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.
Yeah, for a decade now it's been a UX disaster. It "works", because so many people are used to it, but look at a new user trying to navigate iOS, it's bonkers. Swiping from random directions achieves different things (and how would you even know you can?). The home button has like 11 different functions depending on how you press it and when.
Im an iPhone user. I want it to take as little space as possible physically and mentally, and try to use it as little as possible. My experience has been that it was easy learning to use it by just bumbling around.
That is, until two weeks ago when I got my new iPhone. I had to, the old one couldnt upgrade to the newest iOS.
I feel ashamed to admit, that I had one or two days of extreme frustration just learning to do basic stuff. It was not about the shape of icons, but more along the lines of what you write. Swiping patterns, button press sequences, and the time you should hold down a button. It is ridiculous.
Some of the blame is on me for not being mobile phone savvy, but it is indisputable that the UX has deterioted significantly. I suspect it will just get worse going forward.
Something that I ended up loving about iOS was the relative simplicity it had compared to Android at the time I started using the iPhone in 2017. iOS 10 and 11 were great. People complained about things like all apps needing to be on the homescreen or not being able to place apps arbitrarily, but at the same time that "lack" of function is part of what made iOS easy to use and understand.
I find nowadays iOS is as complex as the Android I remember. I can navigate it just fine because I'm used to it but even my parents who've been using iPhones longer than me have found themselves getting lost in the OS with iOS 26 in particular.
I used to describe iPhone being an Appliance, with some smart function added to it. Android was a PC trying to made into a Phone form factor and act like an appliance.
It was that simplicity of iPhone that was great.
And you are right now iPhone and Android have converge in many ways it has added complexity. And no one seems to be doing anything about it. And somehow after 15 years of UX Craig Federighi is still popular and gets no blame for it.
It was a weal-and-woe situation. The lockdown was tolerable with such a weak device, but portended a lot of the App Store issues that Apple grapples with today.
Back then, the coolest way to use an iPhone or iPod was to put Cydia on it. You could run emulators, live wallpapers, sideloaded apps, pretty much anything that Android had was at the tip of your fingers. Once Apple pushed for a return to the locked-down software distribution philosophy, I gave up on iOS and started dailying Android instead.
> Swiping from random directions achieves different things
I haven't used iOS 27 yet, but from what I've seen it's going to get worse. We already have swiping down from the top left or top right bringing up different things, while swiping down anywhere else in the middle of the screen brings up search... unless you're swiping down at the bottom of the screen, then it's Reachability. From what I understand, iOS 27 will also bring swiping down from the Dynamic Island to trigger Siri. So that's 3 different behaviors from a swipe down from somewhere on the top of a <3" wide screen, with no real way to know what's going on intuitively.
1. Ive been using apple iphone since 2010 and i jave an iphone air right now. I still dont know how/why/when i seem to accidentally call the AI thing where the side of my acreen go all all funny. Ive never done it intentionally and i dont know how but every so often i trigger it.
2. Can apple ‘regress’ the camera app so the it is easy to use. The interface is a disaster of mixed inputs and over loaded widgets. Theres so many modes and sub modes. Swipe to zoom works mostly except when it changes modes. I spend about 10 seconds every tone inise the camera app just making it take a picture because accidentally touching it in the wrong place switches to some other mode.
3. The genrel consistency has went downhill. Its difficult sometimes now to know just how to interact with an app.
4. Search box. If i do another attempt at a web search when i am in mail search box i dunno. Either unify it or make it distinct. Also sometime its at the top sometimes the bottom
About (2), it reminds me of a video I saw once of someone trying to take a picture at a sport event, or how my parents try to do it. Hold the phone with an awkward grip to point it towards what you want, with one hand free. Accidentally touch the edge of the screen and click something with the gripping hand. Then try to zoom in with your free hand, but one finger hits the screen first due to the angle of the phone so you do a swipe instead and go to selfie mode. Swipe fervently to get back. Try again, click screen to focus. But just as you click a notification pops up and you press it.
EXACTLY. I'm a tech savvy user and know about all these things. But it's still too damn difficult to use without all that jeopardy. It didn't used to be like this.
1. This is generally from holding in the lock button (the upper button on the right side). Maybe you're accidentally holding it in while gripping the phone. Some people tend to rest their thumb there and might start holding it on accident.
4. The top vs bottom search boxes drive me nuts. I still instinctively reach for the top of the screen for search, so going to the bottom is weird. The move to the bottom is also a symptom of the phones being too large, so they have to move all the UI users interact with down to the bottom. Not being 100% consistent with it makes it hard to retrain my habits around it.
I have an ipad that I mainly use to open YouTube... If I had q nickel for every time some random gesture accidentally triggered some weird feature, I'd certainly have a few nickels.
I moved over from my old Android to an iPhone (needed to develop an iOS app for a freelance thing too) and that was the first thing that cause me off guard - it’s like controls that should be buttons of some kind were just omitted.
2. Go to previous app view. This is app-dependent though it will probably, successively with each press:
a. Close menus if open (context, sidebar, etc)
b. Go to previous (web)page if web/file browser
c. Go out of submenus (ex: settings/WiFi -> settings) if not in a browser or if the oldest page has been reached. Keeps walking the tree upwards.
3. Reach the main app view (usually the one you land on when opening the app)
4. One more press minimizes the app.
It is fairly consistent, but some apps decide otherwise:
* some will minimize as soon as you press it (I've seen games do it)
* some will open a new menu (again, games: pause menu)
* some will seemingly walk you the history of visited pages instead of the hierarchy -- which may make sense but can be confusing
* some old apps will display a toast "press back twice to exit". This used to be common back when physical buttons were the norm, but I haven't seen this message a lot.
So, mostly consistent with some weird-behaving apps. Same as on desktop I guess?
I prefer 3-button navigation, but it seems most of the web has decided that gesture-based navigation has won, and it's an awful experience sometimes. They assume you will always swipe down to close popup modals like full-size images, so pressing back will instead navigate out of the page. And half the time, navigating forward puts you right back on top of the modal again!
It breaks the intuition that one tap == one piece of state on the navigation stack.
If i switch to my browser and hit back what happens : I go back to my previous app ? I go back in my browser page cache history ? I go back to the page that opened that web page i'm looking at ? something else ?
also mixing Back and Up is just wrong. I've had arguments with people that don't understand the difference.
brilliant. when i last used an android google apps were the worst for abusing the back button. maybe it's changed since then. sometimes it went up. sometimes previous. sometimes quit.
My favorite was long pressing back to show the history. Perfect for escaping from a nav hijack page or returning to a page multiple steps ahead in history. Swipes are a downgrade in functionality.
If you're in Chrome, the previous entry in the history. If you're in YouTube, the previous video. If you were previously on the main screen and you just clicked into an app, the main screen.
What's confusing about it? Seems very intuitive to me, it's like CTRL+Z, it always changes what it does but the behavior is to undo the latest action.
On YouTube if enter a comment and decide i dont want to submit it after all, does back close the comment window and take me to the video, or does it take me to the previous video i viewed.
If i click a link in youtube and browser opens, does clicking back take me back to YouTube? Back in the browser? Back to the previous video.?
Quirks, nonetheless, but after using the app for a few hours the logic starts to click.
To answer your questions, I'm guessing:
- Pressing Back in YouTube closes the comments so you can continue watching the video.
- If you tap a link in YouTube and it opens a browser, it'll default to an in-app browser with an X in the upper-left. If you've disabled that browser, pressing Back returns you to YouTube.
Even thats slowly being depreciated for gestures as the default option. A bunch of Google's own apps won't play nice with it anymore on the flagship Pixel, drawing buttons underneath
Tapping something is discoverable and a basic human instinct. How the hell do you discover "swipe up from the bottom edge and then slightly right" to open the app switcher?
You don't have to do the slightly right thing, it's just a bit more fluid. If you swipe up and wait a split second before letting go, it also works. There is haptic feedback once the mode triggers. It's fast, but requires intention vs a fluid swipe.
No, tapping something visible and seeing what happens is discoverable. And Apple used to have skeuomorphism to help with affordance. Swiping from various directions and other hidden shortcuts aren't discoverable, and my guess is most users can't find half of the features of their phone.
Man... I stand by it being an interesting idea that they fumbled by not following their own HIG.
Even if it is a bit of a silly line of reasoning, there was (at least originally) a purpose to the brushed metal UI. Anything that was capable of external IO (quicktime for ingesting firewire feed from camera, itunes for syncing with an iPod, finder for disks) was supposed to have a brushed metal interface. There's a world where 2 different classes of windows stuck around (one for things INSIDE the computer, one for things OUTSIDE of the computer) and I bet we would've gotten a lot more afforadances for real-life devices. Maybe a predictable device status UI in those sorts of windows or something. Maybe they'd just be those white panes with fancy animated product shots that show up when you get an Apple-blessed bluetooth device near an iPhone. There's at least some reasoning to treat external IO windows as sharing some sort of common UX. (Answering pretty common gadget questions like: is it connected, is it charging, is it lost, etc etc etc)
But then the waters get muddied with the calculator being brushed metal because it's trying to look like a calculator. And safari... because I guess the network is external but...?
I think a little after John wrote this blog post I'm using to jog my memory, all pinstripe windows were gone except maybe the preferences panes... so it was definitely arbitrary form over function at that point.
I think OS 9 (and that entire era of computer graphics design) had the perfect mix of form and function. I won't comment on it aesthetically as that is entirely subjective, but its use of shape and depth made things very human friendly. Buttons looked distinctly buttonable. The icon design was also great, they were skeuomorphic enough that you generally got the idea of what you were clicking but also flat enough that they weren't distracting
Haha yeah! Mac users just buy them to look cool while they write their whatever in the coffee shop! This is definitely not a preposterous and outdated observation/joke!
I heard this was a thing with AirPods when they first came out.
I was recently at the airport and also saw several pairs of fake AirPod Max headphones. They looked fine from a distance, but up close it was really obvious and they looked bad.
I have both a Windows and a Mac. What triggers me isn't people insulting Apple products, but immature, gaming-forum ass, console warring. People need to grow up.
I have one because I am a professional with a job and don't have time to mess around with Linux on my laptop when I'm not getting paid. That leaves Windows and macOS. I haven't had a good Windows experience since XP.
I feel as if it was the opposite. It started as a true "home computer," and nowadays, it's used to do work.
The fact that MacOS is probably the worst gaming platform on Earth (and Apple doesn't seem to lose sleep over it -although I think they'd like iPad to be a better gaming platform), is an indicator that people use the computer to get work done; whether at home, or in the office.
But there's a lot of pretty visceral hatred for Apple -especially in tech circles- so I don't expect much reasoned discourse about it.
Is that why their laptops routinely beat the competition year after year in reviews and reliability surveys? Because they “look cool”? I’m going to need some more numbers on that one.
All my devices are Apple: laptop, Studio, display, phone, iPad, watch...
I will say that Apple has solidified on the design and reliability "recently". But let's not pretend that the MBP line, to pick on one, didn't go through some rough rough days. I've had laptops that had the delaminating screen, the 'single grain of sand can ruin it' butterfly keyboard, hell, I've had two models that had recalled logic boards. Early Magsafe connectors (fantastic invention) where the rubber would routinely fail even without tension (I had two that failed, exposing bare wire, even though they spent the entirety of their life on a desk, routed through a cable organizer, far away from any UV sunlight hitting them directly.
You missed the late Intel MBPs which I remember heating up hotter than the sun and exhausting it out the back which made the touch bar uncomfortable to touch!
Some of the other examples you could maybe say are just poor industrial design or bad execution of a potentially workable idea, but the Intel MBP thermal debacle was definitely the most egregious example of Apple blindly pursuing form-over-function. They set a goal for ultra-slim laptop forms that the components they were using simply could never achieve. It would have been obvious from prototyping that temperature was a major problem, but whatever decision making process they had in place at the time overrode it. The best you can say is they seemed to have learned from their mistake.
If you're comparing an MBP to a $500 Acer (the Neo changes that nexus a bit, though I don't know much about it), then yes, of course it is, and for a reason (or 600-1000 reasons).
I don't use anything, but it's not like Windows is AWOL - my partner's Dell is quality construction, and the Yoga Pro my stepdaughter uses for college. You could still say (and I'd agree) that the MBP is still better designed (for me: "except the edges" - I hate the sharpness) but it's not like "there's Macs and there's dogshit".
I challenge you to find a laptop that can do what my macbook air m1 with 8gb of ram does at the $899 it was through the education store. No fan, awesome battery life, good trackpad and keyboard, the ability to not get hot while using it.
I'm a senior platform engineer who at the time I bought it was a senior software developer, who can still use it for my daily tasks despite it having 8gb of ram. Until very recently the 32gb T14 I had ad work was frankly worse performant than the little air, while having a battery life of around 45 minutes a fan sounding like a jetengine and a keyboard so hot it made the sun jealous. My new model is way faster than my macbook air though, but the old model was technically newer than the air. Obviously the comparisson isn't completely fair since we run a lot of corporate enterprise stuff on our laptops, but still.
I'd really like a Linux laptop, but a Framework laptop is expensive (and it has loud fans and runs hot). A tuxedo is even more expensive and has fans where you'd place it on your legs for whatever reason, and runs hot. Looking at the laptop market now, I can't see what you'd buy. A week ago I would've said the Neo (if the 8gb of ram holds up as well on the mobile chip as it does on the m1), but today I'm guessing a refurbished air with 16gb would be the only real option for someone who want's a cool low noise machine with decent battery time.
Whether you run OS/X or Asahi, I really can't see what you'd buy other than these. At least if you actually use it on your lap and don't just have it sit in a dock on a table.
Then again, I'm the sort of person who would buy the pink neo because it would fuck with the perception people have of my mid 40 Scandinavian conservativeish dad look. So maybe it is just about the message?
A Framework isn't loud at all. I regularly do simulations on mine and it works perfectly without noise.
I think if you just compare cost then yes the Mac is a good deal but there is more than cost that matters. I think flexibility, reparibility and so on matter.
I have to keep it in battery saver mode or the fans just spin up when it's idle. They come up anyway (and irregularly) when watching a movie, loud enough to be heard over the movie -- though that may also be partly the fault of the milquetoast speakers that also inexplicably point down (so if you're watching something in bed you'll need to find a hard surface to put it on so that the sound isn't completely muffled).
That said, i have a macbook pro for work and macOS infuriates me, i would not trade my framework for any apple device under any circumstances. I love my framework more than any laptop I've ever owned. I just wish the hardware was more polished.
Comparing a subsidised computer for children to one that isn't isn't exactly a fair comparison, is it?
> No fan,
You know why Macbooks don't need a fan? It's because they aren't powerful enough to draw heat in the first place. A month ago, for the same price as a $1700 Macbook Pro (before the recent increase) I got a laptop with a CPU that is literally twice as fast on parellelisable workloads, has a 5070 Ti vs. nothing at all, and 32GB RAM. A superior screen, keyboard, and I can install my own choice of OS on it, too. Now that same dingy Macbook Pro costs $2000, or $2400 if you want 32GB RAM. Apple's greatest coup was convincing people that paying twice as much for half the hardware was a killer feature, and now everyone goes on and on about how Macbooks are the most premium hardware money can buy because they're so weak they don't need a fan to keep them cool. It's truly remarkable how susceptible people are to status-culture-based marketing.
This comment is untethered from reality. Apple Silicon at present beats every single laptop on the market at CPU-bound workloads using a fraction of the power draw. Exceptions exist but usually those cases are break even or close calls.
It trails GPU workflows on the high end but wins on the low end. It still wins on efficiency.
It falls over on storage and RAM prices (well, for about 6 months it was competitive here).
I say this as someone who over the last year has done the majority of my competition on PC hardware running Linux.
You may be looking at this as a status game but it has clouded your vision. It is implausible that mass market products with mass adoption find their success solely on status. If believing that makes you feel superior, well, enjoy the rush.
> Apple Silicon at present beats every single laptop on the market at CPU-bound workloads
[citation needed]
> It is implausible that mass market products with mass adoption find their success solely on status.
People still pay a massive premium for blood diamonds over physically indistinguishable lab diamonds. You underestimate how wildly irrational the market is when it comes to status perception.
If you want a macbook, go for it. I wouldn’t presume to know your needs more than you. I want something that I can easily run OpenBSD on and is amd64. And none of the apple laptop fits the bill.
I don't own or want anything apple. But I want no fan and maximum possible power/battery life. So I am really looking, but they do seem to offer the best hardware.
compare this to the top of the line Intel Panther Lake chips, which have comparable battery life. I cherry picked a 16" Dell XPS machine, which has the best thermal headroom, for its best score: https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/18390748
Single core: ~2,900
Multicore (16-cores): 16,900
Geekbench is bursty, so we can look at more sustained test, Cinebench 2024:
"Despite the XPS 16's discrete Nvidia RTX 4070 laptop GPU, the MacBook Pro M4 Pro's unified memory architecture outpaced the Dell in 4K video export and machine learning inference benchmarks by 22 percent on average."
For GPU, this is not comprehensive. It depends heavily on whether it needs raw grunt, where Nvidia discrete chips will win. When the processes uses the NPUs on Apple's chips, it will often win. They trade blows.
Efficiency I think is close to a wash on the latest machine, but before Panther Lake, Apple's win handily. My Framework 13 on AMD would last me about 2 hours doing regular work; my Macbook Pro doing the same workload would last over 10 hours. Thank goodness Intel caught up here.
I do scientific computing where Apple has some disadvantages. Matrix math heavy things lose out to discrete GPUs, as do -- I'm told -- things depending on 512-bit extensions (e.g., AVX).
Until last week, prices on Framework/Dell vs. Apple were similar. I think Apple is probably 10-20% expesnive at this point, but adjusting for performance, Apple still comes out ahead.
Apple's displays used to have a huge advantage. Now that you can get OLED displays on performant, efficient Panther Lake machines, this is far less of an Apple advantage.
The upshot is that the new Panther Lake machines caught up considerably to Apple, but they're still about 20-30% slower (sometimes more) in most workloads, and IMO the build quality is still not quite as good. I think many of them actually have better displays. Battery life is comparable on better equipped PCs. IMO once you can work an entire day and a little more unplugged, you're good to go.
It's not hard to find this data and evaluate it objectively.
I dare to say that this market change works both ways. Software is now created by people who have little idea about UI concepts, or even who don't want to bother themselves with these. Because the dominant type of a device is no longer a desktop computer. This isn't about strictly Apple as other companies also create, or allow to exist "awful" interfaces with no substance.
Is it a bad thing? Not necessary. Smartphones revolution made Internet truly accessible to everyone by cost of dumbing down software by features and UI - turning effectively these devices to work like any other home appliance.
Software today has to have that captivating appearance so user wouldn't be scared away. But nothing is perfect and there are examples where users are being treated with this nasty infantile approach by literally showing confetti and balloons as the satisfaction derived from interaction.
The peak was flat style which not only introduced maximum simplified interfaces, design but also provided grounds for all sorts of darkpatterns where content is indistinguishable from active element. That let companies manipulate the user's informed choice.
The past 10 years have been a sad, slow decline for Apple's UIs. I'm really hoping for them to reclaim some of their former UI glory.
At least, in Golden Gate, they reverted their own HIG violation of excessive icons back to factory: https://www.macrumors.com/2026/06/11/macos-27-golden-gate-me...
The time span and visible effect are both fully attributable to Alan Dye being head of design. It (what we have today) was his style. He made this world.
No they were better. Whether someone likes the style better or not (I do) they were FAR more visually distinct from each other which made it much easier to find the program you wanted to use.
Right now my dock is a soup of squircles. I have to scan multiple times to find icons even though I know roughly where they should be.
They aren’t distinct. They don’t stand out.
That was never a problem until last year. 40 years of Mac was fine. Then that.
I remember getting interested in an app because of the icon looked nice. Also couldn't use apps if the icon was too ugly and spoiled my beautiful dock.
There must be someone senior at Apple that still thinks the squircles look good, I dunno how we're still stuck with them. I haven't made a change to my dock in years and I have to hunt for apps nearly every time I open it. It doesn't help that a lot of newer apps seeming don't actually have a logo and are just happy with some random circular shaped blob.
Same people who thought text on translucent glass over text looked good.
Who thought that and lots of floating buttons was “getting out of the way of my content”.
Who thought sidebars should look like windows with mirrored content under them was smart.
Who thought long horizontal scrolling lists were easy to use.
Who never gave more than one window open at once.
Who are apparently illiterate and need icons everywhere and text nowhere.
They’ve lost the plot and I don’t care what they think. My machine is drastically harder to use than it was just two years ago all to make it “prettier“ even though personally I don’t think it is.
I genuinely find my apps harder to navigate now than I used to. Part of that is that I have far more apps installed today, but the uniform white borders also contribute. They make every icon look about 20% more similar, which adds just enough friction that scanning for the app I want takes a little longer.
Poorly executed icon shapes were distracting, but when they were done well they provided subtle visual cues that made the interface easier to navigate. I miss that more than I expected.
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.
I understand this logic, but at some point it makes sense to design the system for the millions of people on macs rather than make compromises for the sake of dozens of Vision Pro users.
They found having round icons made people look at the center, rather than the edges and corners. Since the UX relies entirely on where the user is looking, this made it more reliable.
I remember reading it in the HIG when VisionOS came out and everyone was complaining about the shape. I went looking to see if there was a reason, and there was.
That's interesting, but I think this is solvable in better ways. If the VisionOS icon grid doesn't have a voronoi hit map, then IMO they're doing a stupid. There's a _lot_ of space between icons in the grid. It should be plenty of distance to reliably determine that you're looking nearer to the center of a particular one.
> In general, give an interactive item a rounded shape. People’s eyes tend to be drawn toward the corners in a shape, making it difficult to keep looking at the shape’s center. The more rounded an item’s shape, the easier it is for people to use their eyes to target it.
The page also talks about leaving enough visual space between elements as well as many other considerations for this type of interface.
They were trying to make a unified design language across all their operating systems. If iOS and VisionOS both have their icons sitting on uniformly shaped tiles, macOS would break the convention.
I don't like it, but I believe that's the reason why.
Oh I’m sure that’s why they did it. It’s not a good reason. It’s like saying all the food you eat should be beige.
Sure it’s more consistent, but at what cost? You lose all the benefits. It’s like Chesterton’s Fence, except it has a big sign on it saying “beware of bull” and there is a guy nearby saying “you don’t want to let that bull out dude, it’s vicious”.
But you want to take down the fence because it’s not the same style as the one on the pen for the chickens.
In the old days, these different OS would have separate teams and all trying to work on what is best for their own products. Be it mac, iPad, iPhone or what hardware it is.
The foundation may share resources, but everything else was tailor made. And that is what used to make Apple so good.
The moment you try to make one size fits all you will start to make compromise. And the good old Apple would try to do things the hard way rather than making unnecessary compromises.
The thing sticking outside of the icon draws the eye to it, which means your focus is at the edge instead of the center, which makes for a more error prone experience.
Since the eyes are the cursor, this is a problem. Desktop and mobile don’t have this issue.
> The thing sticking outside of the icon draws the eye to it, which means your focus is at the edge instead of the center, which makes for a more error prone experience.
And Apple decided this was a problem with icons, rather than a problem with the way they implemented their vision tracking? Believable, and laughable.
It seems like the opposite of this. They tried to adapt the system to the way the eyes naturally work, rather than trying to tell people they needed to overcome their biology to use the system.
This is a false dichotomy. If the software assumes that people focus on the center of the thing they're looking at, the software is wrong. Fix the software.
Regardless, you don't need to make the hitboxes one-to-one with the graphics. Indeed, doing so tends to make for unreliable hitboxes, so most picking systems have two different, idealized enter and exit hitboxes for each icon.
VisionOS, at least as it stands today, will be dead before you know it. If you don't understand what I mean, look up the rumor about the future of Vision Pro.
What a waste of resource to invent the whole Tahoe "design language" only for nothing.
One thing I tend to give Apple a lot of credit for is having a longer term vision (no pun intended). When they release something they tend to stick with it, where others (Microsoft in particular) will kill products pretty fast if it doesn’t look like they are instant hits.
When trying to create a new category, customers need to have some faith it’s going to stick around and they won’t be abandoned. So it’s important to have that long term vision and conviction that the decisions made were the right ones.
That said, I bought the M5 Vision Pro and returned it after a week. It doesn’t feel like a product yet. Vision Pro as a future product might be questionable, but will they abandon spacial computing all together or switch to more of a true AR setup? I think real AR would be much better.
I think now that Cook is stepping down, we could see more change. Cooked seemed a little desperate to make sure Apple looked like an innovative company, when he clearly wasn’t a product guy. I don’t think a a full computer is needed on the face, that was the first mistake, they need a more purpose built device for the few things that make sense in the context of a HUD.
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.
That's just big corporate politics. Ever been involved in a 'lessons learned' exercise? Everything gets politically massaged so as not to upset individuals or functions, so that by the end of it, there are very few meaningful lessons remaining, and those that are still present need background understanding to divine.
This approach just protects the people, the function, and ultimately the corporation.
Right!? Who's out there going "oh no, translucent is too translucent; opaque is too opaque; but now that I can have 72.93% glass, my life is complete"?
I'll take an admission of failure over slavishly refusing to and trying to pretend it's fine.
There were plenty of people saying Liquid Glass was fundamentally an utterly flawed, bad design, that even if you subjectively liked the way it looked, that its design philosophy was wrong, and led to logically consistent but unusable and ugly interfaces, all to solve a problem no one had.
I'm cautiously optimistic now that the bozo cardboard box designer dope with the ugly glasses is gone we'll see a quiet but rapid change of direction. I'll take "mea culpa". I'll take "whelp, this shit does actually just suck, here's a slider while we work on something better".
To me the cherry on top was that they started modifying how third party icons look to match the Liquid Glass. People started complaining to us that our app icon looked blurry because of it.
They look fine when zoomed in, and I'm assuming that's all the designers considered as they were redrawing icons, blown up across their 27" monitor. But once you shrink them down to an actual app icon size, the glassy effects on the edges of everything look like a blur.
In iOS 27 they sharpened the edges up and everything looks a lot better.
There's so little joy and happiness left in computing. Reverting to the older style of icons, plus perhaps a few UI tweaks, certainly help bring a bit of whimsical back into the macOS platform. That's something many of us would love.
Great article -but the image has issues with Safari (invisible drag corner), and iOS (a mess).
I have found that we need to be very, very careful, when making the UI more "fun."
Things like rounded affordances, short transition animations, easy-to-understand elements, etc., are good. They remove the "friction."
However, cute icons, unprompted animations, and overuse of whitespace for the sake of design aesthetics, can cause the UI to be too prominent.
UI needs to be approachable, useful, and unobtrusive. i.e. "forgettable." Many designers absolutely can't stand the idea of designing stuff that no one pays attention to; but that's actually exactly what most UI needs to be.
The metaphor that I use, is that most waitstaff at restaurants, wear black.
The reason is, is because people don't go to a restaurant to pay attention to the staff (with a couple of ahem exceptions <owl emoji/>). They go for the food, and the ease of having it provided without the need to cook and wash up.
I feel that UI needs to be the same.
I am currently working on a version 2 of a pretty popular app that has been out for a couple of years. The original was almost entirely designed by a professional graphic designer, and he did a great job -for the most part. It looks great, and people like it.
But I am constantly encountering people that have no idea about some of its most important features, mainly because the affordances were deprecated in service to visual aesthetic. The new version uses a distinct "accent color" for elements that can be manipulated, as well as simpler, clearer design. It's working well.
Another example is my "Spinner" UI element[0]. This was a UIKit element that I designed, to provide an interactive "prize wheel" spinner feature for iOS. It works nicely.
But I have never been able to justify actually using it for any of my projects. It's too "in your face."
Thanks, very nice of you to note that, and I'll fix. The SSG behind it has some updates coming to improve mobile rendering for sidenotes etc already, will add more :)
Drag corner... hmm... seems a change in recent browsers - that has not changed in the website implementation since it worked in all three (FireFox, Chrome, Safari.) And I may have to break my no-Javascript ethos to get it working again!
> UI needs to be approachable, useful, and unobtrusive. i.e. "forgettable." Many designers absolutely can't stand the idea of designing stuff that no one pays attention to; but that's actually exactly what most UI needs to be.
You can be all those things without being forgettable. What matters to the user is the cohesiveness of the whole experience, not individual widgets. People use apps, they don’t just stand there looking at it like a video playing.
Liquid Glass was a good step in the right direction imo. A choice to make visual entertainment and beauty a priority over pure function.
I feel like what computers really lost was sounds, we used to have so many joyful sounds and background music on computers while now they are all silent. I think it’s a tragedy the Nintendo switch broke the long history of music in the menus and apps.
I wonder if the sound reduction is a result of computers moving into more and more spaces, rather than relegated to a single dedicated area. Beeps and boops going off all the time can be really annoying in public spaces.
Highly likely, though I still think the Nintendo Switch should have had sounds. Maybe computers should restore a dedicated mute switch or something users can toggle when they are in a quiet space.
People started hating when their computers made sound around the time smartphones became big. This is because companies can not be trusted with the ability to make attention grabbing sounds. Sounds should be used to mean something important is happening. It just so happens what Zuck' thinks is important isn't really important
> A choice to make visual entertainment and beauty a priority over pure function.
Except that (in my view, which is shared by many others though of course not universal) Liquid Glass is ugly as sin. Even if it worked properly I’d still rather not have it. But there’s also nothing entertaining or beautiful about unreadable overlapping text, flashing UI as you pan, visually cut off scrollbars, excessively rounded corners, or any from a plethora of bad decisions.
Liquid Glass is the worst of both worlds.
macOS used to be both functional and visually entertaining, and they’ve been removing that incompetently and for no apparent reason. One obvious case is removing an app from the Dock: It used to be that it went away in a quick puff of smoke with an appropriate sound; some versions back they removed the puff of smoke but kept the sound.
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.
> Giving equal visual weight to each icon is an improvement.
Equal visual weight is another way of saying less differentiated.
> "Shape" hasn't disappeared as a distinct visual cue, as the area within the squircle is made of, well... different shapes.
Shape refers to a boundary outline, not interior patterning. A square with polkadots is still shaped like a square.
> A smaller icon is harder to click, because clicking on a transparent area... doesn't click at all.
That problem is only tangential to what shape they allow your icon to be within an enclosing NxN hitbox. Assume an implied framework where clicking on them isn't broken.
Some differentiation between elements must be sacrificed in order to build shared UX patterns between them. I think we can definitely go too far in either direction.
An example of a nice compromise would be the macOS menu bar. Most status icons are monotone, which allows the ones with meaningful color differentiation to shine through without being drowned in the noise or increasing user fatigue.
Citation needed.
What is user fatigue? Can it be empirically measured? Fatigued by what? Too much color? Lack of shape? Too much contrast? Lack of contrast?
When is the last time you were "fatigued" by icons?
Without hard facts the expression is just a wishy-washy way to promote a personal taste.
I'd be surprised if squircles reduced user fatigue though - I think a good adjacent example is Googles new icons with the colours that all look similar. Users were complaining immediately that they had to look harder to find the correct app.
Another thing we use everyday - fonts - have differentiated visual spacing and shapes make them easier/quicker to read. So it would make sense for this to apply to icons that serve a similar purpose on a smaller scale.
I'm speaking in the capacity of a professional designer and developer, using industry terminology that any other professional will recognize. Please let the adults talk.
You seem to conflate different facts that have nothing to do with each other to arrive at a conclusion: There is nothing preventing Apple from not using said click masks while icons retain their distinct shapes. iOS is for mobile, its lessons don't transfer to desktop, and this was proven by Windows 8.
That "squircles aren't ugly because they are functional" - how on Earth can those be mutually exclusive even in recognition? Functional very often is at the cost of making things ugly, the history lesson is that Apple more often than others managed to be both functional and beautiful.
You also conflate convex pixel area with visual weight, but that is false too.
I’m not a designer but I disagree. I want to be able to easily distinguish apps without much focus or concentration or searching. Making them visually distinct with shape and color is superior. Uniformity is a problem not a target.
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.
Apple CEOs always seem to want to make a splash via hardware (especially since the guy worked in hardware engineering) but it would be nice if an engineer brings more focus on the software as well.
Alan Dye was brought in during the Jony Ive era when they were launching the first Apple Watch because he came from a fashion/print background. Before Apple really figured out what the Watch was going to be (a health/fitness accessory for your phone) they were going for the "luxury fashion" angle.
Somehow when Ive left, Dye got put in charge of design even though he had zero experience in software design that anyone seems to be aware of. He was criticized for the years following for a lot of bizarre design regressions that were happening across all of Apple's OSes. Then a few months after Dye himself announced Liquid Glass at WWDC last year, he blindsided Apple by accepting a poaching offer from Meta, seemingly because Zuck isn't aware of how untalented the guy is.
Now Stephen Lemay is in charge, who's been at Apple for many years and actually knows stuff about software design. It's said that within the walls of Apple, a lot of people were very happy about the change, and the first showing of design changes we got since then are looking very good for Apple.
I have no real love for Alan Dye but you should probably understand that Gruber feels it is a personal affront that someone might work for a company that is not Apple.
Gruber does not have a monopoly on disliking Alan Dye’s work. On the contrary, I never met anyone who knew UI design was a thing that liked what he did.
When you’re using a tool for 40 years and someone who really has no clue gets in charge, starts breaking basic functionality for no good reason and affecting your day to day work, it’s not hard to get infuriated.
How do you think thay worked? Alan Dye alome came up with, designed and somehow forced Liquid Glass into every platform? Lemay, who was his second in command had nothing to do with it? It was Alan Dye single-handedly doing it?
I am very, very curious how he reached, stayed that long at the top of the org chart and convinced so many people that this was a good direction to take.
If I were at Apple's leadership I'd consider that a major blindspot and focus deeply on fixing it.
On your first point, I don't know if Lemay merely agreed to keep his job or was an enthusiast of the vision. But it is a bit worrisome, if Bloomberg is to be believed.
On your second, Liquid Glass is merely the culmination of years of bad direction. Hiding essential feature on hover (notification's close icon, elapsed time on Apple Music, proxy icon, etc), poor contrast, legibility, background/foreground differentiation, was a long running process.
On your third point, I think it's possible and, if that's the case, deeply troubling.
> I don't know if Lemay merely agreed to keep his job
Again: why do you keep assigning Dye God-like powers? There wasn't just Lemay. There's no end of senior designers and senior product people, Federighi and his minions etc. at Apple.
In the end we still got Liquid Glass.
> On your second, Liquid Glass is merely the culmination of years of bad direction.
Indeed. Easily hundreds of people across several platforms saw this direction. Somehow we are led to believe that all of them were against this direction, and Dye single-handedly forced all the changes through.
The mess he actively implemented and was an integral part of?
Why do people keep thinking that Alan Dye was the only person (apparently with God-like powers) who somehow forced and designed Liquid Glass alone, in isolation, and somehow sneaked it in to every Apple platform.
The thing which kills me, is that with entirety of the State of California's Gazetteer to pull from, Apple didn't pull a page from Android and use an alphabetically ordered naming scheme so that folks could determine ordering of versions.
You know, someone should invent an infinite sequence of ordinal symbols which we could use to place things in a sequence. It could start with a simple vertical line, something like "1". Maybe someone more clever than me can come up with the next symbol.
Don't know if this is what you want to do or not, but you can actually change app icons for Applications however you like if you have the alternate that you want it to be.
I'll tell you how
Applications Folder (in Finder) -> Right-click on the target app -> Get Info -> Drag-and-drop the intended icon file to the top-left corner where the original icon is present.
Ik it's just a way to customise and not something official but your Mac looks the way you want it to.
Interesting... I had used this trick many times in the past, but assumed that with Tahoe it would put the icon in the little squircle jail it puts other default icons in if they don't conform to the new standards. Those end up looking really bad. I just tried it with a non-conforming icon and it seems to work.
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.
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.
Early on, when UI/UX was emerging as a discipline, user reaction times and accuracy were measured across a large number of participants. There are many stories during the development of the Lisa and Mac of unexpected user behavior and results.
We shouldn’t be guessing if uniformity helps distinguish between apps or not. We could very easily test it.
But UI/UX has long distanced itself from science, for whatever reason. Maybe because users are so proficient these days that almost anything works. We used to required training on how to use a mouse, menus and windows.
It’s been probably a decade since I’ve heard anyone mention Fitt’s law, for instance, and Liquid Glass atrocities are direct a consequence of disregarding all that was learned in this field.
I'm pretty sure Nielsen already tested it, if I had to guess they probably found that different icon shapes are broadly better but that gets ignored because "it's cheaper to use some shitty vector squiggle in a round rect", just like the research that found "icons are better when there is text" is widely ignored too because internationalization costs money.
I mostly lament the simplification of app icons as an artistic loss, not as a usability loss. Shameless plug, but I made a project based on the idea of icons as pure art with no utility https://www.benedelste.in/post/__001
I can see both sides. Artistic constraints can suck, but on the other hand, for every app with a truly beautiful icon design, like the ones listed in the "It Doesn’t Have to Be Like This" section, how many apps have truly awful icon designs? The dock is prime visual real estate, and as a user, I'd like some kind of constraint that makes it less likely some crazy art style is going to be imposed on my desktop just because I need an app there.
As an aside, Rogue Amoeba are one of an ecosystem of great and greatly passionate indie software houses for the Mac.
All of them create excellent software with polished UIs, provide excellent support and never forget to have fun. This seems to be unique to the Mac, at least at this scale.
Great design is more about consistency than uniformity.
Just imagine how hard it would be to read a text if all the words had a similar shape! You want them to look very distinct while the predictability of the layout helps you read (which is consistency).
> With color now so critical to tell icons apart, it should be no surprise that the new “Clear” and “Tinted” icon styles added in Tahoe are seeing so little uptake. As Adam Engst noted, “[I]t’s nearly impossible to identify a particular app when they’re all clear or tinted squircles, as you can see below. My brain just shuts down when it sees them.”
Also, that's true for a lot of normal application icons. Any Google application, including of course Chrome, but also Slack, Apple Photos, etc ... they all decided to use a "abstract red green yellow blue" logo on a white background. Of course, Google is the main culprit here. IntelliJ icons are another variant but still a pain to recognize and they add so much fun when they are mixed with Google ones.
And that's for the multicolor icons. Less problematic but still are "one color abstract on white background", like how am I supposed to distinguish Jira from Confluence ?
Also my personal bonus is that I have slimmed down high reflective glasses which creates chromatic aberrations so all those multicolor icons are dismantled when they are in my peripheral vision.
> 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.
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.
I'm on Tahoe and when i built an app using neutralino js the png icon was way bigger than the other icons, i needed to add padding to make the squircle look normal. So honestly i dont think this is a software thing, its more of designers designing it this way or only using their icon composer software which creates imaginary limitations.
Any linux kid with a slightest experience with desktop ricing would tell them that uniformly customized icons are a nightmare for visual recognition. Why didn't they run some internal tests, it's so obvious
Maybe it's just me, but I never really liked the detailed older mac icons, like the examples at the bottom of the page. I've always enjoyed more minimalist, simple user interfaces. And I can understand what Apple are trying to do by standardising their icons on the squircle (even if the execution is a bit iffy sometimes, the big grey border doesn't look great). Though, judging by everyone else's writings, I'm probably in the minority
What happened to being able to use themes and skins? Is it just corporate control? Why can't Windows or Mac has a CSS-style system where users can use custom style sheets? It doesn't have to go as far as classic Winamp but just going back to what we had in Win85 would be nice. (and I know there are things like Stardock's Windowblinds but why isn't it built in?)
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.
Tangential related, but i find Icons should have a animated tooltip- when hovered over prolonged, they should tell what the program should do in a cyclical svg-animation.
> Let’s return to a world of gorgeous app icons like these:
Seriously, they look like pictures you could find in a child's book, and it's a form of occupational deformation when you think of those icons as "gorgeous".
Admittedly, the term is unavoidably subjective. But what I like about them is that they are distinct, and that each one has character. Honestly, the fact that they looked like pictures I could find in a child's book is the main part of what I like about them: they have simple ideas ("a bird") and forms so distinctive a child could tell them apart.
Ok, but how would you feel if the dashboard of your car had images that made it look like a child's toy? Or your watch? You've maybe grown accustomed to it on your smartphone, but it has little to do with great taste (imho).
A physical thing has more degree of freedom to differentiate things. Loke distance and form. So much that you can be blind and still be able to use them.
A conputer interface does not have those. You need to track the cursor and then decide how you want to move it. There’s no muscle memory. And no tactile perception. What’s left is visual differentiation and it should be slightly exaggerated.
It can be. But I prefer slighty more than slightly less for things that I’m using daily. My apple tv remote is more beautiful than my AVR remote, but I strongly prefer the latter. Same with my big mechanical keyboard vs my apple one.
"A unique, memorable icon expresses your app’s or game’s purpose and personality and helps people recognize it at a glance."
"In iOS, iPadOS, and macOS, icons are square, and the system applies masking to produce rounded corners that precisely match the curvature of other rounded interface elements throughout the system and the bezel of the physical device itself."
Every time I see criticism of MacOS Tahoe, it just makes me suspect that someone without experience went on an ego trip.
That being said, should I skip Tahoe and wait for whatever comes next? MacOS keeps nagging me to upgrade to Tahoe, but I've been holding off because HN hates it so much.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Someone with 5000 hours design experience needs to make a common icon theme for a few 100 GTK and QT libraries and standard-names. It feels like it's 1000s of hours of work. And then you have to make them available in a few formats, HDPI, maybe a build system, etc. there are a number of themes but the ones I try seem to be missing one or more of the icons from the set. Just need the right volunteers to build them, and also get a bunch of app-builders to adopt them, and figure out what colour the bike-shed should be (blue).
Why volunteer? Why not find a way to pay someone for the value of their time at market rate and release the product of their labor under a permissive license?
For the last 25+ years I've been hearing folks say: "why not find a way". But then not suggest anything more than that obvious answer.
Please suggest an actual path forward, an actual plan that is more than just "figure it out". And the plan needs to address at least 1/2 of the points I made above.
It's a "Hard Problem". The answer needs lots of time, likely money and at least two humans with strong drive to fix the problem.
We've managed to make the entire corpus of open source software but the thing that's a "Hard Problem" that nobody can find a way to do is making the icons look good?
It's almost like it's not a technical challenge, it's that getting good looking icons would require a unified userbase, and Apple has that but Linux does not.
As a bit of a shameless plug, I did some in the past[0] and am working sporadically on a "fork" of those[1] but it's a whole full-time work. There are hundreds of icons to do for apps alone. Each one needs to be done in 16x16, 22x22, 32x32, 64x64, 128x128 and 256x256 so if say you have 150 icons to do for apps, you actually will need to do 900 icons. And add to that that you'll need to cover categories, places, filetypes, actions...
Granted, you can do a 256x256 and scale it down to 128x128, for example, but if you care for quality some details will be lost anyway. So that's why nowadays you'll see most icon themes are just a bunch of logos plastered over a shaped background.
And what irked me the most was that a few weeks after that I released that first set via deviantart and opendesktop.org there were websites that included them in their sets and made them available for download in their websites, not even a redirect to my deviantart or opendesktop pages or something. And found out after that that some people were using them in commercial projects and stuff so I had to chase them asking to not use them since they were cc-by-nc'ed.
Never got a single cent of any of that. I love making icons, at some point I was even working for the icons that would eventually become the Breeze set for KDE5 with their VDG, but it happens that I also need money to buy the beans.
These are very nice (especially the Betelgeuse set), but -- unless this is just chance from the ones displayed -- don't they mostly all have the same silhouette, a rounded rectangle? While the Betelgeuse ones have more flair and are more differentiable from each other, an excellent thing, locking them in a box is the same kind of jail that this article is about.
I would love to encourage you to free your own icons from the round-rect jail. You have some fantastic designs there.
There are plenty of Icon packs suitable to all aesthetic preferences. Just nobody is going to write a blog post ragging a some Icon Pack b/c if you don't like it then it's trivial to change to a "better" one (that said I still think the arguments in the blog post are interesting and worth considering)
To the blog's point - many KDE Icon Packs have non-uniform shapes (ex: I'm currently using Newaita)
I think illustration isn't something too much in the mindshare of open source, so overall support for it isn't great. IMO this has contributed to it. The industry standard tools are all closed, with closed formats, so it just sounds like much more of a hassle vs contributing code/text.
I mean this throughout the whole process. The only standard illustration file format I can think of is SVG, but it's largely a format to export to, not one industry-standard software uses as it's main persistence format.
So for starters, contributors tend to need access to speciality software they probably don't have installed to view and edit the source of truth. This also means you're handling at least two files in your VCS, the closed format acting effectively as a blob, no diffs, etc. and an export file (usually more, for different scales) to actually interface with the rest of the ecosystem; this is the file everyone can open, inspect and compare, the one your build consumes, etc.
This already would be a good amount of friction for someone familiar with the tools, but designers are not necessarily familiar with git, the PR process, etc. Add to it that icons are more subjective than code, which overall should follow certain rules and either works or doesn't, and it overall seems not worth it for a casual contributor.
It's part of "What's been keeping Linux from having good UX up to this point?"
Making good products means lots and lots of drudgery, just for fun volunteers aren't going to touch that, and the stereotypical FOSS contributor is the type that's clueless about UX and puts stability above everything else.
Have fun convincing someone feature x is too overengineered to be usable by anyone who's not an alpha geek and should be simplified to a single switch. Not to mention proper large scale usability testing likely being unaffordable.
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.
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.
Yeah, for a decade now it's been a UX disaster. It "works", because so many people are used to it, but look at a new user trying to navigate iOS, it's bonkers. Swiping from random directions achieves different things (and how would you even know you can?). The home button has like 11 different functions depending on how you press it and when.
Im an iPhone user. I want it to take as little space as possible physically and mentally, and try to use it as little as possible. My experience has been that it was easy learning to use it by just bumbling around.
That is, until two weeks ago when I got my new iPhone. I had to, the old one couldnt upgrade to the newest iOS.
I feel ashamed to admit, that I had one or two days of extreme frustration just learning to do basic stuff. It was not about the shape of icons, but more along the lines of what you write. Swiping patterns, button press sequences, and the time you should hold down a button. It is ridiculous.
Some of the blame is on me for not being mobile phone savvy, but it is indisputable that the UX has deterioted significantly. I suspect it will just get worse going forward.
This seems exaggerated. I recently moved to iOS 26 from iOS 16. They work exactly the same in my experience.
Except for the fact that you can’t scrub on the native video player by swiping anywhere, you now have to use the time-bar. Drives me nuts.
Something that I ended up loving about iOS was the relative simplicity it had compared to Android at the time I started using the iPhone in 2017. iOS 10 and 11 were great. People complained about things like all apps needing to be on the homescreen or not being able to place apps arbitrarily, but at the same time that "lack" of function is part of what made iOS easy to use and understand.
I find nowadays iOS is as complex as the Android I remember. I can navigate it just fine because I'm used to it but even my parents who've been using iPhones longer than me have found themselves getting lost in the OS with iOS 26 in particular.
It was even better before 2017.
I used to describe iPhone being an Appliance, with some smart function added to it. Android was a PC trying to made into a Phone form factor and act like an appliance.
It was that simplicity of iPhone that was great.
And you are right now iPhone and Android have converge in many ways it has added complexity. And no one seems to be doing anything about it. And somehow after 15 years of UX Craig Federighi is still popular and gets no blame for it.
It was a weal-and-woe situation. The lockdown was tolerable with such a weak device, but portended a lot of the App Store issues that Apple grapples with today.
Back then, the coolest way to use an iPhone or iPod was to put Cydia on it. You could run emulators, live wallpapers, sideloaded apps, pretty much anything that Android had was at the tip of your fingers. Once Apple pushed for a return to the locked-down software distribution philosophy, I gave up on iOS and started dailying Android instead.
> Swiping from random directions achieves different things
I haven't used iOS 27 yet, but from what I've seen it's going to get worse. We already have swiping down from the top left or top right bringing up different things, while swiping down anywhere else in the middle of the screen brings up search... unless you're swiping down at the bottom of the screen, then it's Reachability. From what I understand, iOS 27 will also bring swiping down from the Dynamic Island to trigger Siri. So that's 3 different behaviors from a swipe down from somewhere on the top of a <3" wide screen, with no real way to know what's going on intuitively.
1. Ive been using apple iphone since 2010 and i jave an iphone air right now. I still dont know how/why/when i seem to accidentally call the AI thing where the side of my acreen go all all funny. Ive never done it intentionally and i dont know how but every so often i trigger it.
2. Can apple ‘regress’ the camera app so the it is easy to use. The interface is a disaster of mixed inputs and over loaded widgets. Theres so many modes and sub modes. Swipe to zoom works mostly except when it changes modes. I spend about 10 seconds every tone inise the camera app just making it take a picture because accidentally touching it in the wrong place switches to some other mode.
3. The genrel consistency has went downhill. Its difficult sometimes now to know just how to interact with an app.
4. Search box. If i do another attempt at a web search when i am in mail search box i dunno. Either unify it or make it distinct. Also sometime its at the top sometimes the bottom
About (2), it reminds me of a video I saw once of someone trying to take a picture at a sport event, or how my parents try to do it. Hold the phone with an awkward grip to point it towards what you want, with one hand free. Accidentally touch the edge of the screen and click something with the gripping hand. Then try to zoom in with your free hand, but one finger hits the screen first due to the angle of the phone so you do a swipe instead and go to selfie mode. Swipe fervently to get back. Try again, click screen to focus. But just as you click a notification pops up and you press it.
EXACTLY. I'm a tech savvy user and know about all these things. But it's still too damn difficult to use without all that jeopardy. It didn't used to be like this.
1. This is generally from holding in the lock button (the upper button on the right side). Maybe you're accidentally holding it in while gripping the phone. Some people tend to rest their thumb there and might start holding it on accident.
4. The top vs bottom search boxes drive me nuts. I still instinctively reach for the top of the screen for search, so going to the bottom is weird. The move to the bottom is also a symptom of the phones being too large, so they have to move all the UI users interact with down to the bottom. Not being 100% consistent with it makes it hard to retrain my habits around it.
I press the lock button long, short, tap, it doesn’t do ‘the thing’ like yellow wobbles around the edge of screen.
I have an ipad that I mainly use to open YouTube... If I had q nickel for every time some random gesture accidentally triggered some weird feature, I'd certainly have a few nickels.
That's what made me switch to Android.
At least you can have 3-button navigation
I moved over from my old Android to an iPhone (needed to develop an iOS app for a freelance thing too) and that was the first thing that cause me off guard - it’s like controls that should be buttons of some kind were just omitted.
Its just as bad. Please define ‘back’
1. Hide virtual keyboard if shown
2. Go to previous app view. This is app-dependent though it will probably, successively with each press:
a. Close menus if open (context, sidebar, etc)
b. Go to previous (web)page if web/file browser c. Go out of submenus (ex: settings/WiFi -> settings) if not in a browser or if the oldest page has been reached. Keeps walking the tree upwards.
3. Reach the main app view (usually the one you land on when opening the app)
4. One more press minimizes the app.
It is fairly consistent, but some apps decide otherwise:
* some will minimize as soon as you press it (I've seen games do it)
* some will open a new menu (again, games: pause menu)
* some will seemingly walk you the history of visited pages instead of the hierarchy -- which may make sense but can be confusing
* some old apps will display a toast "press back twice to exit". This used to be common back when physical buttons were the norm, but I haven't seen this message a lot.
So, mostly consistent with some weird-behaving apps. Same as on desktop I guess?
I prefer 3-button navigation, but it seems most of the web has decided that gesture-based navigation has won, and it's an awful experience sometimes. They assume you will always swipe down to close popup modals like full-size images, so pressing back will instead navigate out of the page. And half the time, navigating forward puts you right back on top of the modal again!
It breaks the intuition that one tap == one piece of state on the navigation stack.
Go to previous (web)page if web/file browser
Keeps walking the tree upwards.
If i switch to my browser and hit back what happens : I go back to my previous app ? I go back in my browser page cache history ? I go back to the page that opened that web page i'm looking at ? something else ?
also mixing Back and Up is just wrong. I've had arguments with people that don't understand the difference.
brilliant. when i last used an android google apps were the worst for abusing the back button. maybe it's changed since then. sometimes it went up. sometimes previous. sometimes quit.
My favorite was long pressing back to show the history. Perfect for escaping from a nav hijack page or returning to a page multiple steps ahead in history. Swipes are a downgrade in functionality.
Back means the previous screen.
If you're in Chrome, the previous entry in the history. If you're in YouTube, the previous video. If you were previously on the main screen and you just clicked into an app, the main screen.
What's confusing about it? Seems very intuitive to me, it's like CTRL+Z, it always changes what it does but the behavior is to undo the latest action.
On YouTube if enter a comment and decide i dont want to submit it after all, does back close the comment window and take me to the video, or does it take me to the previous video i viewed.
If i click a link in youtube and browser opens, does clicking back take me back to YouTube? Back in the browser? Back to the previous video.?
Quirks, nonetheless, but after using the app for a few hours the logic starts to click.
To answer your questions, I'm guessing:
- Pressing Back in YouTube closes the comments so you can continue watching the video.
- If you tap a link in YouTube and it opens a browser, it'll default to an in-app browser with an X in the upper-left. If you've disabled that browser, pressing Back returns you to YouTube.
Even thats slowly being depreciated for gestures as the default option. A bunch of Google's own apps won't play nice with it anymore on the flagship Pixel, drawing buttons underneath
For me, the swipe to go to home gesture on iOS very often conflicts with my swipe to go to all tabs in Safari.
> Swiping from random directions achieves different things (and how would you even know you can?)
Cultural context, the same way you'd know tapping on an icon opens an app.
Tapping something is discoverable and a basic human instinct. How the hell do you discover "swipe up from the bottom edge and then slightly right" to open the app switcher?
You don't have to do the slightly right thing, it's just a bit more fluid. If you swipe up and wait a split second before letting go, it also works. There is haptic feedback once the mode triggers. It's fast, but requires intention vs a fluid swipe.
No, tapping something visible and seeing what happens is discoverable. And Apple used to have skeuomorphism to help with affordance. Swiping from various directions and other hidden shortcuts aren't discoverable, and my guess is most users can't find half of the features of their phone.
> brushed metal was... a choice
Man... I stand by it being an interesting idea that they fumbled by not following their own HIG.
Even if it is a bit of a silly line of reasoning, there was (at least originally) a purpose to the brushed metal UI. Anything that was capable of external IO (quicktime for ingesting firewire feed from camera, itunes for syncing with an iPod, finder for disks) was supposed to have a brushed metal interface. There's a world where 2 different classes of windows stuck around (one for things INSIDE the computer, one for things OUTSIDE of the computer) and I bet we would've gotten a lot more afforadances for real-life devices. Maybe a predictable device status UI in those sorts of windows or something. Maybe they'd just be those white panes with fancy animated product shots that show up when you get an Apple-blessed bluetooth device near an iPhone. There's at least some reasoning to treat external IO windows as sharing some sort of common UX. (Answering pretty common gadget questions like: is it connected, is it charging, is it lost, etc etc etc)
But then the waters get muddied with the calculator being brushed metal because it's trying to look like a calculator. And safari... because I guess the network is external but...?
I think a little after John wrote this blog post I'm using to jog my memory, all pinstripe windows were gone except maybe the preferences panes... so it was definitely arbitrary form over function at that point.
(Jogging my memory from: https://daringfireball.net/2004/10/brushed-metal)
I think OS 9 (and that entire era of computer graphics design) had the perfect mix of form and function. I won't comment on it aesthetically as that is entirely subjective, but its use of shape and depth made things very human friendly. Buttons looked distinctly buttonable. The icon design was also great, they were skeuomorphic enough that you generally got the idea of what you were clicking but also flat enough that they weren't distracting
it's market changed
it started as a computer for professionals
now its for people who want to look cool. so form is much more important than function, it's literally what you buy
Haha yeah! Mac users just buy them to look cool while they write their whatever in the coffee shop! This is definitely not a preposterous and outdated observation/joke!
Wasn't there a trend where kids were just wearing dead apple watches as accessories? It's just a status symbol, like gold bracelets.
I just graduated college and I’ve never heard of this. Can’t find anything about it online either.
You can get a functional Apple Watch on Facebook for 50-100 bucks. So not much of a signal for status.
We have much sillier, trendier accessories to choose from :)
Not every kid has 50-100 bucks avaiable.
Might be just a certain demographic then, there was a viral tiktok with athletes wearing dead apple watches.
Are you not in the United States?
I'm not.
I heard this was a thing with AirPods when they first came out.
I was recently at the airport and also saw several pairs of fake AirPod Max headphones. They looked fine from a distance, but up close it was really obvious and they looked bad.
Yeah, and there are kids pooping in litterboxes in Texas schools! /s
I would never trust media covering youth trends. It's a bunch of 50yos whose teenager told them something as a joke and they took it seriously.
See also: latest millennial trend is avocado toast, and that's why they're all broke
Sounds like it hit a nerve to be honest
I have both a Windows and a Mac. What triggers me isn't people insulting Apple products, but immature, gaming-forum ass, console warring. People need to grow up.
says stupid thing
"wow that's stupid"
"Hehe sounds like it hit a nerve to be honest"
I have one because I am a professional with a job and don't have time to mess around with Linux on my laptop when I'm not getting paid. That leaves Windows and macOS. I haven't had a good Windows experience since XP.
> it started as a computer for professionals
I feel as if it was the opposite. It started as a true "home computer," and nowadays, it's used to do work.
The fact that MacOS is probably the worst gaming platform on Earth (and Apple doesn't seem to lose sleep over it -although I think they'd like iPad to be a better gaming platform), is an indicator that people use the computer to get work done; whether at home, or in the office.
But there's a lot of pretty visceral hatred for Apple -especially in tech circles- so I don't expect much reasoned discourse about it.
Is that why their laptops routinely beat the competition year after year in reviews and reliability surveys? Because they “look cool”? I’m going to need some more numbers on that one.
All my devices are Apple: laptop, Studio, display, phone, iPad, watch...
I will say that Apple has solidified on the design and reliability "recently". But let's not pretend that the MBP line, to pick on one, didn't go through some rough rough days. I've had laptops that had the delaminating screen, the 'single grain of sand can ruin it' butterfly keyboard, hell, I've had two models that had recalled logic boards. Early Magsafe connectors (fantastic invention) where the rubber would routinely fail even without tension (I had two that failed, exposing bare wire, even though they spent the entirety of their life on a desk, routed through a cable organizer, far away from any UV sunlight hitting them directly.
But now? Things are much, much more solid.
You missed the late Intel MBPs which I remember heating up hotter than the sun and exhausting it out the back which made the touch bar uncomfortable to touch!
Some of the other examples you could maybe say are just poor industrial design or bad execution of a potentially workable idea, but the Intel MBP thermal debacle was definitely the most egregious example of Apple blindly pursuing form-over-function. They set a goal for ultra-slim laptop forms that the components they were using simply could never achieve. It would have been obvious from prototyping that temperature was a major problem, but whatever decision making process they had in place at the time overrode it. The best you can say is they seemed to have learned from their mistake.
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Even the worst MBP is light years better than the plasticky crap on the Windows side.
If you're comparing an MBP to a $500 Acer (the Neo changes that nexus a bit, though I don't know much about it), then yes, of course it is, and for a reason (or 600-1000 reasons).
I don't use anything, but it's not like Windows is AWOL - my partner's Dell is quality construction, and the Yoga Pro my stepdaughter uses for college. You could still say (and I'd agree) that the MBP is still better designed (for me: "except the edges" - I hate the sharpness) but it's not like "there's Macs and there's dogshit".
"Plasticky crap" like the x1 carbon? I daily drive a mac, but I would drop it in an instant once I can get linux on arm on thinkpad.
MacBooks have the best value/money ratio at the moment. The combination of battery life, processing power and touch pad UX are unmatched
I challenge you to find a laptop that can do what my macbook air m1 with 8gb of ram does at the $899 it was through the education store. No fan, awesome battery life, good trackpad and keyboard, the ability to not get hot while using it.
I'm a senior platform engineer who at the time I bought it was a senior software developer, who can still use it for my daily tasks despite it having 8gb of ram. Until very recently the 32gb T14 I had ad work was frankly worse performant than the little air, while having a battery life of around 45 minutes a fan sounding like a jetengine and a keyboard so hot it made the sun jealous. My new model is way faster than my macbook air though, but the old model was technically newer than the air. Obviously the comparisson isn't completely fair since we run a lot of corporate enterprise stuff on our laptops, but still.
I'd really like a Linux laptop, but a Framework laptop is expensive (and it has loud fans and runs hot). A tuxedo is even more expensive and has fans where you'd place it on your legs for whatever reason, and runs hot. Looking at the laptop market now, I can't see what you'd buy. A week ago I would've said the Neo (if the 8gb of ram holds up as well on the mobile chip as it does on the m1), but today I'm guessing a refurbished air with 16gb would be the only real option for someone who want's a cool low noise machine with decent battery time.
Whether you run OS/X or Asahi, I really can't see what you'd buy other than these. At least if you actually use it on your lap and don't just have it sit in a dock on a table.
Then again, I'm the sort of person who would buy the pink neo because it would fuck with the perception people have of my mid 40 Scandinavian conservativeish dad look. So maybe it is just about the message?
Are there any laptops where the cooling is handled by the screen backside?
A Framework isn't loud at all. I regularly do simulations on mine and it works perfectly without noise.
I think if you just compare cost then yes the Mac is a good deal but there is more than cost that matters. I think flexibility, reparibility and so on matter.
Mine (11th gen framework 13) is.
I have to keep it in battery saver mode or the fans just spin up when it's idle. They come up anyway (and irregularly) when watching a movie, loud enough to be heard over the movie -- though that may also be partly the fault of the milquetoast speakers that also inexplicably point down (so if you're watching something in bed you'll need to find a hard surface to put it on so that the sound isn't completely muffled).
That said, i have a macbook pro for work and macOS infuriates me, i would not trade my framework for any apple device under any circumstances. I love my framework more than any laptop I've ever owned. I just wish the hardware was more polished.
> $899 it was through the education store
Comparing a subsidised computer for children to one that isn't isn't exactly a fair comparison, is it?
> No fan,
You know why Macbooks don't need a fan? It's because they aren't powerful enough to draw heat in the first place. A month ago, for the same price as a $1700 Macbook Pro (before the recent increase) I got a laptop with a CPU that is literally twice as fast on parellelisable workloads, has a 5070 Ti vs. nothing at all, and 32GB RAM. A superior screen, keyboard, and I can install my own choice of OS on it, too. Now that same dingy Macbook Pro costs $2000, or $2400 if you want 32GB RAM. Apple's greatest coup was convincing people that paying twice as much for half the hardware was a killer feature, and now everyone goes on and on about how Macbooks are the most premium hardware money can buy because they're so weak they don't need a fan to keep them cool. It's truly remarkable how susceptible people are to status-culture-based marketing.
Username related.
This comment is untethered from reality. Apple Silicon at present beats every single laptop on the market at CPU-bound workloads using a fraction of the power draw. Exceptions exist but usually those cases are break even or close calls.
It trails GPU workflows on the high end but wins on the low end. It still wins on efficiency.
It falls over on storage and RAM prices (well, for about 6 months it was competitive here).
I say this as someone who over the last year has done the majority of my competition on PC hardware running Linux.
You may be looking at this as a status game but it has clouded your vision. It is implausible that mass market products with mass adoption find their success solely on status. If believing that makes you feel superior, well, enjoy the rush.
> Apple Silicon at present beats every single laptop on the market at CPU-bound workloads
[citation needed]
> It is implausible that mass market products with mass adoption find their success solely on status.
People still pay a massive premium for blood diamonds over physically indistinguishable lab diamonds. You underestimate how wildly irrational the market is when it comes to status perception.
Can you recommend me a non apple fanless laptop with similar power/battery life characteristics?
If you want a macbook, go for it. I wouldn’t presume to know your needs more than you. I want something that I can easily run OpenBSD on and is amd64. And none of the apple laptop fits the bill.
I don't own or want anything apple. But I want no fan and maximum possible power/battery life. So I am really looking, but they do seem to offer the best hardware.
Obvious massive asterisk that benchmarks are not always realworld use:
Apple M5, Single core Geekbench: ~4,200 (https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/macbook-pro-14-inch-2025)
Apple M5 Pro (15-core, lower core version), multicore: ~26,000 (https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/18535781)
compare this to the top of the line Intel Panther Lake chips, which have comparable battery life. I cherry picked a 16" Dell XPS machine, which has the best thermal headroom, for its best score: https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/18390748
Single core: ~2,900 Multicore (16-cores): 16,900
Geekbench is bursty, so we can look at more sustained test, Cinebench 2024:
https://nanoreview.net/en/laptop-compare/dell-xps-16-2026-vs...
Single core:
XPS 16 (2026): 111 MacBook Pro 16 (M5, 2026): 203
Multicore: XPS 16 (2026): 613 MacBook Pro 16 (M5, 2026): 2065
on GPU, https://spylab.ai/seo/v5/C54a/
"Despite the XPS 16's discrete Nvidia RTX 4070 laptop GPU, the MacBook Pro M4 Pro's unified memory architecture outpaced the Dell in 4K video export and machine learning inference benchmarks by 22 percent on average."
For GPU, this is not comprehensive. It depends heavily on whether it needs raw grunt, where Nvidia discrete chips will win. When the processes uses the NPUs on Apple's chips, it will often win. They trade blows.
Efficiency I think is close to a wash on the latest machine, but before Panther Lake, Apple's win handily. My Framework 13 on AMD would last me about 2 hours doing regular work; my Macbook Pro doing the same workload would last over 10 hours. Thank goodness Intel caught up here.
I do scientific computing where Apple has some disadvantages. Matrix math heavy things lose out to discrete GPUs, as do -- I'm told -- things depending on 512-bit extensions (e.g., AVX).
Until last week, prices on Framework/Dell vs. Apple were similar. I think Apple is probably 10-20% expesnive at this point, but adjusting for performance, Apple still comes out ahead.
Apple's displays used to have a huge advantage. Now that you can get OLED displays on performant, efficient Panther Lake machines, this is far less of an Apple advantage.
The upshot is that the new Panther Lake machines caught up considerably to Apple, but they're still about 20-30% slower (sometimes more) in most workloads, and IMO the build quality is still not quite as good. I think many of them actually have better displays. Battery life is comparable on better equipped PCs. IMO once you can work an entire day and a little more unplugged, you're good to go.
It's not hard to find this data and evaluate it objectively.
Apple education store isn't subsidized or "for children."
A strange retort. "Yeah well, your CHILD'S COMPUTER is better, but that's for CHILDREN. We're talking adult computers here!"
I dare to say that this market change works both ways. Software is now created by people who have little idea about UI concepts, or even who don't want to bother themselves with these. Because the dominant type of a device is no longer a desktop computer. This isn't about strictly Apple as other companies also create, or allow to exist "awful" interfaces with no substance.
Is it a bad thing? Not necessary. Smartphones revolution made Internet truly accessible to everyone by cost of dumbing down software by features and UI - turning effectively these devices to work like any other home appliance. Software today has to have that captivating appearance so user wouldn't be scared away. But nothing is perfect and there are examples where users are being treated with this nasty infantile approach by literally showing confetti and balloons as the satisfaction derived from interaction.
The peak was flat style which not only introduced maximum simplified interfaces, design but also provided grounds for all sorts of darkpatterns where content is indistinguishable from active element. That let companies manipulate the user's informed choice.
The past 10 years have been a sad, slow decline for Apple's UIs. I'm really hoping for them to reclaim some of their former UI glory. At least, in Golden Gate, they reverted their own HIG violation of excessive icons back to factory: https://www.macrumors.com/2026/06/11/macos-27-golden-gate-me...
The time span and visible effect are both fully attributable to Alan Dye being head of design. It (what we have today) was his style. He made this world.
He’s out now. We can start to do something else.
It's such a shame because back then even Windows was motivated by actual human user research and had thorough guidelines. https://ics.uci.edu/~kobsa/courses/ICS104/course-notes/Micro... (HN discussion from a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22475521 .)
https://movq.de/blog/postings/2026-06-16/0/POSTING-en.html was an interesting look at Win2K's UI controls and how much clearer they are compared to modern UIs.
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.
No they were better. Whether someone likes the style better or not (I do) they were FAR more visually distinct from each other which made it much easier to find the program you wanted to use.
Right now my dock is a soup of squircles. I have to scan multiple times to find icons even though I know roughly where they should be.
They aren’t distinct. They don’t stand out.
That was never a problem until last year. 40 years of Mac was fine. Then that.
I remember getting interested in an app because of the icon looked nice. Also couldn't use apps if the icon was too ugly and spoiled my beautiful dock.
There must be someone senior at Apple that still thinks the squircles look good, I dunno how we're still stuck with them. I haven't made a change to my dock in years and I have to hunt for apps nearly every time I open it. It doesn't help that a lot of newer apps seeming don't actually have a logo and are just happy with some random circular shaped blob.
Same people who thought text on translucent glass over text looked good.
Who thought that and lots of floating buttons was “getting out of the way of my content”.
Who thought sidebars should look like windows with mirrored content under them was smart.
Who thought long horizontal scrolling lists were easy to use.
Who never gave more than one window open at once.
Who are apparently illiterate and need icons everywhere and text nowhere.
They’ve lost the plot and I don’t care what they think. My machine is drastically harder to use than it was just two years ago all to make it “prettier“ even though personally I don’t think it is.
I don't think it's superficial at all.
I genuinely find my apps harder to navigate now than I used to. Part of that is that I have far more apps installed today, but the uniform white borders also contribute. They make every icon look about 20% more similar, which adds just enough friction that scanning for the app I want takes a little longer.
Poorly executed icon shapes were distracting, but when they were done well they provided subtle visual cues that made the interface easier to navigate. I miss that more than I expected.
Yeah the article really drives the point home ending with those icons
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.
I understand this logic, but at some point it makes sense to design the system for the millions of people on macs rather than make compromises for the sake of dozens of Vision Pro users.
For this reason I doubt this was actually why Apple did it.
A lot of confident guesswork is done at HN regarding companies' motivations.
> VisionOS requires round icons for more reliable eye tracking
I'm confused here. What do you think is the relationship between round icons and eye tracking?
They found having round icons made people look at the center, rather than the edges and corners. Since the UX relies entirely on where the user is looking, this made it more reliable.
I remember reading it in the HIG when VisionOS came out and everyone was complaining about the shape. I went looking to see if there was a reason, and there was.
That's interesting, but I think this is solvable in better ways. If the VisionOS icon grid doesn't have a voronoi hit map, then IMO they're doing a stupid. There's a _lot_ of space between icons in the grid. It should be plenty of distance to reliably determine that you're looking nearer to the center of a particular one.
Here is what they say:
> In general, give an interactive item a rounded shape. People’s eyes tend to be drawn toward the corners in a shape, making it difficult to keep looking at the shape’s center. The more rounded an item’s shape, the easier it is for people to use their eyes to target it.
The page also talks about leaving enough visual space between elements as well as many other considerations for this type of interface.
https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...
So what? Thats not MacOS.
I think things are fine on iOS. I don’t mind the rectangles, they fit the grid. That’s how it’s always been.
I don’t care about VisionOS. Circles are odd, whatever.
But the Mac shouldn’t be forced to lose great design because iOS was under different constraints almost 20 years ago. That’s just dumb.
They were trying to make a unified design language across all their operating systems. If iOS and VisionOS both have their icons sitting on uniformly shaped tiles, macOS would break the convention.
I don't like it, but I believe that's the reason why.
Oh I’m sure that’s why they did it. It’s not a good reason. It’s like saying all the food you eat should be beige.
Sure it’s more consistent, but at what cost? You lose all the benefits. It’s like Chesterton’s Fence, except it has a big sign on it saying “beware of bull” and there is a guy nearby saying “you don’t want to let that bull out dude, it’s vicious”.
But you want to take down the fence because it’s not the same style as the one on the pen for the chickens.
In the old days, these different OS would have separate teams and all trying to work on what is best for their own products. Be it mac, iPad, iPhone or what hardware it is.
The foundation may share resources, but everything else was tailor made. And that is what used to make Apple so good.
The moment you try to make one size fits all you will start to make compromise. And the good old Apple would try to do things the hard way rather than making unnecessary compromises.
It is sad.
Like trying to merge a bulldozer, a minivan, and a GT car. Because they all have 4 wheels and an engine.
Oh this is such a great analogy. Thank You.
Are you sure visionOS requires it? Having an icon be a few px smaller so a microphone can stick out, doesn't seem like a big deal for tracking.
The thing sticking outside of the icon draws the eye to it, which means your focus is at the edge instead of the center, which makes for a more error prone experience.
Since the eyes are the cursor, this is a problem. Desktop and mobile don’t have this issue.
Obvious solution, two different icons, round one for Vision OS, more shapely one for everyone else.
Or squirqle jail just on vision OS
Or squirgle jail on a transparent background instead of a grey one? Why would cursor collision with an image stop working because a new input method?
Maybe an animation which focuses the eye on the center of the icon?
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> The thing sticking outside of the icon draws the eye to it, which means your focus is at the edge instead of the center, which makes for a more error prone experience.
And Apple decided this was a problem with icons, rather than a problem with the way they implemented their vision tracking? Believable, and laughable.
"You're looking at it wrong"
It seems like the opposite of this. They tried to adapt the system to the way the eyes naturally work, rather than trying to tell people they needed to overcome their biology to use the system.
This is a false dichotomy. If the software assumes that people focus on the center of the thing they're looking at, the software is wrong. Fix the software.
Where you are looking should not be the cursor, that is obviously dumb. Should be where your nose is pointing.
Regardless, you don't need to make the hitboxes one-to-one with the graphics. Indeed, doing so tends to make for unreliable hitboxes, so most picking systems have two different, idealized enter and exit hitboxes for each icon.
VisionOS, at least as it stands today, will be dead before you know it. If you don't understand what I mean, look up the rumor about the future of Vision Pro.
What a waste of resource to invent the whole Tahoe "design language" only for nothing.
One thing I tend to give Apple a lot of credit for is having a longer term vision (no pun intended). When they release something they tend to stick with it, where others (Microsoft in particular) will kill products pretty fast if it doesn’t look like they are instant hits.
When trying to create a new category, customers need to have some faith it’s going to stick around and they won’t be abandoned. So it’s important to have that long term vision and conviction that the decisions made were the right ones.
That said, I bought the M5 Vision Pro and returned it after a week. It doesn’t feel like a product yet. Vision Pro as a future product might be questionable, but will they abandon spacial computing all together or switch to more of a true AR setup? I think real AR would be much better.
I think now that Cook is stepping down, we could see more change. Cooked seemed a little desperate to make sure Apple looked like an innovative company, when he clearly wasn’t a product guy. I don’t think a a full computer is needed on the face, that was the first mistake, they need a more purpose built device for the few things that make sense in the context of a HUD.
the Vision Pro is the modern day pippin. An ambitious idea that could have done well if not for the terrible execution
Also imo touchscreen Mac tap targets. Sigh.
> 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.
It's prideful too since just undoing it would be an actual admission of failure. This is a hollow apology and compromise
You're totally right. :)
That's just big corporate politics. Ever been involved in a 'lessons learned' exercise? Everything gets politically massaged so as not to upset individuals or functions, so that by the end of it, there are very few meaningful lessons remaining, and those that are still present need background understanding to divine.
This approach just protects the people, the function, and ultimately the corporation.
> outright admission of failure
Right!? Who's out there going "oh no, translucent is too translucent; opaque is too opaque; but now that I can have 72.93% glass, my life is complete"?
Apple designers
I'll take an admission of failure over slavishly refusing to and trying to pretend it's fine.
There were plenty of people saying Liquid Glass was fundamentally an utterly flawed, bad design, that even if you subjectively liked the way it looked, that its design philosophy was wrong, and led to logically consistent but unusable and ugly interfaces, all to solve a problem no one had.
I'm cautiously optimistic now that the bozo cardboard box designer dope with the ugly glasses is gone we'll see a quiet but rapid change of direction. I'll take "mea culpa". I'll take "whelp, this shit does actually just suck, here's a slider while we work on something better".
To me the cherry on top was that they started modifying how third party icons look to match the Liquid Glass. People started complaining to us that our app icon looked blurry because of it.
Apple's own app icons look blurry in iOS 26.
They look fine when zoomed in, and I'm assuming that's all the designers considered as they were redrawing icons, blown up across their 27" monitor. But once you shrink them down to an actual app icon size, the glassy effects on the edges of everything look like a blur.
In iOS 27 they sharpened the edges up and everything looks a lot better.
There's so little joy and happiness left in computing. Reverting to the older style of icons, plus perhaps a few UI tweaks, certainly help bring a bit of whimsical back into the macOS platform. That's something many of us would love.
> There's so little joy and happiness left in computing
Preach it! https://daveon.design/creating-joy-in-the-user-experience.ht...
Great article -but the image has issues with Safari (invisible drag corner), and iOS (a mess).
I have found that we need to be very, very careful, when making the UI more "fun."
Things like rounded affordances, short transition animations, easy-to-understand elements, etc., are good. They remove the "friction."
However, cute icons, unprompted animations, and overuse of whitespace for the sake of design aesthetics, can cause the UI to be too prominent.
UI needs to be approachable, useful, and unobtrusive. i.e. "forgettable." Many designers absolutely can't stand the idea of designing stuff that no one pays attention to; but that's actually exactly what most UI needs to be.
The metaphor that I use, is that most waitstaff at restaurants, wear black.
The reason is, is because people don't go to a restaurant to pay attention to the staff (with a couple of ahem exceptions <owl emoji/>). They go for the food, and the ease of having it provided without the need to cook and wash up.
I feel that UI needs to be the same.
I am currently working on a version 2 of a pretty popular app that has been out for a couple of years. The original was almost entirely designed by a professional graphic designer, and he did a great job -for the most part. It looks great, and people like it.
But I am constantly encountering people that have no idea about some of its most important features, mainly because the affordances were deprecated in service to visual aesthetic. The new version uses a distinct "accent color" for elements that can be manipulated, as well as simpler, clearer design. It's working well.
Another example is my "Spinner" UI element[0]. This was a UIKit element that I designed, to provide an interactive "prize wheel" spinner feature for iOS. It works nicely.
But I have never been able to justify actually using it for any of my projects. It's too "in your face."
[0] https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/RVS_Spinner
Thanks, very nice of you to note that, and I'll fix. The SSG behind it has some updates coming to improve mobile rendering for sidenotes etc already, will add more :)
Drag corner... hmm... seems a change in recent browsers - that has not changed in the website implementation since it worked in all three (FireFox, Chrome, Safari.) And I may have to break my no-Javascript ethos to get it working again!
> my no-Javascript ethos
I can absolutely support that.
Wouldn’t surprise me, if modern CSS can handle it.
> UI needs to be approachable, useful, and unobtrusive. i.e. "forgettable." Many designers absolutely can't stand the idea of designing stuff that no one pays attention to; but that's actually exactly what most UI needs to be.
You can be all those things without being forgettable. What matters to the user is the cohesiveness of the whole experience, not individual widgets. People use apps, they don’t just stand there looking at it like a video playing.
That's a lovely little article. Thank you.
Liquid Glass was a good step in the right direction imo. A choice to make visual entertainment and beauty a priority over pure function.
I feel like what computers really lost was sounds, we used to have so many joyful sounds and background music on computers while now they are all silent. I think it’s a tragedy the Nintendo switch broke the long history of music in the menus and apps.
I wonder if the sound reduction is a result of computers moving into more and more spaces, rather than relegated to a single dedicated area. Beeps and boops going off all the time can be really annoying in public spaces.
Highly likely, though I still think the Nintendo Switch should have had sounds. Maybe computers should restore a dedicated mute switch or something users can toggle when they are in a quiet space.
People started hating when their computers made sound around the time smartphones became big. This is because companies can not be trusted with the ability to make attention grabbing sounds. Sounds should be used to mean something important is happening. It just so happens what Zuck' thinks is important isn't really important
> A choice to make visual entertainment and beauty a priority over pure function.
Except that (in my view, which is shared by many others though of course not universal) Liquid Glass is ugly as sin. Even if it worked properly I’d still rather not have it. But there’s also nothing entertaining or beautiful about unreadable overlapping text, flashing UI as you pan, visually cut off scrollbars, excessively rounded corners, or any from a plethora of bad decisions.
Liquid Glass is the worst of both worlds.
macOS used to be both functional and visually entertaining, and they’ve been removing that incompetently and for no apparent reason. One obvious case is removing an app from the Dock: It used to be that it went away in a quick puff of smoke with an appropriate sound; some versions back they removed the puff of smoke but kept the sound.
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.
> Giving equal visual weight to each icon is an improvement.
Equal visual weight is another way of saying less differentiated.
> "Shape" hasn't disappeared as a distinct visual cue, as the area within the squircle is made of, well... different shapes.
Shape refers to a boundary outline, not interior patterning. A square with polkadots is still shaped like a square.
> A smaller icon is harder to click, because clicking on a transparent area... doesn't click at all.
That problem is only tangential to what shape they allow your icon to be within an enclosing NxN hitbox. Assume an implied framework where clicking on them isn't broken.
Some differentiation between elements must be sacrificed in order to build shared UX patterns between them. I think we can definitely go too far in either direction.
An example of a nice compromise would be the macOS menu bar. Most status icons are monotone, which allows the ones with meaningful color differentiation to shine through without being drowned in the noise or increasing user fatigue.
> user fatigue
Citation needed. What is user fatigue? Can it be empirically measured? Fatigued by what? Too much color? Lack of shape? Too much contrast? Lack of contrast?
When is the last time you were "fatigued" by icons?
Without hard facts the expression is just a wishy-washy way to promote a personal taste.
User fatigue is UX concept and can be measured.
I'd be surprised if squircles reduced user fatigue though - I think a good adjacent example is Googles new icons with the colours that all look similar. Users were complaining immediately that they had to look harder to find the correct app.
Another thing we use everyday - fonts - have differentiated visual spacing and shapes make them easier/quicker to read. So it would make sense for this to apply to icons that serve a similar purpose on a smaller scale.
I'm speaking in the capacity of a professional designer and developer, using industry terminology that any other professional will recognize. Please let the adults talk.
> Without hard facts the expression is just a wishy-washy way to promote a personal taste.
For a moment there, you almost had us thinking that you were interested in learning something.
You seem to conflate different facts that have nothing to do with each other to arrive at a conclusion: There is nothing preventing Apple from not using said click masks while icons retain their distinct shapes. iOS is for mobile, its lessons don't transfer to desktop, and this was proven by Windows 8. That "squircles aren't ugly because they are functional" - how on Earth can those be mutually exclusive even in recognition? Functional very often is at the cost of making things ugly, the history lesson is that Apple more often than others managed to be both functional and beautiful. You also conflate convex pixel area with visual weight, but that is false too.
I’m not a designer but I disagree. I want to be able to easily distinguish apps without much focus or concentration or searching. Making them visually distinct with shape and color is superior. Uniformity is a problem not a target.
Hard disagree. For me quircles make finding the desired app way more difficult…
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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.
In fact the HIG used to explicitly say so with clear examples proving it.
and which was backed by scientific evidence from controlled trials and human factors and psychology.
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
It really was Mac OS X's Vista moment.
Edit: It'll always be Mac OS X to me, not macOS.
Yes! You are not alone. The name Mac OS X has always felt special to me.
Windows Vista primarily suffers from technical issues. Aero is virtually unchanged in 7.
Mac OS X 27.
10.27?
But that means there were two each of 10.11, 10.12, 10.13, 10.14, and 10.15 :-)
OS X? Surely you mean Rhapsody
Apple CEOs always seem to want to make a splash via hardware (especially since the guy worked in hardware engineering) but it would be nice if an engineer brings more focus on the software as well.
They have a new head designer too IIRC, but probably is going to take some time for him to slowly move away from the mess he inherited.
Alan Dye was brought in during the Jony Ive era when they were launching the first Apple Watch because he came from a fashion/print background. Before Apple really figured out what the Watch was going to be (a health/fitness accessory for your phone) they were going for the "luxury fashion" angle.
Somehow when Ive left, Dye got put in charge of design even though he had zero experience in software design that anyone seems to be aware of. He was criticized for the years following for a lot of bizarre design regressions that were happening across all of Apple's OSes. Then a few months after Dye himself announced Liquid Glass at WWDC last year, he blindsided Apple by accepting a poaching offer from Meta, seemingly because Zuck isn't aware of how untalented the guy is.
Now Stephen Lemay is in charge, who's been at Apple for many years and actually knows stuff about software design. It's said that within the walls of Apple, a lot of people were very happy about the change, and the first showing of design changes we got since then are looking very good for Apple.
> seemingly because Zuck isn't aware of how untalented the guy is.
Maybe Zuck just wanted his laptop to get better.
> Now Stephen Lemay is in charge, who's been at Apple for many years and actually knows stuff about software design
And who was Dye's second in command, and who was integral in coming up with Liquid Glass, designing it, and forcing it down everyone's throat.
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The bit about internal rumblings at Apple I definitely read from him but the rest is just things we saw play out publicly over the past decade.
I have no real love for Alan Dye but you should probably understand that Gruber feels it is a personal affront that someone might work for a company that is not Apple.
Are you suggesting Gruber is upset at Dye for leaving Apple?
We all disliked Dye before he left. People were taking potshots at Apple's design direction under him for 10 years.
He thinks Dye was never good enough to be at Apple and that he would think of leaving proves it
Is there something you perceive as unfair about judging a guy on the output of the work he was responsible for over a long period of time?
You will note that this is not what is being judged as I described in my comment that you just replied to
Gruber does not have a monopoly on disliking Alan Dye’s work. On the contrary, I never met anyone who knew UI design was a thing that liked what he did.
When you’re using a tool for 40 years and someone who really has no clue gets in charge, starts breaking basic functionality for no good reason and affecting your day to day work, it’s not hard to get infuriated.
How do you think thay worked? Alan Dye alome came up with, designed and somehow forced Liquid Glass into every platform? Lemay, who was his second in command had nothing to do with it? It was Alan Dye single-handedly doing it?
I am very, very curious how he reached, stayed that long at the top of the org chart and convinced so many people that this was a good direction to take.
If I were at Apple's leadership I'd consider that a major blindspot and focus deeply on fixing it.
Perhaps (any of these can be true, or false):
- He wasn't the only one pushing it? Lemay was described in Bloomberg as one of the key people behind Liquid Glass
- The vision wasn't as bad as it turned out to be, but it was rushed because of yearly releases and Apple having nothing to present?
- None of the senior leadership use the devices beyond occasionally, so they couldn't care less what's happening to the UX?
On your first point, I don't know if Lemay merely agreed to keep his job or was an enthusiast of the vision. But it is a bit worrisome, if Bloomberg is to be believed.
On your second, Liquid Glass is merely the culmination of years of bad direction. Hiding essential feature on hover (notification's close icon, elapsed time on Apple Music, proxy icon, etc), poor contrast, legibility, background/foreground differentiation, was a long running process.
On your third point, I think it's possible and, if that's the case, deeply troubling.
> I don't know if Lemay merely agreed to keep his job
Again: why do you keep assigning Dye God-like powers? There wasn't just Lemay. There's no end of senior designers and senior product people, Federighi and his minions etc. at Apple.
In the end we still got Liquid Glass.
> On your second, Liquid Glass is merely the culmination of years of bad direction.
Indeed. Easily hundreds of people across several platforms saw this direction. Somehow we are led to believe that all of them were against this direction, and Dye single-handedly forced all the changes through.
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> slowly move away from the mess he inherited.
The mess he actively implemented and was an integral part of?
Why do people keep thinking that Alan Dye was the only person (apparently with God-like powers) who somehow forced and designed Liquid Glass alone, in isolation, and somehow sneaked it in to every Apple platform.
Because he's now a Traitor, an Un-person, so every sin can be safely attributed to him without losing faith in the glorious Party.
Such is the world of Apple fans.
Golden Gate is better but it hasn't fixed your icons unfortunately
The thing which kills me, is that with entirety of the State of California's Gazetteer to pull from, Apple didn't pull a page from Android and use an alphabetically ordered naming scheme so that folks could determine ordering of versions.
You know, someone should invent an infinite sequence of ordinal symbols which we could use to place things in a sequence. It could start with a simple vertical line, something like "1". Maybe someone more clever than me can come up with the next symbol.
Unfortunately, I lost track of how Mac OS X was numbered after 10.7.whatever the last iteration was.
Doesn't much matter, since 10.6.8 was the last version I truly enjoyed using.
Codenames are meant to tickle the pride of this or that manager, not be useful to customers.
They also need to function as workable identifiers, and their being confusing works against folks.
Same. Apple and Adobe seem to constantly have updates that feel one step forward, two steps back in a lot of places.
Don't know if this is what you want to do or not, but you can actually change app icons for Applications however you like if you have the alternate that you want it to be. I'll tell you how
Applications Folder (in Finder) -> Right-click on the target app -> Get Info -> Drag-and-drop the intended icon file to the top-left corner where the original icon is present.
Ik it's just a way to customise and not something official but your Mac looks the way you want it to.
Even Apple has forgotten about this it seems. There are various places in the UI where this change is not respected, e.g. Stage Manager.
Interesting... I had used this trick many times in the past, but assumed that with Tahoe it would put the icon in the little squircle jail it puts other default icons in if they don't conform to the new standards. Those end up looking really bad. I just tried it with a non-conforming icon and it seems to work.
Time to go icon hunting.
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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.
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.
Early on, when UI/UX was emerging as a discipline, user reaction times and accuracy were measured across a large number of participants. There are many stories during the development of the Lisa and Mac of unexpected user behavior and results.
We shouldn’t be guessing if uniformity helps distinguish between apps or not. We could very easily test it.
But UI/UX has long distanced itself from science, for whatever reason. Maybe because users are so proficient these days that almost anything works. We used to required training on how to use a mouse, menus and windows.
It’s been probably a decade since I’ve heard anyone mention Fitt’s law, for instance, and Liquid Glass atrocities are direct a consequence of disregarding all that was learned in this field.
I'm pretty sure Nielsen already tested it, if I had to guess they probably found that different icon shapes are broadly better but that gets ignored because "it's cheaper to use some shitty vector squiggle in a round rect", just like the research that found "icons are better when there is text" is widely ignored too because internationalization costs money.
I mostly lament the simplification of app icons as an artistic loss, not as a usability loss. Shameless plug, but I made a project based on the idea of icons as pure art with no utility https://www.benedelste.in/post/__001
I can see both sides. Artistic constraints can suck, but on the other hand, for every app with a truly beautiful icon design, like the ones listed in the "It Doesn’t Have to Be Like This" section, how many apps have truly awful icon designs? The dock is prime visual real estate, and as a user, I'd like some kind of constraint that makes it less likely some crazy art style is going to be imposed on my desktop just because I need an app there.
As an aside, Rogue Amoeba are one of an ecosystem of great and greatly passionate indie software houses for the Mac.
All of them create excellent software with polished UIs, provide excellent support and never forget to have fun. This seems to be unique to the Mac, at least at this scale.
Great design is more about consistency than uniformity.
Just imagine how hard it would be to read a text if all the words had a similar shape! You want them to look very distinct while the predictability of the layout helps you read (which is consistency).
> With color now so critical to tell icons apart, it should be no surprise that the new “Clear” and “Tinted” icon styles added in Tahoe are seeing so little uptake. As Adam Engst noted, “[I]t’s nearly impossible to identify a particular app when they’re all clear or tinted squircles, as you can see below. My brain just shuts down when it sees them.”
Also, that's true for a lot of normal application icons. Any Google application, including of course Chrome, but also Slack, Apple Photos, etc ... they all decided to use a "abstract red green yellow blue" logo on a white background. Of course, Google is the main culprit here. IntelliJ icons are another variant but still a pain to recognize and they add so much fun when they are mixed with Google ones.
And that's for the multicolor icons. Less problematic but still are "one color abstract on white background", like how am I supposed to distinguish Jira from Confluence ?
Also my personal bonus is that I have slimmed down high reflective glasses which creates chromatic aberrations so all those multicolor icons are dismantled when they are in my peripheral vision.
Your last paragraph is why I no longer have my lenses thinned. It's cheaper too!
> 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.
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.
I'm on Tahoe and when i built an app using neutralino js the png icon was way bigger than the other icons, i needed to add padding to make the squircle look normal. So honestly i dont think this is a software thing, its more of designers designing it this way or only using their icon composer software which creates imaginary limitations.
Any linux kid with a slightest experience with desktop ricing would tell them that uniformly customized icons are a nightmare for visual recognition. Why didn't they run some internal tests, it's so obvious
Maybe it's just me, but I never really liked the detailed older mac icons, like the examples at the bottom of the page. I've always enjoyed more minimalist, simple user interfaces. And I can understand what Apple are trying to do by standardising their icons on the squircle (even if the execution is a bit iffy sometimes, the big grey border doesn't look great). Though, judging by everyone else's writings, I'm probably in the minority
I find the squircle jail just creates a lot of confusion for me, having distinct shapes helps a lot at a glance.
What happened to being able to use themes and skins? Is it just corporate control? Why can't Windows or Mac has a CSS-style system where users can use custom style sheets? It doesn't have to go as far as classic Winamp but just going back to what we had in Win85 would be nice. (and I know there are things like Stardock's Windowblinds but why isn't it built in?)
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...
https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/s/9MZsGioCG6
What is the most annoyig is that the effin' rest of the world had to follow and embrace this stupid trend :/
Luckily on Android and Linux I can select custom icon sets that can have shapes…
It is always great to see more people be vocal about the poison of flat design
Custom, free-shaped icons are too costly. Much more economical to have a square. It will never happen, unfortunately.
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.
I never understood this sick decision. I used to use the shapes to identify apps.
Most cartoon characters have very distinctive silhouettes and I don't think it's a coincidence. Remember "Who's that Pokemon?"
Squircle from above!
I don't know if it's a real screenshot at the bottom of OP (the blue on black icons), but that' hilarious if it is.
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.
Tangential related, but i find Icons should have a animated tooltip- when hovered over prolonged, they should tell what the program should do in a cyclical svg-animation.
I am sad that I will not have both Rosetta 2 and a tolerable UI for the remainder of my life.
> Let’s return to a world of gorgeous app icons like these:
Seriously, they look like pictures you could find in a child's book, and it's a form of occupational deformation when you think of those icons as "gorgeous".
I find them gorgeous.
Admittedly, the term is unavoidably subjective. But what I like about them is that they are distinct, and that each one has character. Honestly, the fact that they looked like pictures I could find in a child's book is the main part of what I like about them: they have simple ideas ("a bird") and forms so distinctive a child could tell them apart.
Ok, but how would you feel if the dashboard of your car had images that made it look like a child's toy? Or your watch? You've maybe grown accustomed to it on your smartphone, but it has little to do with great taste (imho).
A physical thing has more degree of freedom to differentiate things. Loke distance and form. So much that you can be blind and still be able to use them.
A conputer interface does not have those. You need to track the cursor and then decide how you want to move it. There’s no muscle memory. And no tactile perception. What’s left is visual differentiation and it should be slightly exaggerated.
> and it should be slightly exaggerated
The problem is that you can go too far here, and it is in fact reminding me of:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
It can be. But I prefer slighty more than slightly less for things that I’m using daily. My apple tv remote is more beautiful than my AVR remote, but I strongly prefer the latter. Same with my big mechanical keyboard vs my apple one.
"A unique, memorable icon expresses your app’s or game’s purpose and personality and helps people recognize it at a glance."
"In iOS, iPadOS, and macOS, icons are square, and the system applies masking to produce rounded corners that precisely match the curvature of other rounded interface elements throughout the system and the bezel of the physical device itself."
Source: Apple https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...
lol
Same for Android. Hate adaptive icons...
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.
Every time I see criticism of MacOS Tahoe, it just makes me suspect that someone without experience went on an ego trip.
That being said, should I skip Tahoe and wait for whatever comes next? MacOS keeps nagging me to upgrade to Tahoe, but I've been holding off because HN hates it so much.
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.
That gives me an idea for an icon pack. TL;DR path-traced voxel art, isometric render.
Alas, I'm no designer.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
What's been keeping Linux from having gorgeous icons up to this point?
Someone with 5000 hours design experience needs to make a common icon theme for a few 100 GTK and QT libraries and standard-names. It feels like it's 1000s of hours of work. And then you have to make them available in a few formats, HDPI, maybe a build system, etc. there are a number of themes but the ones I try seem to be missing one or more of the icons from the set. Just need the right volunteers to build them, and also get a bunch of app-builders to adopt them, and figure out what colour the bike-shed should be (blue).
Why volunteer? Why not find a way to pay someone for the value of their time at market rate and release the product of their labor under a permissive license?
For the last 25+ years I've been hearing folks say: "why not find a way". But then not suggest anything more than that obvious answer.
Please suggest an actual path forward, an actual plan that is more than just "figure it out". And the plan needs to address at least 1/2 of the points I made above.
It's a "Hard Problem". The answer needs lots of time, likely money and at least two humans with strong drive to fix the problem.
Linux these days is almost exclusively developed by companies with combined value exceeding Apple's several-fold.
Finding money and designers is not really a hard problem.
We've managed to make the entire corpus of open source software but the thing that's a "Hard Problem" that nobody can find a way to do is making the icons look good?
It's almost like it's not a technical challenge, it's that getting good looking icons would require a unified userbase, and Apple has that but Linux does not.
Yeah what if these open source developers just got jobs and then they paid someone to do what they used to do for free?
Yeah, it’s amazing what you can accomplish when you find a way to pay people a livable wage for the things you want.
As a bit of a shameless plug, I did some in the past[0] and am working sporadically on a "fork" of those[1] but it's a whole full-time work. There are hundreds of icons to do for apps alone. Each one needs to be done in 16x16, 22x22, 32x32, 64x64, 128x128 and 256x256 so if say you have 150 icons to do for apps, you actually will need to do 900 icons. And add to that that you'll need to cover categories, places, filetypes, actions...
Granted, you can do a 256x256 and scale it down to 128x128, for example, but if you care for quality some details will be lost anyway. So that's why nowadays you'll see most icon themes are just a bunch of logos plastered over a shaped background.
And what irked me the most was that a few weeks after that I released that first set via deviantart and opendesktop.org there were websites that included them in their sets and made them available for download in their websites, not even a redirect to my deviantart or opendesktop pages or something. And found out after that that some people were using them in commercial projects and stuff so I had to chase them asking to not use them since they were cc-by-nc'ed.
Never got a single cent of any of that. I love making icons, at some point I was even working for the icons that would eventually become the Breeze set for KDE5 with their VDG, but it happens that I also need money to buy the beans.
[0] https://miler.codeberg.page/?prj=rekt
[1] https://miler.codeberg.page/?prj=betelgeuse
These are very nice (especially the Betelgeuse set), but -- unless this is just chance from the ones displayed -- don't they mostly all have the same silhouette, a rounded rectangle? While the Betelgeuse ones have more flair and are more differentiable from each other, an excellent thing, locking them in a box is the same kind of jail that this article is about.
I would love to encourage you to free your own icons from the round-rect jail. You have some fantastic designs there.
There are plenty of Icon packs suitable to all aesthetic preferences. Just nobody is going to write a blog post ragging a some Icon Pack b/c if you don't like it then it's trivial to change to a "better" one (that said I still think the arguments in the blog post are interesting and worth considering)
To the blog's point - many KDE Icon Packs have non-uniform shapes (ex: I'm currently using Newaita)
GNOME simplified its icons primarily to make life easier for app developers: http://jimmac.musichall.cz/blog/2019-01-23-the-big-app-icon-...
(They still have different shapes, though)
I think illustration isn't something too much in the mindshare of open source, so overall support for it isn't great. IMO this has contributed to it. The industry standard tools are all closed, with closed formats, so it just sounds like much more of a hassle vs contributing code/text.
I mean this throughout the whole process. The only standard illustration file format I can think of is SVG, but it's largely a format to export to, not one industry-standard software uses as it's main persistence format.
So for starters, contributors tend to need access to speciality software they probably don't have installed to view and edit the source of truth. This also means you're handling at least two files in your VCS, the closed format acting effectively as a blob, no diffs, etc. and an export file (usually more, for different scales) to actually interface with the rest of the ecosystem; this is the file everyone can open, inspect and compare, the one your build consumes, etc.
This already would be a good amount of friction for someone familiar with the tools, but designers are not necessarily familiar with git, the PR process, etc. Add to it that icons are more subjective than code, which overall should follow certain rules and either works or doesn't, and it overall seems not worth it for a casual contributor.
They have other, arguably more important, yaks to shave.
It's part of "What's been keeping Linux from having good UX up to this point?"
Making good products means lots and lots of drudgery, just for fun volunteers aren't going to touch that, and the stereotypical FOSS contributor is the type that's clueless about UX and puts stability above everything else.
Have fun convincing someone feature x is too overengineered to be usable by anyone who's not an alpha geek and should be simplified to a single switch. Not to mention proper large scale usability testing likely being unaffordable.
So designers stayed far, far away.
a question as old as Linux itself
It'll take just a few prompts to customize all your icons the way you like.
looks at Android icons
shivvers Please no
Design is a cost center now at Apple. Must be reduced and minmaxed.
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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.
The real question isn’t whether LIQUID should be BLURRY but whether intentionally choosing a BLURRY user interface design is STUPID.
Apple spent millions convincing everyone they needed Retina displays and then churned out an update that made them all blurry.
I agree Liquid Glass is bad a lot of the time (some parts have grown on me)
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.
You can’t. “Squircle jail” is a real thing. If your icon isn’t the right shape Apple puts it inside one for you.
>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.
That's not the "it's not just X—it's Y" AI tell that I assume you've seen other people call out.
It's legitimately a useful sentence to assist the point the author is making.