launch another app, a specific folder that has an icon, or will perform a specific action like a window resize or category sort change that already has an icon you could click elsewhere.) They also have cleaned up the mess of differently rounded borders (not complete yet but progress is being made). The OS also feels a lot less sluggish. I had gone back to Sequoia simply because performance was so bad.
- thisislife2 3mo ago
  The poor quality of macOS Tahoe is by design as it is a "transition" release - a transition OS release is often like a beta quality release (of some feature) and often features a "break" (like loss of hardware support or EOL etc.). It is meant to frustrate the user, so that the "next" OS release (which fixes all the bugs of the "beta" features is more "appealing" and hyped (just read all the comments praising the new release here and elsewhere :). Apparently Tahoe is going to be the last macOS that supports Intel macs - that means it will continue to frustrate Intel Mac users and force them to consider buying the Apple ARM models if they want to use the newer macOS. A similar thing happened with Catalina too after it dropped support for 32-bit apps - many people chose to remain in the previous version (Mojave) because it was less "buggy" / appealing than Catalina. Followed by the "hype" of how the next version (Big Sur) was "so much better". Microsoft also does this with Windows OS - e.g. Windows Vista and Windows 8 both can be considered "transition" releases that are infamous due to their "beta" quality features and / or frustrating UI features. (This tactic of boring and / or frustrating the viewers is more common in many popular TV series, where one or more episodes is often deliberately made that way - by focusing on something mundane and meaningless that doesn't really move the story forward, so that it makes the following and often climax episodes more exciting, fulfilling and enjoyable. E.g. Breaking Bad s03e10 - The Fly - the most boring episode of season 3).
  - 9dev 3mo ago
    That seems to be more of an emergent phenomenon than conscious design decision to me to be honest - never assume malice when stupidity will suffice and all that.
antran22 3mo ago
Good grief, hopefully in v28 Lemay will also throw away the absolute crap that is Liquid glass. Aesthetically it looks horrible, it slows my iPhone 13 — which never before lagged in all its life since iOS 15 – to a maddening crawl. Liquid glass should be taught in design school as an example of what not to do when you design UX. And also in business school as a case of how middle management can fudge up something that is working normally in the illusion of progress.
- knollimar 3mo ago
  Did they not learn from windows aero? Or are they comprised of pure hubris that they thought they could make it work
  - duskdozer 3mo ago
    There's a constant "need" to churn UI revamps, so I guess eventually you run out of ideas before cycling around.
  - GaryBluto 3mo ago
    Windows Aero did work, or at least the Windows 7 incarnation of it.
    - knollimar 3mo ago
      Wasn't it a bastardized watered down version that cached the elements behind it and still gave a performance hit? They seem to be running into the same issues and didn't take the learned lessons with them
    - flohofwoe 3mo ago
      It was still ugly, but it did kinda work because it only affected the window chrome, and it could be set to opaque with an easy-to-find setting. On macOS the checkbox for "Reduce transparency" is hidden away in the Accessibility settings panel which is the last place I'd look for configuring the desktop theme.
iandanforth 3mo ago
Brutal. I love it.
phkahler 3mo ago
For the HIG: Use menu item icons sparingly and with purpose. Icons allow people to find menu items more quickly, and help clarify what selecting an item does. I'm not sure that's even OK. I find icons disruptive to reading the menu, but at least Apple still has text to read. Microsoft Word doesn't even have "Save" as text for saving your file, never mind that the icon isn't even in the file menu these days.
kibwen 3mo ago
> I don’t know if all the untalented hacks are gone, but the untalented magazine-designer hacks with clout and influence all left with Alan Dye. As usual for Gruber, this is fanboy cope. Dye may be a convenient scapegoat, but he was not a lone wolf, he was operating with the full assent of executive leadership, which is to say, the same leadership that appointed his successor.
- ckcheng 3mo ago
  It’s important not to forget the (work) politics while looking at the work produced. Unfortunately when you get a politically astute Mad Men (for real, from Ogilvy) in the organization, great damage can be done for a very long time without much recourse. You’ll note Dye was an Ive decision. And you’ll see the successor was not in Dye’s camp. Because (work) politics. From https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/bad_dye_job https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/bad_dye_job > Gurman reported that Billy Sorrentino, a Dye deputy who has served as a senior director of design at Apple since 2016, is leaving for Meta with Dye.3 I don’t have any other names, but word on the street is that other members of Dye’s inner circle are leaving Apple for Meta with him. But those who remain — or who might remain, if they’d have been offered the promotion to replace Dye — simply can’t be trusted from the perspective of senior leadership, who were apparently blindsided by Dye’s departure for Meta. > Putting Alan Dye in charge of user interface design was the one big mistake Jony Ive made as Apple’s Chief Design Officer. > Dye had no background in user interface design... Before joining Apple, he was design director for the fashion brand Kate Spade, and before that worked on branding for the ad agency Ogilvy. > Alan Dye is not untalented. But his talents at Apple were in politics. His political skill was so profound that it was his decision to leave, despite the fact that his tenure is considered a disaster by actual designers inside and outside the company. He obviously figured out how to please Apple’s senior leadership. His departure today landed as a total surprise because his stature within the company seemed so secure.
  - kibwen 3mo ago
    Whether or not the successor was a friend of Dye isn't relevant here. Let's say for a moment that Apple's design woes were a result of Dye. Dye was appointed by Apple's leadership. The conclusion would that Apple's leadership isn't capable of evaluating whether or not someone is fit for the job. And even if the guy who appointed Dye isn't around any more, the guy who appointed Dye was also appointed by Apple's leadership; despite whatever turnover there may be, there is an entire web of leadership continuity that resulted in Apple not being capable of selecting proper leaders, which means there is no reason to suspect that the current guy will fare any better. Politics is politics; the idea that the last guy was appointed because he was good at politics only goes to show that Apple fundamentally rewards politicking, not ability, so the assumption must be that the new guy is also a politicker first and foremost. Gruber is hoping that the new guy, in addition to politicking, is also good at design, but that's all it is: hope, and hope as a front for refusing to face harsh truths (to wit: the harsh truth that Apple has no magic touch left, especially difficult for a lifelong super-fanboy like Gruber to understand) is called cope.
sbinnee 3mo ago
I didn’t upgrade to Tahoe after reading a couple of bad reviews. This time around though I may just do the upgrade. Nagging for system upgrade every time I plug my iphone is getting my nerves.
IshKebab 3mo ago
The second piece of advice there is still wrong though. They still want all icons or no icons for visual consistency, just on a smaller scale. Visual consistency like this is bad because it removes distinct features (like the presence or lack of an icon) that make it easier to find things. Google's icons are visually consistent: https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/jie6b7/for_opening_home_instead_of_drive_gang/ https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/jie6b7/for_opening_... Outsourcing their UX design to the internet badly...
mring33621 3mo ago
No doubt will be a 7.49 GB download to remove said icons from the menus.
varispeed 3mo ago
I am still on Sonoma. Why would I "upgrade" to macOS 27?
1shooner 3mo ago
Having recently switched to Tahoe with a new computer, I honestly wonder what kind of life these people lead that this is where there mental and expressive effort goes. It's just not a big deal.
hbn 3mo ago
This has been my favorite WWDC in years. Everything I've seen from the OS 27 releases has been such a breath of fresh air after years of bizarre design/usability decisions. I hope Apple learned a lesson from what happened with Alan Dye and that Ternus doesn't let something like that happen again under his leadership.
- port11 3mo ago
  It’s easy to make a wow-factor release after years of putting out bad design.
  - hbn 3mo ago
    Well there's very little software being put out these days that's well-designed so Apple is absolutely notable for getting back to its previously held high standards.
    - port11 3mo ago
      Touché. I was about to say that Things looks great, but it’s unchanged since I’ve bought it. I’m very fond of Things, it’s full of clever little things and doesn’t try to get in your way.
wwalexander 3mo ago
Icons in menu bars serve the same purpose as icons elsewhere: quickly identifying buttons. I don't know why this is such a big deal.
- tyre 3mo ago
  Did you read the article? They give great examples.
  - wwalexander 3mo ago
    Yes, I have been listening to Gruber complain about them for a year now. His critique is that "Apple's HIG used to say not to," not anything about what actually makes them bad. Curiously, I haven't heard him talk about Apple Intelligence in Shortcuts, or any of the cool new features in Tahoe. Design is how it looks, I guess.
- akazantsev 3mo ago
  Or when you're asked to perform a task remotely or whatever, with a user who uses a language other than English. You WILL appreciate icons.
- jxdxbx 3mo ago
  It's one for one or two items to have icons. The vegetarian dishes on a restaurant can have the leaf icon for instance. But it would be stupid if every single dish did. The whole point is that icons pop out so putting them on EVERY item is just counterproductive.
  - wwalexander 3mo ago
    What about toolbars? Those almost universally have both text and icons for each item. Why should menus be any different?
    - manwe150 3mo ago
      Toolbars (pre office-ribbon design era) were understood to only have frequently used items which are the ones that also happen to have icons. Then the office-ribbon thing happened, and everyone complained about that because it meant everything had to have an icon and everyone had to memorize what every icon meant (I’m exaggerating slightly)
duxup 3mo ago
I certainly struggle with this myself where I add icons and I think “wow this work great” and then I add a few more and “ omg this is horrible”. It’s a knife’s edge.
cornhole 3mo ago
everything went downhill since 10.6

322 points by epaga 3mo ago

Razengan 3mo ago

I liked those. It should be an option. Stop trying to assume OS UI can ever be one-size-fits-all.

hegelguy 3mo ago

Meh - these icons were bad, but I don't see the disaster

MattDamonSpace 3mo ago
Dead canary
- JumpCrisscross 3mo ago
  Dyed canary.
  - CoastalCoder 3mo ago
    You're just parroting the GP.
    - DonHopkins 3mo ago
      Is that the hill you want to Dye on? https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/bad_dye_job https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/bad_dye_job
torben-friis 3mo ago
It was death by a thousand cuts. I am not a designer and Tahoe bothered me enough that, after trying it at work, I've been actively stopping my personal Mac to update, and it was a factor in moving to android.
- Grombobulous 3mo ago
  Liquid Glass motivated me to sell my Mac. But also, Linux becoming genuinely amazing and being able to play all my PC games played a role there as well. I don’t find Android nearly as compelling, and Liquid Glass seems at least a bit less of a disaster on the iOS platform. My suggestion to you is follow the Panther Lake laptops that are coming out as your potential future Mac off-ramp. I have a Framework 13 Pro on preorder [1] but some other laptops are also showing impressive results on battery life and GPU performance. If I had more money to blow I would totally grab a Zephyrus G14 2026 with the panther lake CPU and RTX 5070Ti. Although as a programmer’s laptop, the Framework is excellent and the 13 Pro looks like it’s shaping up to be a dream system. [1] Unfortunately you can’t get the kind of RAM deal that I got for my 13 Pro anymore. As soon as the 13 Pro was announced I pounced on some new old stock of Crucial LPCAMM2 memory, which isn’t available anymore. I paid about $250 for 32GB, which is a “deal,” apparently. As of now you pretty much have to buy it from Framework as nobody else has it at a more reasonable price.
  - torben-friis 3mo ago
    Thanks for the suggestion! For the moment I'm dual booting, since the m1 MacBook is still a decent piece of hardware for my needs and asahi Linux offers good support. Given the current market I intend to hold on as long as possible, but I'll probably be eyeing the Frameworks when it's time to change. Apple's change of direction makes me hopeful that they'll recover, but the current trends in tech have moved me away from corporate platforms a bit.
    - Grombobulous 3mo ago
      Holding as long as possible is a good play. I like the YouTube channel Just Josh Tech for laptop reviews. They also have a price tracking website. Something that’s perhaps hard to get used to with switching to a non-Apple piece of hardware is that Apple sales are not the same as Windows laptop sales. If you watch retailers like a hawk there are sometimes pretty incredible discounts. In other words, lots of Windows laptop MSRPs are just completely not real prices and it makes them look really bad against MacBook hardware. That said, with Apple’s stable pricing, alternative laptops being the “cheap alternative” to a Mac is pretty much over. Your next upgrade might just be a newer but still used MacBook when the newer hardware gets better Asahi support.
xdennis 3mo ago
You have to make accommodation for designers, that's simply their language. If something is misaligned by 1 pixel, it's not an annoyance, it's a catastrophe. The icons were bad, but the real issue with the new theme is the waste of space and wasting time computing transparencies.

librasteve 3mo ago

good - I have resorted to a config setting to suppress these bad icons on Tahoe

xandrius 3mo ago
Can you share it?
- SoKamil 3mo ago
  In terminal: defaults write -g NSMenuEnableActionImages -bool false

triyambakam 3mo ago

This is also what's annoying with most model generated artifacts. They want every bullet point with an emoji. Even worse is an HTML artifact will be littered with chips/pill style "informative" boxes. So much useless distraction. I need something fine tuned by Tufte

rsynnott 3mo ago

Aw. I may have been the only one, but I kind of liked those.

foobarian 3mo ago
Same, my brain is pretty visually oriented so I kind of like the icons. To be clear I don't really use the icons to pick out a particular item, but they just look nice. It's kind of like pleasant background music in a hotel lobby.
- hbn 3mo ago
  If you're visually oriented it's easier to quickly find what you're looking for when there's only occasional icons as visual anchor points rather than everything being a bunch of tiny icons you have to parse

dlcarrier 3mo ago

You'd think they'd go the other direction and remove the text. I installed VLC on my phone, and I couldn't figure anything out, because it was covered in vague post-skeuomorphic icons without text.

philistine 3mo ago
VLC has atrocious UI, but don't complain, everybody loves the story of the app so it must be perfect in every way!
- bloomca 3mo ago
  VLC does have atrocious UI but it works great, while macOS stuff both looks bad and does not work well, so I would take VLC easily.
- skhr0680 3mo ago
  VLC has the best UX in the world. Yes It Will Play That Video! It has a ton of cryptic options, but at least it lets you mess around with them and maybe get something usable, where other apps would just give up and shake their head.
  - al_borland 3mo ago
    But that’s all I want it to do… play the video. Now it adds those videos to a media library for some reason. I never want this and I never found a way to turn it off. I moved to IINA to finally get back to a video Swiss Army knife that just plays video and doesn’t force me into an experience I don’t want… after tweaking a bunch of settings. A miss Perian, the codec pack for QuickTime, which gave QuickTime and QuickLook that play-anything experience. It played the video and got out of my way.

adriand 3mo ago

I’m still on Sequoia because of all the Tahoe complaints. Not so much the rounded corners, but I heard performance was poor. Have updates to Tahoe improved things?

Shank 3mo ago
I’m on an M1 Max device and the GPU performance drops have not gotten back to Sequoia levels on Tahoe patches. Golden Gate hasn’t changed anything either.
- nottorp 3mo ago
  They toned down the effects in Golden Gate but the backend is doing the same amount of work to blend all that pointless stuff in. You'd get the performance back if they gave up on the translucently to the point of removing the code.
  - LoganDark 3mo ago
    I'm so upset that Liquid Glass is visibly pixelated now. Like, it's barely even blurred at the least transparent setting -- it just looks like a very obviously downsampled background. Like distractingly/annoyingly downsampled. Ugh!! Screenshots: https://logandark.net/files/3SQ5P9OP-PP373NQ7-RS6RP2QR-P772S289/least.png https://logandark.net/files/3SQ5P9OP-PP373NQ7-RS6RP2QR-P772S... https://logandark.net/files/3SQ5P9OP-PP373NQ7-RS6RP2QR-P772S289/middle.png https://logandark.net/files/3SQ5P9OP-PP373NQ7-RS6RP2QR-P772S... https://logandark.net/files/3SQ5P9OP-PP373NQ7-RS6RP2QR-P772S289/most.png https://logandark.net/files/3SQ5P9OP-PP373NQ7-RS6RP2QR-P772S...
    - nottorp 3mo ago
      I'm upset that Apple is wasting my shader transistors on it.
      - LoganDark 3mo ago
        They're trying to waste it less. For example, it's now very common for me to see it simply not update when I move a window that's behind another window. Which kinda ruins part of the magic for me.

nsbk 3mo ago

"But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough can you see the stars"

mieses 3mo ago

[flagged]

dwb 3mo ago
What? Almost everyone who has a Mac uses macOS.

quartzink 3mo ago

[dead]

michelb 3mo ago

A good correction. But think about the months of work that has been wasted on creating those icon iterations. What a waste!

antran22 3mo ago
that's just sunk cost fallacy. The icons are also publicly available and can be used on projects conforming to the Apple branding, so it's not truly a waste. https://developer.apple.com/sf-symbols/ https://developer.apple.com/sf-symbols/
- saghm 3mo ago
  If anything, the waste would have arguably been putting people to work on a feature that needed to get removed in the first place. If there's any post-mortem to be done, it's "why did this get released in the first place, and how do we make sure we don't spent time on something like it again?"
- michelb 3mo ago
  That is true. I thought this was funny to see as well, although these icons redesigns happen with every MacOS release I think: https://basicappleguy.com/basicappleblog/macos-golden-gate-icon-comparison https://basicappleguy.com/basicappleblog/macos-golden-gate-i...

eviks 3mo ago

No good reason to be excited about the old garbage UI returning after the new garbage had been trashed. > This updated advice in the HIG is perfect. > Use an icon to highlight the most common actions and key features of your app Saving a document is the one of the most common actions in your average app, but I * never* need an icon there in the menu, there is no benefit in focusing my attention on an action I always do with a shortcut! The perfect advice would be easy and powerful user customization, so that, for example, I could right click on the app's File>Save menu and select an option to hide the icon, reformat the rich text field and have this change propagate in all the other apps. Or click on a web link from someone who has already done it better and add the theme. Then I wouldn't even care about the back and forth design changes between major OS releases. And that could also fix another sin in the screenshot - the text is not vertically aligned! "visual consistency" misunderstood

DonHopkins 3mo ago
The garbage that threw itself out was "the untalented magazine-designer hacks with clout and influence [who] all left with Alan Dye" and that's worth celebrating. Especially because Meta collected the trash. https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/bad_dye_job https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/bad_dye_job >My favorite reaction to today’s news is this one-liner from a guy on Twitter/X: “The average IQ of both companies has increased.” https://x.com/shipulin/status/1996318006335401997 https://x.com/shipulin/status/1996318006335401997

talkingtab 3mo ago

"it’s proof that the rot has been rooted out of Apple’s software design team" I know little about Apple, but have quite a bit of experience with how software products get "designed". Goofy and offensive things happen when corporations decide not to pay attention to customers. The decision to ignore customer and focus on market wow is not the software design team. It is a systemic and structural thing.

michelb 3mo ago
"it’s proof that the rot has been rooted out of Apple’s software design team" Weird sentence given that three staunch supporters of liquid glass are still in that team, including Lemay. I highly doubt it's going anywhere, hopefully it gets a few more improvements before it will be replaced for The New Thing in MacOS 29.
- hbn 3mo ago
  Liquid glass isn't inherently bad, it just needed someone to dial it back when the prettiness is hurting legibility/usability. There are lots of things (well, in iOS) that I think are a big improvement, like menus spawning from the button you tapped instead of a bottom sheet popping up from the bottom of the screen. And the nested list menus are very nice. But completely eradicating toolbars and replacing them with a fade that still doesn't allow buttons legible in all cases was clearly a mistake. And it's something they're backtracking on!

garyrob 3mo ago

The icons in menu items is one of the reasons I'm still on Sequoia. This settles it; I'll just stay on Sequoia until Golden Gate is released. I can't say the following for sure, but there's evidence of it: One of Apple's real strengths and differentiators is that it listens to customer feedback to the point that it will say: "Hey, this was dumb. Customer feedback proves it. Let's just get rid of it like it never happened." Other examples include getting rid of the earlier getting rid of Magsafe. I don't know whether it's something taught in Apple School, but in the absence of not doing dumb things in the first place, which seems to be unavoidable in the real world with real people, it's probably the next best thing. And it may be enough better than the norm from tech companies that it's a real cultural differentiator.

philistine 3mo ago
People tend to ascribe to Apple only the Jobs years. That Apple might have reset after he came back. The truth is far from that. The people in the company were great, they just needed a massive amount of refocus. Apple has people who have been there decades and have had to reverse incredibly stupid decisions.
ChoGGi 3mo ago
The butterfly keys were around five years before they changed them. Which may have been related to the lawsuit about them? I also vaguely recall issues with their magsafe connectors and lawyers.
- joeblubaugh 3mo ago
  Hardware timelines are long. I doubt they could have switched in less than three years regardless.

randallsquared 3mo ago

TIL about the proliferation of menu item icons in Tahoe. Perhaps I missed the outcry when Tahoe came out, but I got around to upgrading to it only a couple months ago, and this was not a change that stood out.

foo12bar 3mo ago

Sometimes who can't be bothered to make the text on their website not extremely tiny when viewing on mobile shouldn't be writing multi-page rants on the other people's UI.

mkl 3mo ago
Just double tap the text you want to zoom to, as has been the way for nearly 20 years.
- NetMageSCW 3mo ago
  Though it’s been broken for ten.
baggachipz 3mo ago
Thank god for Reader Mode.
- port11 3mo ago
  I remember Instapaper, that made text look good. Apple’s Read Mode settings are a bit lacking.
al_borland 3mo ago
Isn’t he just serving up the desktop website? This goes along with the original intent of the benefits of the browser on the iPhone. It was able to run the normal Internet, not a separate “mobile” version of it. I found a simple double tap on the text sized it perfectly fine to read the text. What I find to be a UI problem are sites that force me into a mobile view, which often loses features, and which removes my ability to zoom and pan as I wish. Apple had to add an option to “Request Desktop Website”, which I assume spoofs the user agent, to try and get around this issue. But for site that use other means, this still doesn’t work and the user is locked into a crippled mobile page… the exact problem modern smartphones were supposed to solve. I’ll take Gruber’s model every time over the crippled mobile sandbox with no way out.
- 3mo ago

JSR_FDED 3mo ago

This is great news. Apple never reverses course this quickly, so this is a clear signal that Stephen Lemay is making his presence felt.

randusername 3mo ago

Glad for the change, but a lot of the criticism overlooks that at some point we won't be the target audience of UI/UX anymore. Flyouts, dropdowns, and other text menus make sense to me, but I could see how they might be alien and uncomfortable to someone that has only ever experienced mobile interfaces. The reverse is true for sure, nowhere do I feel more frustrated and old-brained then trying to make sense of a new mobile app that everyone else seems to think is great.

skydhash 3mo ago
> but I could see how they might be alien and uncomfortable to someone that has only ever experienced mobile interfaces They are different devices. Just because you can drive a sedan does not means you can drive a bulldozer. Or playing piano qualifies you to play the organ. So going from touch and a small screen to keyboard/mouse and a bigger screen, you should expect that the interactions will change.
- spinningslate 3mo ago
  Exactly this. The “one UI to rule them all” paradigm has been a persistent, recurring flaw for decades. It probably hit its lowest (to date) with the exhortations to “mobile first design”. The motivation for that was reasonable: conventional desktop UIs of the time didn’t render on mobile. However the ensuing “mobile first” instead became “mobile only” - and consequently wide screen displays with buttons the size of elephants. Phones and desktops are so radically different that your sedan/bulldozer analogy seems like shades of grey. It’s more like taking a Saturn V rocket to the local shop for a pint of milk.
- _diyar 3mo ago
  true, but ~all new users have a stronger mental model of how their phone works vs. big-screen devices.
  - preg_match 3mo ago
    The solutions is then them building a mental model for the desktop. Using phone strategy on larger screens is a usability issue, because it doesn’t translate well or take advantage of a mouse and keyboard. We went through this with windows 8. It’s a nice idea, but in practice it makes the desktop much more cumbersome to use. It might have a benefit for very new users, but it’s temporary in nature.

projektfu 3mo ago

Is this a case of "removing the duck"? https://bwiggs.com/notebook/queens-duck/ https://bwiggs.com/notebook/queens-duck/

dormento 3mo ago
I'd guess no because in this case the whole system is the duck.
- projektfu 3mo ago
  I'd think it's like, the whole Tahoe version had a lot to complain about, but enough people focused on the menu icons that they didn't focus on other things. Look how relieved they are the icons are gone!
  - saghm 3mo ago
    There's a whole flock of aquatic poultry flapping about, but at least now it's duck-free! Too bad about the swan, goose, loon, egret, and heron though
  - pseudalopex 3mo ago
    More people complained of Liquid Glass than menu icons. And many of these comments continued to complain of Liquid Glass.

reddalo 3mo ago

I'm just sad that Intel MacBooks will be stuck with Tahoe, which is essentialy a botched beta for Golden Gate. Bad customer experience for a company like Apple.

roysting 3mo ago
Considering that Intel Macs will still be more than functional and provide a great user experience for many years afterwards even with Tahoe, not something that can be said for Win/PC machines, strikes me as being rather good customer support even if the breakpoint does seem like a bit of a short EOL. But I now plenty of people who bought Win machines and with the next update they basically turned into molasses, all while dealing with horrible trackpads and bad performance. Just get a new Mac Neo for ~$500
- SwellJoe 3mo ago
  Or install Linux for free and have a better OS than either.
  - roysting 3mo ago
    Your tone deaf suggestion precisely underlies why Linux is not dominant. Obviously the question is about the MacOS environment, whether good or bad. No amount of installing any of the tens of thousands of quirky Linux distros will e.g., give you Continuity, cross-device calling, let alone the simplicity of setup. You try simply opening the case of some headsets that immediately connect using Linux. It’s like suggesting a Cummings tractor will pull a load all day long, but the majority of people are looking for comfort and being able to navigate city streets and the school pickup line. Is tone deaf. Yes, but I don’t think anyone here is in need of being told about Linux. “Do you have a minute to talk about your lord and savior, Linux?”
    - SwellJoe 3mo ago
      Sorry, it's just on my mind, as I bought a Mac recently because it's the best hardware, but boy does the software suck.

whicks 3mo ago

For those that haven’t seen this very well done write up about Tahoe’s use of icons, I would definitely recommend it: https://tonsky.me/blog/tahoe-icons/ https://tonsky.me/blog/tahoe-icons/

ninju 3mo ago
or this one https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2025/icons-in-menus/ https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2025/icons-in-menus/
dewey 3mo ago
Also linked in the second sentence of the blog post.
pseidemann 3mo ago
Is pixel golf a thing? Apple definitely did it.
andai 3mo ago
Great article. Main lesson seems to be, it's good to put icons on the standard, most frequently used actions. And make them colorful. That helps the eye find them. Edit: also consistency and legibility. So basically "don't design it so it's bad!"
RetroTechie 3mo ago
Holy sh... That's ehm, 'impressive'! "On the upside: it’s not that hard anymore to design better than Apple!" Good one to keep in mind.

nalekberov 3mo ago

Probably no one caused more damage than John Ive to Apple (post-Jobs period). Removal of skeuomorphism, removal of essential ports, making MacBooks so thin that they wouldn’t work without overheating to name a few. I am so glad he is gone now, it’s not all bells and whistles for Apple now, but at least it’s way more pleasing to own Apple devices any more.

hilariously 3mo ago
I agree with you on everything but Skeuomorphism - seeing that leather address book made me genuinely repulsed every time, it felt like I was using a child's computer.
- nalekberov 3mo ago
  Taste is subjective indeed, but for me they were more expressive and visually appealing than ironed out icons.
  - hilariously 3mo ago
    Genuinely glad someone liked them!
kstrauser 3mo ago
I hated - hated - skeuomorphism. It’s not just the appearance, which I can take or leave, but also the idea of making software model the behavior of physical items. Frankly, the old Mac first party apps sucked for it. For example, for the longest time Calendar didn’t have an event list view, only a day or week or month view (IIRC; it’s been a while). Why? Because desk calendars don’t have an event list view, so neither should this. Or remember the old QuickTime Player where you had to adjust the volume by clicking the edge of a volume wheel and dragging it because that’s how an old portable TV worked. Skeuomorphic icons can be pretty. Skeuomorphic UX sucks because it inherently brings physical world limitations to software where it’s unnecessary.
wwalexander 3mo ago
I strongly dislike Ive's influence overall, but skeuomorphism made it incredibly difficult and cost-prohibitive for a single indie developer to make an app that felt like a polished first-party experience for iOS. I'm glad it's gone. You're still welcome to do it if you want and you have the whimsy and artistic talent (or design team) for it.

JKCalhoun 3mo ago

I'm happy to see the HIG (Human Interface Guidelines) referenced in the post. I was unaware Apple still maintained such a document? There was a time when TOG's HIG [1] was the Bible for the Mac interface. UI nerds at Apple (and likely elsewhere) would enjoy debating/interpreting them for some project or another. (I don't recall anyone being burned at the stake but there were definitely discussions that could reach a heretical pitch.) The HIG preached a kind of nuance and balance—when it allowed for somewhat less "staid" UI elements it would advise moderation. This came about in an era when the graphical user interface was a fairly new thing to the public and inconsistency (Do What Thou Wilt) would only have destabilized the gentle adoption Apple was treading. It was a marketable advantage for Apple as well. Consistency on the DOS side, as far as I know, came about only as companies tried to adopt familiar patterns from popular apps of the day. (Related: I talked to an engineer at Adobe about the hideous UI (my opinion) of Adobe Acrobat on the Mac and was told they wanted it to look like it belonged alongside the suite of Microsoft Office apps. le sigh.) From 1992, see Page 72 for menu widgets: [1] https://vintageapple.org/inside_r/pdf/Human_Interface_Guidelines_1992.pdf https://vintageapple.org/inside_r/pdf/Human_Interface_Guidel...

troupo 3mo ago
> I was unaware Apple still maintained such a document? They kinda do. For a long time HIGs were well researched documents with great examples and explanations. For the past few years they've been used as post-hoc justifications (or just examples with no justifications) for whatever designs vomits out.
brontitall 3mo ago
Page 12 (PDF p36) seems almost written for the people who did the Tahoe menus
- dewey 3mo ago
  It would've been very funny if the left side is an actual screenshot of a system app from Tahoe.

mc32 3mo ago

Random icons for the days of the week don’t even make much sense. If they at least iconified the moon, Tyr, Woden, etc., it would at least have a leg to stand on, but here it’s like the randomized avatars so many services assign user accounts.

mwexler 3mo ago

Got a vote just for the wonderful title, which captured my feelings exactly and was SFW.

trollbridge 3mo ago

MacOS 27 Beta seems to actually fix a lot of my complaints with Tahoe. I had cynically been believing Apple was simply going to let macOS rot and not fix these major annoyances. (Rather interestingly, menus still have icons if a menu option will simply launch another app, a specific folder that has an icon, or will perform a specific action like a window resize or category sort change that already has an icon you could click elsewhere.) They also have cleaned up the mess of differently rounded borders (not complete yet but progress is being made). The OS also feels a lot less sluggish. I had gone back to Sequoia simply because performance was so bad.

thisislife2 3mo ago
The poor quality of macOS Tahoe is by design as it is a "transition" release - a transition OS release is often like a beta quality release (of some feature) and often features a "break" (like loss of hardware support or EOL etc.). It is meant to frustrate the user, so that the "next" OS release (which fixes all the bugs of the "beta" features is more "appealing" and hyped (just read all the comments praising the new release here and elsewhere :). Apparently Tahoe is going to be the last macOS that supports Intel macs - that means it will continue to frustrate Intel Mac users and force them to consider buying the Apple ARM models if they want to use the newer macOS. A similar thing happened with Catalina too after it dropped support for 32-bit apps - many people chose to remain in the previous version (Mojave) because it was less "buggy" / appealing than Catalina. Followed by the "hype" of how the next version (Big Sur) was "so much better". Microsoft also does this with Windows OS - e.g. Windows Vista and Windows 8 both can be considered "transition" releases that are infamous due to their "beta" quality features and / or frustrating UI features. (This tactic of boring and / or frustrating the viewers is more common in many popular TV series, where one or more episodes is often deliberately made that way - by focusing on something mundane and meaningless that doesn't really move the story forward, so that it makes the following and often climax episodes more exciting, fulfilling and enjoyable. E.g. Breaking Bad s03e10 - The Fly - the most boring episode of season 3).
- 9dev 3mo ago
  That seems to be more of an emergent phenomenon than conscious design decision to me to be honest - never assume malice when stupidity will suffice and all that.

antran22 3mo ago

Good grief, hopefully in v28 Lemay will also throw away the absolute crap that is Liquid glass. Aesthetically it looks horrible, it slows my iPhone 13 — which never before lagged in all its life since iOS 15 – to a maddening crawl. Liquid glass should be taught in design school as an example of what not to do when you design UX. And also in business school as a case of how middle management can fudge up something that is working normally in the illusion of progress.

knollimar 3mo ago
Did they not learn from windows aero? Or are they comprised of pure hubris that they thought they could make it work
- duskdozer 3mo ago
  There's a constant "need" to churn UI revamps, so I guess eventually you run out of ideas before cycling around.
- GaryBluto 3mo ago
  Windows Aero did work, or at least the Windows 7 incarnation of it.
  - knollimar 3mo ago
    Wasn't it a bastardized watered down version that cached the elements behind it and still gave a performance hit? They seem to be running into the same issues and didn't take the learned lessons with them
  - flohofwoe 3mo ago
    It was still ugly, but it did kinda work because it only affected the window chrome, and it could be set to opaque with an easy-to-find setting. On macOS the checkbox for "Reduce transparency" is hidden away in the Accessibility settings panel which is the last place I'd look for configuring the desktop theme.

iandanforth 3mo ago

Brutal. I love it.

phkahler 3mo ago

For the HIG: Use menu item icons sparingly and with purpose. Icons allow people to find menu items more quickly, and help clarify what selecting an item does. I'm not sure that's even OK. I find icons disruptive to reading the menu, but at least Apple still has text to read. Microsoft Word doesn't even have "Save" as text for saving your file, never mind that the icon isn't even in the file menu these days.

kibwen 3mo ago

> I don’t know if all the untalented hacks are gone, but the untalented magazine-designer hacks with clout and influence all left with Alan Dye. As usual for Gruber, this is fanboy cope. Dye may be a convenient scapegoat, but he was not a lone wolf, he was operating with the full assent of executive leadership, which is to say, the same leadership that appointed his successor.

ckcheng 3mo ago
It’s important not to forget the (work) politics while looking at the work produced. Unfortunately when you get a politically astute Mad Men (for real, from Ogilvy) in the organization, great damage can be done for a very long time without much recourse. You’ll note Dye was an Ive decision. And you’ll see the successor was not in Dye’s camp. Because (work) politics. From https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/bad_dye_job https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/bad_dye_job > Gurman reported that Billy Sorrentino, a Dye deputy who has served as a senior director of design at Apple since 2016, is leaving for Meta with Dye.3 I don’t have any other names, but word on the street is that other members of Dye’s inner circle are leaving Apple for Meta with him. But those who remain — or who might remain, if they’d have been offered the promotion to replace Dye — simply can’t be trusted from the perspective of senior leadership, who were apparently blindsided by Dye’s departure for Meta. > Putting Alan Dye in charge of user interface design was the one big mistake Jony Ive made as Apple’s Chief Design Officer. > Dye had no background in user interface design... Before joining Apple, he was design director for the fashion brand Kate Spade, and before that worked on branding for the ad agency Ogilvy. > Alan Dye is not untalented. But his talents at Apple were in politics. His political skill was so profound that it was his decision to leave, despite the fact that his tenure is considered a disaster by actual designers inside and outside the company. He obviously figured out how to please Apple’s senior leadership. His departure today landed as a total surprise because his stature within the company seemed so secure.
- kibwen 3mo ago
  Whether or not the successor was a friend of Dye isn't relevant here. Let's say for a moment that Apple's design woes were a result of Dye. Dye was appointed by Apple's leadership. The conclusion would that Apple's leadership isn't capable of evaluating whether or not someone is fit for the job. And even if the guy who appointed Dye isn't around any more, the guy who appointed Dye was also appointed by Apple's leadership; despite whatever turnover there may be, there is an entire web of leadership continuity that resulted in Apple not being capable of selecting proper leaders, which means there is no reason to suspect that the current guy will fare any better. Politics is politics; the idea that the last guy was appointed because he was good at politics only goes to show that Apple fundamentally rewards politicking, not ability, so the assumption must be that the new guy is also a politicker first and foremost. Gruber is hoping that the new guy, in addition to politicking, is also good at design, but that's all it is: hope, and hope as a front for refusing to face harsh truths (to wit: the harsh truth that Apple has no magic touch left, especially difficult for a lifelong super-fanboy like Gruber to understand) is called cope.

sbinnee 3mo ago

I didn’t upgrade to Tahoe after reading a couple of bad reviews. This time around though I may just do the upgrade. Nagging for system upgrade every time I plug my iphone is getting my nerves.

IshKebab 3mo ago

The second piece of advice there is still wrong though. They still want all icons or no icons for visual consistency, just on a smaller scale. Visual consistency like this is bad because it removes distinct features (like the presence or lack of an icon) that make it easier to find things. Google's icons are visually consistent: https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/jie6b7/for_opening_home_instead_of_drive_gang/ https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/jie6b7/for_opening_... Outsourcing their UX design to the internet badly...

mring33621 3mo ago

No doubt will be a 7.49 GB download to remove said icons from the menus.

varispeed 3mo ago

I am still on Sonoma. Why would I "upgrade" to macOS 27?

1shooner 3mo ago

Having recently switched to Tahoe with a new computer, I honestly wonder what kind of life these people lead that this is where there mental and expressive effort goes. It's just not a big deal.

hbn 3mo ago

This has been my favorite WWDC in years. Everything I've seen from the OS 27 releases has been such a breath of fresh air after years of bizarre design/usability decisions. I hope Apple learned a lesson from what happened with Alan Dye and that Ternus doesn't let something like that happen again under his leadership.

port11 3mo ago
It’s easy to make a wow-factor release after years of putting out bad design.
- hbn 3mo ago
  Well there's very little software being put out these days that's well-designed so Apple is absolutely notable for getting back to its previously held high standards.
  - port11 3mo ago
    Touché. I was about to say that Things looks great, but it’s unchanged since I’ve bought it. I’m very fond of Things, it’s full of clever little things and doesn’t try to get in your way.

wwalexander 3mo ago

Icons in menu bars serve the same purpose as icons elsewhere: quickly identifying buttons. I don't know why this is such a big deal.

tyre 3mo ago
Did you read the article? They give great examples.
- wwalexander 3mo ago
  Yes, I have been listening to Gruber complain about them for a year now. His critique is that "Apple's HIG used to say not to," not anything about what actually makes them bad. Curiously, I haven't heard him talk about Apple Intelligence in Shortcuts, or any of the cool new features in Tahoe. Design is how it looks, I guess.
akazantsev 3mo ago
Or when you're asked to perform a task remotely or whatever, with a user who uses a language other than English. You WILL appreciate icons.
jxdxbx 3mo ago
It's one for one or two items to have icons. The vegetarian dishes on a restaurant can have the leaf icon for instance. But it would be stupid if every single dish did. The whole point is that icons pop out so putting them on EVERY item is just counterproductive.
- wwalexander 3mo ago
  What about toolbars? Those almost universally have both text and icons for each item. Why should menus be any different?
  - manwe150 3mo ago
    Toolbars (pre office-ribbon design era) were understood to only have frequently used items which are the ones that also happen to have icons. Then the office-ribbon thing happened, and everyone complained about that because it meant everything had to have an icon and everyone had to memorize what every icon meant (I’m exaggerating slightly)

duxup 3mo ago

I certainly struggle with this myself where I add icons and I think “wow this work great” and then I add a few more and “ omg this is horrible”. It’s a knife’s edge.

cornhole 3mo ago

everything went downhill since 10.6