alt Hacker NewsFree the Icons
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While I wholeheartedly agree, I suspect the required backgrounds are to create a uniform format between system, where VisionOS requires round icons for more reliable eye tracking.
It seems like every OS got a little harder to use in order to better vibe with VisionOS, the least popular platform they have.
While I applaud the commitment to building a new platform, I don’t like that’s is coming at the expense of the others.
Seeing all those old icons makes me realize how much I miss them.
Superficial, perhaps, but they were one of the things I loved about OS X when I made the switch back in 2005 or 2006.
> the much-celebrated Liquid Glass opacity slider
The Liquid Glass slider is an embarrassing outright admission of failure. Apple built its brand as a tastemaker, so to put out this new, controversial design language, and after a year of tweaking, finally throw their hands up and say "we don't know what looks good, you decide" is so disappointing.
That said, all the changes in iOS 27 are such a massive improvement from 26. The first design turnout with Alan Dye gone is making me feel very optimistic of their direction.
The only reason to run MacOS over Linux is the hardware. Arm MacBooks are unreasonably good but don’t support Linux (Asahi is still a bit WIP).
They sell hardware, not software, so the state of things makes sense. It is so disappointing though.
Someone posted an old MacOS screenshot on Reddit and it was immediately obvious that the icons without a silhouette were the worst out of all of them.
Like iTunes / Books / App Store. And that's basically what they went with eventually...
Dashboard and Launcher are fine, but they have a reason to be a circle. (Well Launcher less so maybe)
Chrome is terrible, it represents nothing. But I guess it's just a brand.
I wish we could go back to this instead of squircles...
I've got to disagree.
I really disliked previously, when icon prominence could be wildly different because one icon takes up the full area with a big square, while another is a circle that necessarily has a significantly smaller area within the same extent. Icons from Apple were all nicely balanced in size, but third-party apps could be anything.
Giving equal visual weight to each icon is an improvement. iOS was a step forward in this direction, and now they finally brought the same standard to Mac.
Squircles aren't ugly, they're functional. "Shape" hasn't disappeared as a distinct visual cue, as the area within the squircle is made of, well... different shapes.
And let's not forget the fact that Macs still effectively use icon masks. A smaller icon is harder to click, because clicking on a transparent area... doesn't click at all. I remember icons like a skinny letter "S" that you had to click just right or you couldn't at all.
Hard agree! Not only is it less fun and less visually appealing to me, I think forcing the uniform squircle everywhere makes it harder (than it used to be) to distinguish one app from another by icon alone.
They've gone too far on enforcing uniformity of icons and abusing liquid glass, but I disagree that arbitrary shapes were better. All the random icon shapes looked cool in isolation, but were harder to scan at a glance. The uniform squircle is a useful constraint.
I wouldn't mind if they allowed something similar to that audio hijack icon, where you require the rounded rect as the guiding frame but are allowed to have some elements protruding out of it. But completely arbitrary shapes are too jarring imo.
Android started mandating all icons to have the same shape like 9 years ago. In 2026 there are still some apps on my phone that haven't updated their icons yet.
My personal take is that icons should conform to the squircle, but have a permitted amount of break out from the core shape. For example, Audio Hijack’s icon as presented in the article should be allowed to have the microphone extend past the border slightly. The squircle should be mandated as the core shape, but with just tad bit of flexibility and shape definition.
This keeps grids feeling proper, organised, and aligned, without feeling like the icons of Android Honeycomb.
Tahoe was such a huge mess, but I'm hopeful that the new CEO will turn things around and bring things back to normal.
If they do, I'll consider upgrading both OS and laptop, but right now I'm holding on to Sequoia
> This time, however, the changes are genuine improvements. Here’s the refined Automator icon, for example
Uh, maybe. Parts of it are certainly slightly sharper in an unimportant way when viewed at normal icon size and not zoomed way in. I'm not sure that it's any better. And if that Automator icon is the exemplar, then any improvement is extremely marginal. My god it's just such a bad icon. Whoever is managing icon design should be extremely ashamed of themselves.
Show anyone the pre-Tahoe Automator icon and ask them what it depicts and why that fits and they'll be able to tell you that it looks like a robot and robots are used in automation and therefore every time they see the little robot they'll think Automator. Ask them what the post-Tahoe icon depicts and why that fits and they'll be able to tell you fuck all because what the fuck even is that supposed to be if you don't already know.
The great thing about the new multi-layer icon format in Golden Gate is that it finally separates an icon's foreground from the background.
So in theory, it opens the door to returning shape-differentiated icons to MacOS if a future display theme (a successor to the poorly-conceived Clear and Tinted themes) allows the background to be minimized while the foreground is emphasized.
What I would love to see, and should now be possible, is a revision of the Clear theme where the squircle is transparent/refractive and the foreground retains its native color.
I find the squircle jail just creates a lot of confusion for me, having distinct shapes helps a lot at a glance.
I was originally excited by the flat design revolution because it appealed to my affinity with uniformity and consistency. But I believe now that I was ignorant and lazy. Bad design still exists within flat style rules, and it has an even worse and cheap feel to it. Meanwhile we've lost whole dimensions of expression.
Ever since the android debacle with icons having shadows going in different directions or length I've been thinking that icons should be 3D models (with restrictions to make them fast to render and/or fast to bake into flat images).
That would be a marvelous way to make icons unified and a differentiating move for Apple.
Apple will never care about what users want, they only do what Apple want. If you want to free anything, don't use Apple. It's an obvious lesson that should have been learned a long time ago.
It is always great to see more people be vocal about the poison of flat design
Oh yes, I hate this. OneUI has that as well. It makes searching for an app so much more conscious and bothersome. I don't want my app drawer to look as neat as possible, I want it to work with the least amount of attention that I can possibly get away with.
I honestly forgot icons used to be a lot of different shapes. Used Panic Coda way back in the day and that leaf icon from this post is unmistakable.
It might be better to make Linux have these gorgeous icons now that Apple locked them up.
Make the icons be Free on Free OSes like Linux.
I think this is a battle they won't win, though I applaud the effort.
I agree, but I'm surprised there was no mention of contrast or proposal to restrict colors.
Their first good example bumped up the color contrast. The orange examples in their set of "gorgeous app icons" are just as bad as the slack vs photos example.
I would love if the OS had an option to automatically convert every app icon to greyscale and required a minimum color contrast ratio for the original. Then, the user can pick their own overlay colors (similar to the color tags in finder).
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I honestly disagree with the author when they say that the Golden Gate icons are better than Tahoes. There are more lines, which is literally removing the point of LIQUID glass. It is supposed to be BLURRY, like LIQUID. I get that it is more readable, but are icons meant to be read? There is no text in them, other than Apple TV which is very distinctive. It seems like they just boosted the sharpness of the icons and pushed to production (or I guess it is technically production-beta?) However I do agree with the point of the article. Icons having things outside of the squircle were unique, fun, and interesting.
>Apple didn’t just mess with their own icons. They also dictated the shape of every third-party app icon
We will never know if this was AI generated or not, but I have started to flinch at this sentence structure.
If one is this passionate about icons, why not just install (or even make) a custom icon pack? The default icons for Google Apps on Android are awful, but I haven't seen them in years aside from setting up a new device.
It's still a bit jarring to me to see how far Apple embraced form over function with iOS and subsequently macOS. I remember reading the Human Interface Guidelines from the late Mac OS 9/early Mac OS X days and being taken aback by the level of detail and thought that went into those interfaces. Don't get me wrong, some things made no sense (brushed metal was... a choice) but there was a certain level of polish that I don't think exists anymore.