By John Gruber
Mux — Video API for developers. Build in one sprint or less.
- Tahoe’s Terrible Icons
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Paul Kafasis, writing at One Foot Tsunami:
While Apple had previously urged developers to use squircle icons on our apps, they’ve now taken things much further to ensure compliance. It’s a shame.
Apple updated their own app icons on Tahoe, for both the squircle shape as well as the new “Liquid Glass” interface. Mostly, these icons seem dumbed-down, with a loss of detail. For example, here’s Safari’s old icon from MacOS 15 (Sequoia) on the left, and the new Tahoe icon on the right:
To me, the new icon just feels blander, and that’s widely true for all of the updated icons. A small number, such as Screen Sharing and Audio MIDI Setup, may be improvements. Most, however, are not. Let’s review with direct comparisons, all of which again feature the older Sequoia icon on the left and the new Tahoe icon on the right.
Trends come and go. Some are to one’s liking, and some are not. But this year’s app icons from Apple are just plain objectively bad. They’re ugly, they’re dumb (like the new Apple Calendar icon, showing a month that somehow has only 24 days), and many of them — regardless of whether they’re aesthetically pleasing or not — are inscrutable. The fundamental purpose of an icon is to have meaning. And some of these are meaningless.
Even good styles fall out of fashion as trends change. But good styles come back into style eventually. A few decades from now, no one is going to say “Hey, let’s bring back 2020s-style icons.” They’re like 1970s leisure suits.
For a remarkably long stretch, Apple’s in-house icons represented the pinnacle of an art form worth celebrating. They were exquisitely crafted, and quite obviously the work of the most talented artists in the field. Apple’s application icons in the OS 26 releases — MacOS Tahoe especially, because MacOS has the most first-party apps — look like they’re the work of people who have zero artistic ability whatsoever. They probably are the work of people with no artistic ability whatsoever, because I can’t imagine how a talented artist could bring themselves to create such things. And whoever at Apple approved them obviously has no taste. “Fuck it, who cares” is replacing “Insanely great” as the company’s design mantra for software.
Show me the person who thinks the new MacOS 26 Tahoe Automator icon is better than the MacOS 15 Sequoia one — or even just believes that the Tahoe icon is acceptable — and I’ll show you a hack who never should have even gotten a job working at Apple. This regression is nothing short of criminal.
★ Friday, 7 November 2025
