Mac OS X and Windows had their best design language from 2007 to 2011. Windows Aero and Mac OS X Aqua during these days were truly beautiful graphical shells. Everything since has been a barren wasteland of boring, overly white flat GUIs. The squircle-ifying (and on Android, circle-ifying) going on is just another step in this path towards the eternal uniformity of the heat death of fun, intuitive UIs.
The icons for Leopard-era programs were outstanding. Look at that dark indigo ink jar for Pages, or that wormhole graphic for Time Machine. The comforting smooth grey gradient of window title bars, contrasted with the large, globular traffic light buttons. A typeface that worked well with the lower-resolution displays of the time, and unique icons for everything at every single size. Apple actually had a massive human interface guidelines document, which was promptly binned with Yosemite.
On Windows, that dark blue Start orb and the cool dark task bar, signalling a whole new OS experience. The new Welcome Centre. Freshly rewritten programs and new ones like Windows Media Player and Windows Photo Viewer, and the absolute beauty that was the Windows Media Centre. Flip 3D, customising the glass window borders, and the huge, high-resolution 512 × 512 icons of the high-quality, no-ads games shipped with Windows Vista and 7, which still stand up to this day.
For all it's flaws: Vista was a truly breathtakingly beautiful operating system. I still remember fondly the matte frosted dark tinted hue from the start menu and the strong deep red of the shutdown button. Everything shimmered and refracted, with almost a tactile feel. My first iPhone felt like I was interacting beyond the current dimension, the retina display with the skeumorphic design made it feel like I wasn't just interacting with software, I was interacting with another digital world... and my first Macbook was similar; every application was gorgeously rendered natively: something even Windows couldn't manage despite having the lions share of developers.
All this, on LCD panels that were comically abysmal compared to the colour accuracy of the displays we take for granted today, and with less than a quarter of the pixels.
The thing is: I think the same issue plagues software also, that when it becomes a place where good money can be made, you attract people who want to make money and, by necessity, push out all the people who were there for the passion.
Diminishing quality of art and engineering sort of go hand-in-hand if MBAs need to make room for themselves and set up fiefdoms.
I'd say Vista introduced or changed—for the better—a ton of Windows paradigms, most of which still endure. User account control, dwm.exe and the WDDM, improved user profiles, the ribbon UI, and more. Vista had the most pervasive changes to Windows in the past two decades, from UI and UX to fundamental OS primitives, APIs, and syscalls.
Disdain levelled at Vista is unfair—it was a heavyweight OS that needed better hardware than was really commonplace at the time.
As for money now being the end game... I have no words. The stupid Weather app (sorry, no, WebView2 wrapper) on Windows 10 and 11 is exasperating.
What it really needed was more than the intel 915 all too many prebuilts cheaped out using, which intel strong-armed MS into certifying as 'vista ready' when it absolutely wasnt.
I think this offers some interesting thought experiments in [tech] leadership:
* what would you have done in Jim Allchin's position? He disagreed once finding out but ultimately trusted his team's judgement and stood by their decision (isn't that exactly the manager you want to work for?) Yet, look at the results
* hypothetically how do you think Steve Jobs would have handled it, by contrast?
* but Windows is a whole ecosystem with many stakeholders, while Apple is not, so the balancing act between Intel and HP is much more delicate. (Apple ultimately ditched Intel, right? But could Microsoft?)
We were promised that the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One generation of hardware would be significantly more powerful than it ended up being.
The amount of backlash we received because the quality of the final product we produced was lower than what we showed to the public was insane and continues to this day.
For context, I worked at Ubisoft on Tom Clancy’s The Division. this was the same period where watch dogs released.
I think we did the right thing, not because we chose to and that we were being an altruistic; but because we were forced to- by the first party console manufacturers as part of certification requirements.
If you release something that you know will perform poorly, that’s on you. It doesn’t matter if you’re Intel in this situation or if your Microsoft in this situation they are both equally guilty of allowing it to happen.
How do you assign blame in that situation? You don’t. they both should’ve done better.
as soon as Microsoft realised that Windows Vista would perform poorly on current generation hardware that the majority of the population had they should’ve worked to downgrade the visual elements and optimise the bloat away even at the cost of features.
When Intel realised that the 98% desktop market leader was going to release something that had graphical intensity requirements, they should have put more emphasis and effort into producing higher quality graphics processing capabilities- it’s not like Windows Vista had a short time it was in development for many many years
The right thing in hindsight absolutely would've been for Microsoft to not relent, because of the power balance. Even back then when Intel was still a behemoth, Intel needed Microsoft more than the other way around. Hence why they were the ones begging MS, not the other way around.
What would Intel have done, only supply chips to.. what? Linux machines? Macs? A funny fantasy, obviously unthinkable. Or go wage a marketing campaign against MS? That too in effect would cause lower sales of new machines if anything, directly hurting Intel.
MS would've seen large benefits especially in the long term.
Now this is all very easy to say in 2025, but I think MS should've known this, yet greatly underestimated the negative effects that this would have. The people making the decision probably thought "it'll be okay, and worth staying super chummy with Intel". Probably plenty of golf trips and steak dinners were exchanged.
Ditching or otherwise snubbing Intel would've been unthinkable in that time period; they were the undisputed performance kings on the desktop. Apple themselves had just moved to Intel, and made a big deal out of it, too.
The other day we found my wifes laptop from 2009, complete with the original Vista install. Still in hibernation from about 12 years back! Firing up vista is a visual feast. For all its technical and usability offlaws, Microsoft absolutely nailed the aesthetics it.
Another on that hill/cemetary. I remember how mush I wish for a computer that was capable of running Win7 (I was on (P2?) with 512mb of memory and 64mb vram). The OS was a delight from turning it on. I have a friend that has Mavericks on his macbook, and that was another amazing experience.
Even today, you look at screenshots of ios 6, and it's still timelessly beautiful. Some apps were atrocious, but you recognize them from a mile away.
I prefer the less-so but still skeuomorphic designs that pre-dated that period. The default Windows 2000 theme, as well as Mac OS 9, both had just enough drop shadow to make it clear what was and was not clickable, and used just enough color to show what was currently selected or active, without going into the angry fruit cocktail color schemes that pre-dated it in command line programs and followed it up in the super-saturated hyper-skeuomorphic themes of the mid to late aughts.
Luna has better colors, Aero is pale slime colored. Luna has bright green colorful checkbox, Aero has pale slime colored checkbox. Luna has nicely drawn light blue scrollbars, Aero has pale slime colored scrollbars. Luna has colorful warm orange window background, Aero has cold pale slime colored window background. Luna has colorful orange button highlight, Aero has cold slime colored button highlight. Luna has an awesome Power Blade style progress bar, Aero suddenly has a colorful progress bar, but with gimmicky animation of a spinner doing nothing. Luna has colorful gradient window caption, Aero has pale slime colored window caption with gimmicky gloss. Also Aero has too thick window borders.
IIRC Vista had a HIG document to par with Apple's and it's not surprising because they really wanted to change interface and kept it unified. Which worked for the most part but event today, in flat style era there are still 9x widgets deep down below that cannot be rooted out. What they could do was flattening these down.
But with release of Office 2007 and Windows Live suite they started changing interface again and Windows 7 was based upon slight plastic flatness and ribbons all over the place.
There was a community ran project Windows Taskforce that tried to catch up all sorts of interface quirks and with provided mockups they wanted MS to further polish their flagship project between Vista and 7. Sadly all these efforts were gone when MS decided to go Metro in Windows 8.
It's interesting, I always see a lot of love for the more "blobby" (for lack of a better word) UIs from that era, whereas I've always preferred flat UI design. I just think it looks cleaner personally. If the actual functionality of windows wasn't so garbage, I'd really like its more flat UI design in recent times.
Its the same with websites, where I routinely see people unhappy with flat website design, but I deliberately made my website a lot more flat because I think it just looks better. Not to detract from your opinion at all, you can like what you like, but I've just never understood the appeal of vista/xp era UI design over flat design
One thing about the AppleScript icon that you don’t notice until you pay attention is that that the paper curls to form an “S”. The rotation and the reduced emphasis on the paper's edge in the update breaks that imagery.
It's not a nit that has to be picked, but it does dim Apple's "whoa, they thought that through?" aura.
Edit: So, upon doing some more inspection, it looks like Apple's Script Editor already does use this fallen-over paper. So that should challenge our assumptions about what the rotation may or may not mean as a portent for Apple's design competency.
https://help.apple.com/assets/65DFB44F6D920677C90E20C9/65DFB...
The Script Editor logo used to be a physical paper with the AppleScript logo printed on it correctly, but seen at an angle in perspective (so the AppleScript logo was tilted as a result), with a pen on top.
When they switched from the original physical-looking icons, whichever designer drew the new one wasn't paying attention and apparently didn't understand the physical context of the previous logo and they screwed up the revision by keeping the (now-nonsensical) tilt.
Past canaries of Apple's software downfall: Scripting and the new Notification Center.
The key thing to make macOS feel welcoming to everybody from noobs to the nerdiest of power users: Pretty much all functionality used to be accessible using an easy GUI, and keyboard shortcuts, and scripting and command line interface.
At some point Apple Script support started to thin out. I started to worry a bit at this point. Apps that power users care about rely on scripting support. I felt that advanced users have fallen outside the target audience of the product.
Then the new Notification Center came out. And suddenly there was no way of reacting to individual notifications from the keyboard. Two interfaces were no out! No keyboard shortcuts. No scriptability. You HAVE to use the mouse!
Core functionality was suddenly inaccessible using the PRIMARY input device!
How is it possible that the accessibility of such major OS functionality is this poor!
At this point I felt that it's not about target audiences, but about indifference. They don't much care.
Someone once said that monopolies are often never toppled - instead they just become irrelevant over time. This is what happened to Windows. The OS monopoly still exists, but it's no longer the center of anyone's attention.
The same seems to have happened to MacOS. It's as if it has become unimportant inside Apple.
I don't follow him closely, but I'd always thought that John Gruber - while often a very good writer - got a little too much exposure to the Reality Distortion Field. So I'm a little surprised to see him come down so hard on this.
Was I wrong about Gruber or is this a proverbial canary in the coal mine?
Apple enthusiasts like John Gruber believe in an ideal Apple. (See his reference to the Founder's "backs of the cabinets" quote.) The real company is distinct from this ideal. Believers support the company's actions so long as they can be plausibly squared with the ideal. But when the company strays—by phoning in design, or being stingy (iCloud's 5 GB free tier)—they respond with equally vocal criticism.
This comment reminds of me of these such philosophical dualisms:
- Form (Formal Blueprint of Ideas) vs Appearances (Actual Manifestation of Ideas) (Plato)
- Noumenal (how things are in themselves) vs Phenomenal (how things appear) (Immanuel Kant)
Gruber has been an idealistic and longtime Apple observer. This is probably why he seems to invoke the Idea of Apple to compare and critique the current Appearance of Apple.
Fascinated to see a remark on HN that reminds me of this concept in philosophy.
"These are the not the work of carpenters who care about the backs of the cabinets they’re building. These icons are so bad, they look like the work of untrained “How hard can it be?” dilettante carpenters who only last a few days on the job before sawing off one of their own fingers. The whole collection looks like the work from someone with no artistic ability nor an eye for detail. From Apple, of all companies."
No, he shared on Dithering that there was a back-and-forth email exchange about the execs appearing on the Talk Show as usual, but they couldn't come to an agreement on details of the event.
Cook makes shareholders happy but he's not much of a leader. Jobs was a leader.
The butterfly keyboard catastrophe whereby Apple sold broken laptops for 4 years just because they didn't want to waste money retooling, would never have happened under Jobs. Jobs had the courage to say fuck the shareholders when necessary, Cook does not and it's a recurring theme of his leadership.
Being a 70's child, thus having lived through most Apple consumer history, I would say it slowly feels like the Apple of old, when Steve Jobs was busy with NeXT and Pixar, the main difference is that now they have enough money to burn and make dumb decisions.
I recently got a newer iPhone and moved to iOS 18 with the hardware change. I had to watch some youtube tutorials explaining navigation and swipe locations. Over and over I've had the thought "this never would have flown under Steve."
Gruber seemed like an Apple sycophant for a while because his values and tastes aligned very closely with Apple's (though he still criticized them from time to time). Now, Apple is drifting away from those values and tastes and so Gruber and others in that sphere of Apple blogs are coming down harder on Apple, especially after Alan Dye made such a mess with "Liquid Glass".
> especially after Alan Dye made such a mess with "Liquid Glass".
Your comment makes it seem like Gruber is a big critic of Liquid Glass like many commenters on HN are, but that's not the case. He's certainly critical of some of the execution details like icons or translucency that can hinder reading, but his stance on it is pretty nuanced leaning toward cautiously optimistic.
Listen to the episode of The Talk Show with Louie Mantia. They really rip on Alan Dye and Liquid Glass. Not so much the _idea_ of Liquid Glass, which I think they appreciate, but its execution, which is shoddy, inconsistent, and reveals a dearth of holistic thinking about UI design.
I suppose life is very different inside the citadel. You get curated and triaged feedback from users, Tim Cook doesn't really have opinions about usability and design choices, so there's no one in charge of the classroom.
The reality is in spite of nice touches like call filtering, software quality and usability are both clearly going down.
And Apple's moat, which is a combination of ecosystem lock-in and graphic design, is threatened from one side by AI and from the other by whatever Liquid Glass is supposed to be.
This is the answer. Gruber has and will continue to criticize Apple, but there has generally been very little room for daylight between his values and those of the company (either as expressed in their products or by their leadership). Also, while he doesn't say it, but I suspect that there has long been a feedback loop where his articles defending the company line are well-received internally and have helped him get press access to executives (for his WWDC live show) and preview hardware.
All that said, there has been a marked change since John's "Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino". Reading between the lines, it's pretty clear that Apple leadership did not like this article and snubbed him for his liveshow. Since then, there have been many more articles critical of Apple on daringfireball.net.
I think it's more the case that Apple is just one of those companies where people tend to leap to the "sycophant" accusation to describe anybody who likes Apple more than a little, because of the (perhaps historical) visibility of their super-fans.
To be frank, Apple earns (earned?) the majority of its applause.
Does anyone have an example of a design team concluding that the right move is not to change anything?
I really think a big chunk of the problem is that it’s very hard for anyone to say to their employer that they shouldn’t be doing work. People like having a job and finding work not to do feels scary.
Selection bias dictates that if this happens you won’t notice it.
I can think of a few times people have been waiting for a refresh of something only to be slightly disappointed that not much or nothing changed: even when there was really nothing wrong.
Hardware-wise: The Volvo X60 and X90 series of cars.
Software wise: Chrome, perhaps, only one major visual change in 15 years.
Disk Utility — a very important app — has an icon that’s just an Apple logo (inside the bolt that’s inside the wrench that’s inside the squircle). Not a hard drive, not an external drive, not an SD card. Just an Apple logo.
He is wrong... It's the glass disk that Tim handed over to Donald in the White House.
> Apps that haven’t been updated with Tahoe-compliant everything-fits-in-a-squircle icons are put in “squircle jail” — their non-Tahoe-compliant icons are shrunk and placed atop a drab gray Tahoe squircle background, to force them into squircle compliance.
I've been replacing some app icons with their older, non-square versions for years (Firefox is probably my favorite). Will be disappointing to lose that option -- I've never understood why Apple feels the need to standardize app icons like this.
I am in general quite dismayed with macOS becoming more and more iOS-like. There is a reason the two operating systems were different, and it was quite nice, to be honest. Not to say that I don't like sharing the liquid glass design language, but stuff like this this forced squircle is really sad to me, too.
I feel like that's the crux of everything that sucks about computing these days: everything tending toward the lowest common denominator of a smartphone UI and a cheap whore of a webpage
I'd like someone running macOS 26 to weigh in here, but I'm not sure it's true that - if you replace an app icon (presumably by pasting in the Finder Get Info window) - the replacement is also confined to squircle jail?
A crescent wrench is a brand of adjustable wrench. I believe Gruber meant open-end wrench, or, because I’m Canadian a British etc roots, I call it a spanner. Either way, I agree the “artist” who drew this has never used such a device, and may not, in fact, qualify as an artist.
> Either way, I agree the “artist” who drew this has never used such a device, and may not, in fact, qualify as an artist.
I was surprised when the article originally leaped to the insane conclusion that someone who created a stylized software icon with (what may not even be) a less-than-perfectly-accurate depiction of a wrench has never used one, but I’m not surprised to see this kind of doubling down on the absurdity from the HN comment section.
Conversely, I disagree; and assert that it is rather John Gruber who has not used nearly enough open ended spanners.
If one has only ever used modern forged steel spanners, then one might think that they aren't this width, and have the jaws at an angle. But try looking at antique tools. There have been a lot of spanners over the past couple of centuries that have looked like the picture.
If I saw a spanner like this in real life, I'd be thinking first half 20th century, possibly from a motorcycling kit, and Imperial and useless. (-:
I don't know if Gruber has ever used a wrench in any serious capacity, because he doesn't mention how the handle in the icons comes exactly at 0 degrees (instead of 15 degrees as in real life.)
As it stands, both the old and the new icons depict handles at 0 degrees, and the old ones depict octagonal open wrenches and not hexagonal ones.
I think it's a mistake to pick apart the wrench icon, but if you're going to make a major issue out of it, at least be exhaustive and consistent in your criticism.
I don’t think anyone is saying it’s a brand of wrench. Just that it is a generic term for a very different kind of wrench with an adjustable jaw. Famous for rounding off the corners of perfectly serviceable nuts, bolts, and all manner of pipe fittings. The wrench in the logo is an open end wrench (typically would have a closed end wrench on the other side)
The NextSTEP people have all retired. The real canary in the coalmine was the release of SwiftUI, which to this day is unusable for real UI work, and yet they keep pushing it. A company that once prided itself on its polished user interfaces, is pushing a fundamentally broken UI framework (they even customized the Swift language itself to make it work!), for no sensible reason, other than to pander to web developers socialized on React.
It's a tired trope, but Steve Jobs is rolling in his grave.
I’m an old school Cocoa dev. I even wrote the UI for a bunch of the built in apps on your iPhone.
I love SwiftUI. I know it inside and out and I’ve talked to its creators. It’s not “done” yet but it is a joy to use. And its power is in saving you from doing “the other 80%” of the work for all the myriad a11y jobs most people don’t bother doing.
Yes of course it panders to web devs. Apple has the same problem MSFT did when webapps with js were invented: if good software can exist in the browser, who cares what OS you have?
SwiftUI is existential for Apple. They are betting the farm on it and Liquid Glass in the hope that native apps are more appealing to users than web apps.
Apple dies if everyone moves to a Google desktop and mobile stack.
> I’m an old school Cocoa dev. I even wrote the UI for a bunch of the built in apps on your iPhone.
same, in fact it reminded me a lot of a highly interactive version of doing ui in webobjects (loop over arrays and layout components, and wire up actions on logic layer (viewmodels instead of controllers) etc)
i do have to say though that while i love it for the paradigm and design, i don't love it for the bugs/holes of which are many compared to uikit/appkit..
Both SwiftUI and Jetpack Compose rewrites, despite all their issues, are still miles ahead on WinUI turned out to be after five years, this is how bad Windows desktop development has become.
UI on Windows is a lost cause at this point. It's over. Windows UI is in the state the Wehrmacht was on April 29, 1945. Fragmented, beaten, disillusioned, out of fuel.
There is nothing whataboutism on my comment, other than asserting the fact that Apple and Google are currently much better at execution than Microsoft, in what concerns their OSes.
> But the new ones in MacOS 26 Tahoe are objectively terrible.
Has the word "objectively" recently taken on the alternative meaning of "subjectively", similar to how "literally" can also mean "figuratively"?
I also don't love the new icons, and he does raise a few objective facts to support his argument - but I don't think it's possible for an icon to be "objectively terrible".
People also have a tendency to be resistant to design changes at first, but over time as they become more familiar they become less offensive. I find myself running into this with new car designs a lot.
> I also don't love the new icons, and he does raise a few objective facts to support his argument - but I don't think it's possible for an icon to be "objectively terrible".
measuring cognitive load / time-to-completion when trying to use such an interface could be an objective measure
for example, ask a user to find disk utility app in old ui vs new, measure both time and brain activity it takes to find it etc, there are ways, just takes money and time
To me it's insane to pick on these 4 icons when it's obvious that they were just bolted on together in the previous version as well. Now suddenly a whole Mac Pro laid on top of 2 tools is supposed to be a "great icon by Apple"? Get outta here.
Correct, then why suddenly the replacements are "dead canary"? The post doesn't make sense. To me they're an improvement, even if a bit flat (flatness we've seen 12 years ago in iOS 7 already)
To me this post sounds like a typical "Steve Jobs wouldn't do this" nonsense.
Call me when macOS Tahoe is out of beta. Nobody is paying attention because the post is judging a beta product that literally has not completed the QA cycle.
By all means there are plenty of things to judge in macOS and there have been for a very long time. These for icons today are not it. The canary has left a very long time ago.
Beta is not an excuse for shoddy workmanship. Beta is to figure out the last outstanding issues and bugs before shipping to production, not to hastily fix a ton of obvious issues, or to redraw icons
macOS Sequoia was released Monday September 16, 2024. The likely release date of macOS Tahoe is Monday September 15, 2025. That's only 20 days from now. Those icons have already been redesigned in Tahoe. What do you expect to happen in the next 20 days? There will maybe be one final beta.
Do you really think there are going to be significant UI design changes in that time? Beta 8 came out today and Beta 9 will probably be or be close to the RC.
Would you mind sharing how you see the new ones as an improvement? I’m having trouble imagining how.
At least 3 of the 4 previous icons were pretty easy to recognize on sight (all but expansion slot utility). I would never guess 3/4 of the new ones (only wireless utility), and I probably would have a hard time recognizing them even after I knew what they were.
- Disk Utility: not an improvement but not a loss either. "Disks" haven't looked like that in a long time, so it makes sense that it's updated. "Disk" as intended now, it's an abstract concept, so I sort of see why the icon would be abstract.
- Expansion Slot Utility: if you looked at a Mac Pro's expansion slots, you'd see exactly why the new icon makes a lot more sense, it has 3 slots in it.
- Wireless Diagnostics: looks perfect to me.
- Apple Script Utility: both suck equally, I struggle to see why an editor/compiler share the same icon style as configuration/diagnostic apps.
So they're either just as bad or slightly better. Neither version shines for quality. The old one only looked slightly "better" because the individual pieces were in high quality, but once overlapped they just looked like slop.
All I'm saying is that these icons have obviously never mattered to anyone, you'd expect more from the author.
Look at the original 2001-2007 version, which was the nicest. It's only gotten worse over time, unfortunately. The 2020 version got an unnecessary rounded rect because macOS Big Sur introduced iOS rounded rects as a new style, and then the 2025 went completely rounded rect because Tahoe enforces it on every app.
I personally have Disk Utility in my Dock, by the way.
Re: Disk Utility - that old school disk still represents disks just as the old school floppy icon still represents save even though most of us haven't used floppy disks in decades now.
> They all look like placeholder icons made by a developer who would be the first to admit that they’re not an artist.
Maybe. Some developers get really passionate about their work and try hard. The results can often fail on execution, but often show signs of overthinking things, and wanting to work.
I’ve been working with a design studio on a data science domain that isn’t your every day (ag tech analytics) and I find the results really disappointing. They can make things conventionally nice. It’s better than a generative solution, yet it’s still very “conventional” and “safe”. Every time we get to a chance to do some innovative infographic, they give it a half hearted effort and then say “let’s just use words” and get all typography geeky.
Point being, my experience is that quality iconographics are not the automatic domain of the gatekeepy designer profression (to be fair, I have worked with some design people that just have a knack).
I'd call them "non-icons": they don't communicate in any way, they don't add significance or separate one application from the other at first glance, they don't really mean anything without the file name, they are really not much better than default icons. And this is probably what they are: default icons for a group of applications with a bit of variation sprinkled on top.
At this point, does it need that residual variation or is this just adding noise? Also, a shape inside a shape inside a shape inside a shape isn't anything anyone is likely to parse – how many bits of information is this? So maybe just go with a simple default wrench icon for all of them?
PS, Another way to put this: are these still icons, as in "indicative of something", or are they merely ornamental, particularly in their individuality? And, if the latter, how good are they as ornaments? Is there even a need or a place for ornaments in an interactive environment that is meant to be tuned for efficiency?
(In my experience, if an interface elements raises questions, even more so, if these are fundamental questions, you do have a problem. If not for other reasons, just for the few more bits of awareness spent on these questions, every time you see them.)
Indeed, all you can do is learn and memorise what they represent. But a square filled with a solid color can do the same ("yellow is the hard disk thingy"), and that would actually be more glanceable and quicker to distinguish.
If your icon loses to a yellow cube, it is not a good icon.
Back in the day, when you could still have custom icons in the sidebar of the Finder and file dialogs (well, Snow Leopard…), I used colored spheres as identifiers for project folders, for minimal 1-bit attention. Which may be a proper use case for such a thing. (There's a clear relationship, but this is also subject to change.)
I think they're okay, except for Disk Utility. The old icon had an out of date image of an HDD, but why would you associate an Apple logo with disks? It's not like it only works on drives sold by Apple. The wrench part is fine, but the nut is all wrong.
I actually agree with all of the comments. I strongly disliked those new icons. In a way, to my sense of aesthetics, they are worse then when I saw the icons in Windows XP compared to previous Windows versions.
The metaphor is fine for me, but the arbitrary inversions of lightness are not acceptable. They make the icons look like the same icon that have been inverted for light/dark mode.
I like the wrench and the only icon that feels particularly unclear to me is the one for Disk Utility. Expansion Slot Utility is also a bit non-obvious, but the old one was even worse since there was just a small image of a Mac Pro slapped in the middle. That could mean it's for just about anything related to the system.
I find amusing that they used this wrench and bolt symbols for their utility applications while making it harder for years to actually physically fix their devices.
And for the overall style, these kinda look like taken from pling.com where people share their packages of customized icons that try to mimic MacOS "squircle" style on Linux
I am probably the only one, but I like those new icons apart from the disk utility one. I think they are better than the old ones and follow more of the design standards of Tahoe (good or bad), so they fit better.
I feel like when I'm presented with most modern criticism of Apple devices/software I tend to agree, but despite all the mostly valid criticisms I see batted about, who is doing consumer tech better?
I've recently (finally) managed to purge the last instance of Windows from my life when I replaced Windows on my gaming desktop with Linux. So I've got Linux on the (gaming) desktop, a Steam Deck and Debian stable on a server, which is great.
But I mean, that covers my home office? I still need a phone (iPhone), a smart watch (Apple Watch) and while not critical, certainly adds a lot of value for me. The things that connects to the TV (AppleTV) is the best of all I've tried when compared to any other type of solution (Firestick, Chrome Cast, Home Media Server, Built-in TV Smarts). I've also got an M4 MacBook for dev, which is frankly fantastic when compared to whatever other hardware I could get here in NZ and would involve going back to Windows anyway?
So I mean, what are the actual valid options really? Apple still offer great devices and the integrations between them are the best on the market imo.
Perhaps in a perfect world Pine64 devices would be rock solid and I could run Linux everywhere, but failing that, what else ya gunna do?
Nobody. Apple's still doing the best by far. Apple Silicon chips. Safari having the strongest anti-tracking of any platform's browser (AAPL, GOOG, MSFT). Privacy on the Apple TV. Using 100% renewable electricity for their AI data centers (Private Cloud Compute) and not using its data for model training, unlike everyone else. They're even starting to compete on price with the $600 Walmart MacBook Air. But then there's all the bad stuff we're all familiar with.
The worst part to me is that I don't think any systemic solution (like antitrust) can ensure it remains that way, or make the others fix their shit. Apple is this way because of the decisions, personalities and whims of a handful of individuals that lead Apple. The other companies are fuckups for the same reason. Maybe the only safeguard is ideology (i.e., up-and-coming Apple employees who dogmatically believe in their marketing on privacy, energy efficiency, speed, etc). From the outside all we can do is impose a PR cost on them and their competitors when they fall short, and on the margin, that helps strengthen that internal faction of dogmatically principled employees against their colleagues who don't care.
Nobody. It's possible to be the best without being good.
I'm surprised a consumer-focused RedHat hasn't come along to build an offering of just-works-but-still-open devices. There are companies out there that do parts of it but nobody does the full personal device stack thing like Apple. I'm still disappointed they went the cloud route instead of everything lives on your AirPort. If I ever win the lottery ten times this is the startup I'll build.
And, to GP’s point, there is no one to replace them.
As someone who lived Apple stuff were between a rock and a hard place. What we loved is dissolving away into mediocrity or worse. And we don’t like the competition better. If we did we’d already be over there.
Add in that lots of companies like to follow Apple’s design leads, for better or worse, and we’re left with nowhere to go.
So we really want the thing we liked to be good again. Or at least to stop getting worse for no good reason.
This is exactly how I feel as someone who enjoyed the Mac during the Jobs era of Mac OS X and has been quite disappointed with the state of personal computing since then. The Apple experience is not the same today as it was during the Snow Leopard days. It seems to me that the old guard at Apple is gone and that the people making the key decisions at Apple in the past decade or so are taking Apple in a different direction than what I would like, as someone who is a big fan of both the classic Macintosh and Jobs-era Mac OS X.
What I'd give for a modern OS with an interface designed with the principles of people like Don Norman and Bruce Tognazzini in mind, combined with rock-solid underpinnings taking advantage of the best that OS research had to offer in the past 30 years. In other words, I want an updated Smalltalk/Lisp machine with a classic Mac interface brought up to 2020s standards regarding networking, security, and other concerns.
Modern macOS to me is a disappointment compared to Mac OS X Snow Leopard, and don't get me started on the lack of user-upgradeable RAM in modern Macs. However, Windows 10/11 is even more disappointing to me compared to Windows 7, which was a nice OS and is my second favorite version of Windows, my favorite being Windows 2000. Desktop Linux seems to be in an eternal Sisyphean cycle of churn.
So, today I begrudgingly use Windows on my personal machines and macOS on my work-issued MacBook Pro, longing for a compelling alternative to appear one day that pushes personal computing forward.
It really feels like Apple is very slowly going the way of enshittification. What's a consumer to do, switch to another platform? Don't make me laugh. Windows and Linux drive me insane. Apple's operating systems are the only ones that seem to 'get' me, which really makes it suck that they're in such danger.
Tahoe is the first macOS that I don't "get", and its fucking scary. I can stay on Sequoia for another year or so, and then what?
When Tahoe came out, I tried it for a day, liked some of it, hated most of it. I gave it a week. Still hated most of it.
The end of that week I bought a used ThinkPad and installed Arch on it. My future is no longer on the Mac. I have a few years to try and transition, but I am otherwise done with them. Butt ugly uber-rounded bouba squircles for fucking windows that cut off the content in my PDFs? That can't even help but cut off the buttom of the scroll bars? This piss ugly grey on light grey on grey with the most pathetic, cowardly whisper of texture they call "glass"? It's fucking over. At least until Alan Dye crawls back into whatever print ad shithole he crawled out of.
> The end of that week I bought a used ThinkPad and installed Arch on it. My future is no longer on the Mac.
same, i think the slow decline of macos' user interface means kde is actually the same level or even better (kde slowly improving mac slowly declining) so i might as well jump sooner than later... i'll miss the quality of some native apps, but that to me is more a business opportunity than a pure negative per se
> The problem isn’t that one little bird has died. The problem is that the bird might be dead because the whole mine is filling with deadly carbon monoxide or highly flammable methane gas
This is where I'm at with Apple at the moment.
I know this sounds crazy or stupid, and people on reddit made sure to tell me as much, but the recent iOS, macOS, and watchOS betas have actually caused me to abandon the Apple ecosystem. As far as I'm concerned, there isn't one bird dead, but a whole bunch of birds. I suppose I'm a little more sensitive than Gruber. I find the design language (or lack thereof?) in Apple's recent work to be largely void of life, inspiration, purpose, craft, or anything else I'd come to expect over the last 25 years of using their platform. The quality in terms of performance, efficiency, bugs, intuitive user interfaces, and so on has been dropping for years now. The last OS revision is exemplary of this decline in a deeply concerning way.
I've been so disheartened by things like this, and I'm confident it represents the end of an era so to speak, that I've already come to terms with it and started moving off of Apple's ecosystem.
For me, the move is a matter of pursuing systems which allow me a bit more freedom. Apple has restricted me in ways that I permitted for decades now, but I permitted it because the compromise was worth it. I don't see it being worth it in 5 or 10 years, so I'm starting the transition now. I sold my watch, gave away my iPhone, and started shopping for a ThinkPad.
It's hard to give up macOS and Apple hardware (the value prop has become kind of insane, really), but seeing their recent OS work takes the sting away. I'd love to see them recognize their mistakes and correct course, but... I don't think I'm their target customer anymore, frankly. The people who think I'm an idiot on reddit are their target market, I suppose. That's fine. I'll learn to love Linux and Windows for different reasons and regain some privacy and control over my machines.
My family will certainly stay on Apple's ecosystem.
My dad went to school near Cupertino and got a student prerelease of the first Mac in '84. I've been in this ecosystem as long as I've been alive.
As many others have said elsewhere in these comments, Apple has been stagnating in quality for a long time. Even the Jobs-era iPhones were buggier than anyone inside the Reality Distortion Field (and most of the tech press at the time) would admit. I'd have to really squint to think of anything good that came from bringing iPhone tech to the Mac.
All that said, the sorts of things I need a computer for have been a mostly-solved problem, by Apple, for most of this millennium. There were year-on-year improvements in the early years of X, but I can't tell you the last Mac feature that made me go "OMG I want that."
Unfortunately, the "by Apple" part of that sentence is load-bearing. So far as I can tell, desktop Linux is still largely the work of hobbyists on GitHub. I don't expect there to be a unified design philosophy, and I do expect it to need constant tweaking to get each package to work how I'd like and to keep them working with one another.
Even if Apple's desktops have been stagnating for at least as long as they've been naming them after landmarks, I don't know of an alternative that's worth the effort of switching.
> the sorts of things I need a computer for have been a mostly-solved problem, by Apple, for most of this millennium.
For a long time now, I find that Apple and Microsoft get in the way and solve the wrong problems. The Walled Garden, GateKeeper, the "Recall" misfeature, invasive CoPilot LLM bling, abusive telemetry exfiltration...
I use Linux exactly because it solves (or provides a solution for) the problems that are important to me.
> I can't tell you the last Mac feature that made me go "OMG I want that."
I can tell you that I look at the OS and often say, "OMG I don't want that!"
I don't think it's fair to characterise Jobs-era iPhones as buggy; they were significantly less buggy than Android, Meego and Symbian.
I think only BlackBerry OS was more polished, but it had significantly fewer things that people actually wanted.
There were bugs, sure, but I was working at Nokia at the time and what was cooking us was not "the luxury brand experience" (because, that comes later): it was that Apple had gotten the software of a mini-computer right, and they executed on it really well.
Android distributors tended to throw much more powerful hardware at the problem to achieve similar results to the consistency of experience.
Linux development is mostly funded by corporations working on the server side. The desktop is an afterthought, and it very much shows. They haven’t even managed to fully expunge X yet. NeXT showed people how to put a proper UI on top of Unix in 1989!
UNIX was developed as an headless OS for timesharing terminals, and to this day it shows that doing proper UIs as never been a strong UNIX culture, which Steve Jobs famously didn't had in high regard.
As someone whose job required using Windows for the last 3 years, I can say without any doubt or reservations, Windows is (much, much) worse. I like Linux and can imagine reasonable price:performance can be found w/ recent high-end hardware... but IME nothing comes close to my m4 macbook air.
I agree, I will mostly use Linux. Windows is more so something I'd use out of necessity. I'll keep a MacBook around too, but not as a daily driver. It'll be essential for managing my family's Apple accounts and Screen Time.
I agree that a lot of Apple stuff has gotten worse recently, both in terms of objective quality in the number of bugs, incomplete features that don't work properly when shipped, and in terms of the company trying to coerce even more control over its platforms and simultaneously enshittifiying them. It's ridiculous that they region lock OS-level stuff like 3rd party app stores and alternative browser engines.
But from where I'm sitting, everyone else is doing what Apple's doing times 100. The latest Windows releases are aesthetically groetesque, both Google and Microsoft are trying to jam chatbots into everything, both Windows and Android are jammed full of ads and nagging "suggestions" to try some useless feature. Now Google is cracking down on Android sideloading.
Desktop Linux I guess? I don't have time for that, and the hardware is so much worse than a MacBook.
I agree re: Apple, but Windows giving you more privacy? Come on now. And I have used Linux for years, most recently pop, and there is certainly no ‘past-apple’ level design there either, but best of luck finding what works for you! I despise my thinkpad, personally.
I didn't mean to imply that Windows offers more privacy at all. I think it's mostly a disaster of an operating system, but it does have a lot of useful software that I'd like to have access to. For example, programming the PLCs I use for automation absolutely requires Windows.
As far as privacy goes, I'd depend on Linux. As for nice user interfaces, cohesion, consistency, any kind of unification: I just have to leave it behind.
But I think I can eventually develop and find something 'good enough' that isn't dependent on Apple to maintain and improve. No mandatory regressions.
Decades ago when we made a version of our Win32 desktop app for the USA, we changed the icon on our settings button from a wrench to something else (I can't remember what) because we were told that - for Americans - a wrench signified that something was broken and needed to be fixed. I guess it was about as good as all the other advice we got!
Heh! Your feelings are so strong that you don't even call a spanner a spanner because the word entered mainstream English (during the industrial revolution) after U.S.A. independence. (-:
the wrench is uncanny, weird if you regularly see wrenches in real life... they likely did this to make the bolt larger, but it ruins the concept
might have been better off simply going with the bolt metaphor, sans wrench, even though it's less apparent... though the squircle also kind of fights with other shapes as containers
the old stethoscope on a disk icon is super cheesy, but at least it means something
When even Gruber start criticising Apple. You know it is bad. From Apple invented USB-C, to selling AirPod below cost, and invented big.LITTLE CPU computing. Sometimes still persist to this day before of his story.
But if even its die hard fans cant find excuses for the appalling Ads they are putting out, design changes that makes no sense, and App icons etc. May be Apple has really changed.
As someone on HN recently stated, in many ways Google Pixel and Android now feels more old school Apple than modern Apple.
I'm honestly curious why Apple (and other OS vendors like MS and various Linux distributions) still feel the need to tweak their UIs many, many years after having reached maturity.
How many iterations does it take before you get it right?
I get that there's a certain sense of fashion to it, but so often these changes are either neutral or worse, and it just seems so pointless. I don't see any concrete benefits of this year's UI design over what was already there 10-20 years ago.
Operating systems from the biggest companies are rather stable and feature rich beneath for years now but that doesn't make these attractive in long term. Certainly not for the daily consumers. So they introduce all sorts of meaningless "featurettes" and UI/UX changes to pretend they work hard and thoughtfully on their products to create these never-ending "exciting experiences".
It's not about polishing to get it right nowadays but rather making a change for sake of changes because that looks good in terms of marketing.
As for this particular Apple case with all "26" versions and Liquid Glass: the backlash they got in June puts their actions along Microsoft's with Windows 8/8.1.
> I'm honestly curious why Apple (and other OS vendors like MS and various Linux distributions) still feel the need to tweak their UIs many, many years after having reached maturity.
its hard to market something like an os to consumers and devs without some large noticeable changes
though one then has to wonder, why do we need a new os every year...
The sad thing is that Apple used to have an excellent and simple way to show the status of an application as a Utility - they were rendered in grey-scale where as regular apps were full-colour
It's not ironic at all. From the article: "They all look like placeholder icons made by a developer who would be the first to admit that they’re not an artist."
I think Gruber would be the first to admit that he's not a designer but rather a writer. His business is one person, himself. In contrast, Apple has over a hundred thousand employees, including quite a few professional full-time designers. You would expect Apple to do vastly better at design than Gruber.
What's ironic is if Alan Dye is no better at design than John Gruber.
> The problem isn’t that one little bird has died. The problem is that the bird might be dead because the whole mine is filling with deadly carbon monoxide or highly flammable methane gas.
I don't get it, you've already been poisoned by those gases and can hardly breath, why do you need to look at dead birds for any signal?
I'm pretty sure the issue with carbon monoxide poisoning is that you don't actually feel it clearly enough and that it doesn't manifest as "can hardly breathe".
"Gases such as ammonia and chlorine are ir- ritating to the skin, eyes, and throat and have a very definite smell. CO, however, has no odor or other warning properties." [1]
In my hobby we have "grognards" - the grumpy old farts that detest everything new and pick on every little change. That opinion piece was written by a full on grognard who cries with bullshit arguments about the collapse of civilization because "corpo changed product" from inarticulate icons to inarticulate icons.
I find it fascinating that the flashpoint is utility app icons. Not the OS architecture, not some major new feature... just icons. Are we just in an era of polishing spoons because there's nothing new to build?
It’s not. We’re all pissed about a TON of what they’re going this year.
It’s more “This? You can’t even get this right? You could have left it alone and it would have been better. You have to crap up everything no matter how small with a poorly conceived bad redesign?”
Did you not read the story? The point is not that the icons are important, it’s that the lack of care is telling. You might think it’s cheesy, but care and details are important, even in the back of a cabinet.
Mac OS X and Windows had their best design language from 2007 to 2011. Windows Aero and Mac OS X Aqua during these days were truly beautiful graphical shells. Everything since has been a barren wasteland of boring, overly white flat GUIs. The squircle-ifying (and on Android, circle-ifying) going on is just another step in this path towards the eternal uniformity of the heat death of fun, intuitive UIs.
The icons for Leopard-era programs were outstanding. Look at that dark indigo ink jar for Pages, or that wormhole graphic for Time Machine. The comforting smooth grey gradient of window title bars, contrasted with the large, globular traffic light buttons. A typeface that worked well with the lower-resolution displays of the time, and unique icons for everything at every single size. Apple actually had a massive human interface guidelines document, which was promptly binned with Yosemite.
On Windows, that dark blue Start orb and the cool dark task bar, signalling a whole new OS experience. The new Welcome Centre. Freshly rewritten programs and new ones like Windows Media Player and Windows Photo Viewer, and the absolute beauty that was the Windows Media Centre. Flip 3D, customising the glass window borders, and the huge, high-resolution 512 × 512 icons of the high-quality, no-ads games shipped with Windows Vista and 7, which still stand up to this day.
Happy to die on this hill defending this opinion.
I'll die right there with you on that hill.
For all it's flaws: Vista was a truly breathtakingly beautiful operating system. I still remember fondly the matte frosted dark tinted hue from the start menu and the strong deep red of the shutdown button. Everything shimmered and refracted, with almost a tactile feel. My first iPhone felt like I was interacting beyond the current dimension, the retina display with the skeumorphic design made it feel like I wasn't just interacting with software, I was interacting with another digital world... and my first Macbook was similar; every application was gorgeously rendered natively: something even Windows couldn't manage despite having the lions share of developers.
All this, on LCD panels that were comically abysmal compared to the colour accuracy of the displays we take for granted today, and with less than a quarter of the pixels.
The thing is: I think the same issue plagues software also, that when it becomes a place where good money can be made, you attract people who want to make money and, by necessity, push out all the people who were there for the passion.
Diminishing quality of art and engineering sort of go hand-in-hand if MBAs need to make room for themselves and set up fiefdoms.
Cheers.
I'd say Vista introduced or changed—for the better—a ton of Windows paradigms, most of which still endure. User account control, dwm.exe and the WDDM, improved user profiles, the ribbon UI, and more. Vista had the most pervasive changes to Windows in the past two decades, from UI and UX to fundamental OS primitives, APIs, and syscalls.
Disdain levelled at Vista is unfair—it was a heavyweight OS that needed better hardware than was really commonplace at the time.
As for money now being the end game... I have no words. The stupid Weather app (sorry, no, WebView2 wrapper) on Windows 10 and 11 is exasperating.
What it really needed was more than the intel 915 all too many prebuilts cheaped out using, which intel strong-armed MS into certifying as 'vista ready' when it absolutely wasnt.
What is the Intel 915?
An underpowered integrated graphics that was ubiquitous at the time but not really up to the task.
Microsoft relented to Intel and allowed it to be classified as "Vista capable" despite not being able to run WDDM.
This is a decent writeup of the situation:
https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/microsoft-e-mails-re...
I think this offers some interesting thought experiments in [tech] leadership:
* what would you have done in Jim Allchin's position? He disagreed once finding out but ultimately trusted his team's judgement and stood by their decision (isn't that exactly the manager you want to work for?) Yet, look at the results
* hypothetically how do you think Steve Jobs would have handled it, by contrast?
* but Windows is a whole ecosystem with many stakeholders, while Apple is not, so the balancing act between Intel and HP is much more delicate. (Apple ultimately ditched Intel, right? But could Microsoft?)
(edit: clarify some wording)
I’ve been in a similar situation.
We were promised that the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One generation of hardware would be significantly more powerful than it ended up being.
The amount of backlash we received because the quality of the final product we produced was lower than what we showed to the public was insane and continues to this day.
For context, I worked at Ubisoft on Tom Clancy’s The Division. this was the same period where watch dogs released.
I think we did the right thing, not because we chose to and that we were being an altruistic; but because we were forced to- by the first party console manufacturers as part of certification requirements.
If you release something that you know will perform poorly, that’s on you. It doesn’t matter if you’re Intel in this situation or if your Microsoft in this situation they are both equally guilty of allowing it to happen.
How do you assign blame in that situation? You don’t. they both should’ve done better.
as soon as Microsoft realised that Windows Vista would perform poorly on current generation hardware that the majority of the population had they should’ve worked to downgrade the visual elements and optimise the bloat away even at the cost of features.
When Intel realised that the 98% desktop market leader was going to release something that had graphical intensity requirements, they should have put more emphasis and effort into producing higher quality graphics processing capabilities- it’s not like Windows Vista had a short time it was in development for many many years
The right thing in hindsight absolutely would've been for Microsoft to not relent, because of the power balance. Even back then when Intel was still a behemoth, Intel needed Microsoft more than the other way around. Hence why they were the ones begging MS, not the other way around.
What would Intel have done, only supply chips to.. what? Linux machines? Macs? A funny fantasy, obviously unthinkable. Or go wage a marketing campaign against MS? That too in effect would cause lower sales of new machines if anything, directly hurting Intel.
MS would've seen large benefits especially in the long term.
Now this is all very easy to say in 2025, but I think MS should've known this, yet greatly underestimated the negative effects that this would have. The people making the decision probably thought "it'll be okay, and worth staying super chummy with Intel". Probably plenty of golf trips and steak dinners were exchanged.
Ditching or otherwise snubbing Intel would've been unthinkable in that time period; they were the undisputed performance kings on the desktop. Apple themselves had just moved to Intel, and made a big deal out of it, too.
a very underpowered integrated graphics for Intel CPUs (core2 and first-generation i-series CPUs had them).
It’s also known as “Intel GMA”, if that helps: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_GMA
Vista is the technical foundation Windows has been built on ever since. It can be praised for that at least.
I ran Vista on a 17" Dell Inspiron. Core 2 Duo. It ran magnificently.
Sometimes it seems like I was the only person that had that experience...
I feel like I gave up less compatibility for Vista than for Windows 11, and for...what?
The other day we found my wifes laptop from 2009, complete with the original Vista install. Still in hibernation from about 12 years back! Firing up vista is a visual feast. For all its technical and usability offlaws, Microsoft absolutely nailed the aesthetics it.
> I'll die right there with you on that hill.
count me in.
May I throw in BeOs' icons [1] for good measure?
[1]: https://mastodon.social/@allenu/111581402975463677
Another on that hill/cemetary. I remember how mush I wish for a computer that was capable of running Win7 (I was on (P2?) with 512mb of memory and 64mb vram). The OS was a delight from turning it on. I have a friend that has Mavericks on his macbook, and that was another amazing experience.
Even today, you look at screenshots of ios 6, and it's still timelessly beautiful. Some apps were atrocious, but you recognize them from a mile away.
Was Vista your first major OS?
The overdone gloss seemed to be a spiritual copies of all the Windowblinds themes, that were themselves inspired copies of Aqua.
Nah, my first OS was Windows 95.
I prefer the less-so but still skeuomorphic designs that pre-dated that period. The default Windows 2000 theme, as well as Mac OS 9, both had just enough drop shadow to make it clear what was and was not clickable, and used just enough color to show what was currently selected or active, without going into the angry fruit cocktail color schemes that pre-dated it in command line programs and followed it up in the super-saturated hyper-skeuomorphic themes of the mid to late aughts.
Luna has better colors, Aero is pale slime colored. Luna has bright green colorful checkbox, Aero has pale slime colored checkbox. Luna has nicely drawn light blue scrollbars, Aero has pale slime colored scrollbars. Luna has colorful warm orange window background, Aero has cold pale slime colored window background. Luna has colorful orange button highlight, Aero has cold slime colored button highlight. Luna has an awesome Power Blade style progress bar, Aero suddenly has a colorful progress bar, but with gimmicky animation of a spinner doing nothing. Luna has colorful gradient window caption, Aero has pale slime colored window caption with gimmicky gloss. Also Aero has too thick window borders.
I'll stand right there with you (though I think XP was fine too, and flip 3D was a pointless gimmick compared to the current Win-Tab)
But by God do I miss when icons actually used to represent something visually
IIRC Vista had a HIG document to par with Apple's and it's not surprising because they really wanted to change interface and kept it unified. Which worked for the most part but event today, in flat style era there are still 9x widgets deep down below that cannot be rooted out. What they could do was flattening these down.
But with release of Office 2007 and Windows Live suite they started changing interface again and Windows 7 was based upon slight plastic flatness and ribbons all over the place.
There was a community ran project Windows Taskforce that tried to catch up all sorts of interface quirks and with provided mockups they wanted MS to further polish their flagship project between Vista and 7. Sadly all these efforts were gone when MS decided to go Metro in Windows 8.
ios 7 was when it all went wrong.
some low points:
- low-contrast low-color shading
- thin fonts that are less readable
- hidden toolbars requiring multiple taps or drag to expose
- links or buttons with no visual clue they are selectable
I think the only thing I hate more is "touch anything in ios phone app to immediately place a call, even to a phone spammer"
unfortunately all of this got picked up by tesla, where you get all of these "features", but while driving a moving, bouncing car you have to control.
> Look at that dark indigo ink jar for Pages, or that wormhole graphic for Time Machine.
Do you have screenshots of the particular versions you're talking about?
The Mastodon handle quoted by the author has a comparison of Pages icons[1].
As for Time Machine, a screenshot won't do it justice[2].
[1]: https://mastodon.social/@BasicAppleGuy/115033200191662888
[2]: https://youtu.be/1BOwL8MuE_Y
It's interesting, I always see a lot of love for the more "blobby" (for lack of a better word) UIs from that era, whereas I've always preferred flat UI design. I just think it looks cleaner personally. If the actual functionality of windows wasn't so garbage, I'd really like its more flat UI design in recent times.
Its the same with websites, where I routinely see people unhappy with flat website design, but I deliberately made my website a lot more flat because I think it just looks better. Not to detract from your opinion at all, you can like what you like, but I've just never understood the appeal of vista/xp era UI design over flat design
Flat != Accessible && Ergonomic. Too much eye-squinting needed and everyone makes mistakes with a new flat UI.
One thing about the AppleScript icon that you don’t notice until you pay attention is that that the paper curls to form an “S”. The rotation and the reduced emphasis on the paper's edge in the update breaks that imagery.
It's not a nit that has to be picked, but it does dim Apple's "whoa, they thought that through?" aura.
Edit: So, upon doing some more inspection, it looks like Apple's Script Editor already does use this fallen-over paper. So that should challenge our assumptions about what the rotation may or may not mean as a portent for Apple's design competency. https://help.apple.com/assets/65DFB44F6D920677C90E20C9/65DFB...
The Script Editor logo used to be a physical paper with the AppleScript logo printed on it correctly, but seen at an angle in perspective (so the AppleScript logo was tilted as a result), with a pen on top.
When they switched from the original physical-looking icons, whichever designer drew the new one wasn't paying attention and apparently didn't understand the physical context of the previous logo and they screwed up the revision by keeping the (now-nonsensical) tilt.
https://web.archive.org/web/20101207035423if_/http://upload....
thank you for unlocking the mystery
Liquid glass looks like some freeware teenager icon pack from gnome-look.org
And we would have laughed at it.
That made me laugh because that’s exactly what it is.
It looks bad in that icon too, which is from the Big Sur era of "mostly squircles but not squircle jail yet".
Past canaries of Apple's software downfall: Scripting and the new Notification Center.
The key thing to make macOS feel welcoming to everybody from noobs to the nerdiest of power users: Pretty much all functionality used to be accessible using an easy GUI, and keyboard shortcuts, and scripting and command line interface.
At some point Apple Script support started to thin out. I started to worry a bit at this point. Apps that power users care about rely on scripting support. I felt that advanced users have fallen outside the target audience of the product.
Then the new Notification Center came out. And suddenly there was no way of reacting to individual notifications from the keyboard. Two interfaces were no out! No keyboard shortcuts. No scriptability. You HAVE to use the mouse!
Core functionality was suddenly inaccessible using the PRIMARY input device!
How is it possible that the accessibility of such major OS functionality is this poor!
At this point I felt that it's not about target audiences, but about indifference. They don't much care.
Someone once said that monopolies are often never toppled - instead they just become irrelevant over time. This is what happened to Windows. The OS monopoly still exists, but it's no longer the center of anyone's attention.
The same seems to have happened to MacOS. It's as if it has become unimportant inside Apple.
I don't follow him closely, but I'd always thought that John Gruber - while often a very good writer - got a little too much exposure to the Reality Distortion Field. So I'm a little surprised to see him come down so hard on this.
Was I wrong about Gruber or is this a proverbial canary in the coal mine?
Apple enthusiasts like John Gruber believe in an ideal Apple. (See his reference to the Founder's "backs of the cabinets" quote.) The real company is distinct from this ideal. Believers support the company's actions so long as they can be plausibly squared with the ideal. But when the company strays—by phoning in design, or being stingy (iCloud's 5 GB free tier)—they respond with equally vocal criticism.
This comment reminds of me of these such philosophical dualisms:
- Form (Formal Blueprint of Ideas) vs Appearances (Actual Manifestation of Ideas) (Plato)
- Noumenal (how things are in themselves) vs Phenomenal (how things appear) (Immanuel Kant)
Gruber has been an idealistic and longtime Apple observer. This is probably why he seems to invoke the Idea of Apple to compare and critique the current Appearance of Apple.
Fascinated to see a remark on HN that reminds me of this concept in philosophy.
From TFA, to illustrate:
"These are the not the work of carpenters who care about the backs of the cabinets they’re building. These icons are so bad, they look like the work of untrained “How hard can it be?” dilettante carpenters who only last a few days on the job before sawing off one of their own fingers. The whole collection looks like the work from someone with no artistic ability nor an eye for detail. From Apple, of all companies."
I follow him, and despite being an Apple commentator, he can be very critical of Apple. You might have missed this from earlier this year: https://daringfireball.net/2025/03/something_is_rotten_in_th...
This year the Apple leadership didn't visit his Talkshow anymore. Likely as a response to this article.
https://www.macrumors.com/2025/05/29/no-apple-executives-tal...
No, he shared on Dithering that there was a back-and-forth email exchange about the execs appearing on the Talk Show as usual, but they couldn't come to an agreement on details of the event.
I feel that he became critical of Apple only post-Jobs.
I don't remember how common it was, but there are definitely examples of him being critical before, e.g. https://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/05/11/facetime-standa...
Steve Jobs was a huge part of Apple. They're just not the same anymore.
Cook makes shareholders happy but he's not much of a leader. Jobs was a leader.
The butterfly keyboard catastrophe whereby Apple sold broken laptops for 4 years just because they didn't want to waste money retooling, would never have happened under Jobs. Jobs had the courage to say fuck the shareholders when necessary, Cook does not and it's a recurring theme of his leadership.
Being a 70's child, thus having lived through most Apple consumer history, I would say it slowly feels like the Apple of old, when Steve Jobs was busy with NeXT and Pixar, the main difference is that now they have enough money to burn and make dumb decisions.
I recently got a newer iPhone and moved to iOS 18 with the hardware change. I had to watch some youtube tutorials explaining navigation and swipe locations. Over and over I've had the thought "this never would have flown under Steve."
Gruber seemed like an Apple sycophant for a while because his values and tastes aligned very closely with Apple's (though he still criticized them from time to time). Now, Apple is drifting away from those values and tastes and so Gruber and others in that sphere of Apple blogs are coming down harder on Apple, especially after Alan Dye made such a mess with "Liquid Glass".
> especially after Alan Dye made such a mess with "Liquid Glass".
Your comment makes it seem like Gruber is a big critic of Liquid Glass like many commenters on HN are, but that's not the case. He's certainly critical of some of the execution details like icons or translucency that can hinder reading, but his stance on it is pretty nuanced leaning toward cautiously optimistic.
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/06/09/apple-intro-liq...
Listen to the episode of The Talk Show with Louie Mantia. They really rip on Alan Dye and Liquid Glass. Not so much the _idea_ of Liquid Glass, which I think they appreciate, but its execution, which is shoddy, inconsistent, and reveals a dearth of holistic thinking about UI design.
This is revealingly cringe and shows an almost complete absence of self awareness.
https://www.printmag.com/podcasts/2025/design-matters-craig-...
I suppose life is very different inside the citadel. You get curated and triaged feedback from users, Tim Cook doesn't really have opinions about usability and design choices, so there's no one in charge of the classroom.
The reality is in spite of nice touches like call filtering, software quality and usability are both clearly going down.
And Apple's moat, which is a combination of ecosystem lock-in and graphic design, is threatened from one side by AI and from the other by whatever Liquid Glass is supposed to be.
This is the answer. Gruber has and will continue to criticize Apple, but there has generally been very little room for daylight between his values and those of the company (either as expressed in their products or by their leadership). Also, while he doesn't say it, but I suspect that there has long been a feedback loop where his articles defending the company line are well-received internally and have helped him get press access to executives (for his WWDC live show) and preview hardware.
All that said, there has been a marked change since John's "Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino". Reading between the lines, it's pretty clear that Apple leadership did not like this article and snubbed him for his liveshow. Since then, there have been many more articles critical of Apple on daringfireball.net.
One thing nobody can take away from him is that he explains his opinions very thoroughly.
For that reason, even if one thought he agreed with Apple too often at least one always knew why.
I find his takes all over the place, but I agree that the new icons are terrible and he makes some very good points.
I'll add that the blue one doesn't even look like a wrench. I know that the old icons are dated and need to go, but the new ones are just bad.
I think it's more the case that Apple is just one of those companies where people tend to leap to the "sycophant" accusation to describe anybody who likes Apple more than a little, because of the (perhaps historical) visibility of their super-fans.
To be frank, Apple earns (earned?) the majority of its applause.
Yes this is a proverbial canary in the coal mine.
Gruber has criticized Apple, but never to this extent.
Does anyone have an example of a design team concluding that the right move is not to change anything?
I really think a big chunk of the problem is that it’s very hard for anyone to say to their employer that they shouldn’t be doing work. People like having a job and finding work not to do feels scary.
Selection bias dictates that if this happens you won’t notice it.
I can think of a few times people have been waiting for a refresh of something only to be slightly disappointed that not much or nothing changed: even when there was really nothing wrong.
Hardware-wise: The Volvo X60 and X90 series of cars.
Software wise: Chrome, perhaps, only one major visual change in 15 years.
OS X Snow Leopard
FWIW they can design more controls like tiles, widgets, wallpapers, user icons, toasters, calculator in the same style.
Rolex.
Disk Utility — a very important app — has an icon that’s just an Apple logo (inside the bolt that’s inside the wrench that’s inside the squircle). Not a hard drive, not an external drive, not an SD card. Just an Apple logo.
He is wrong... It's the glass disk that Tim handed over to Donald in the White House.
No, the bribe disk was round, this is hexagonal, big difference.
10.3%
Personally, I'm more dismayed by this change:
> Apps that haven’t been updated with Tahoe-compliant everything-fits-in-a-squircle icons are put in “squircle jail” — their non-Tahoe-compliant icons are shrunk and placed atop a drab gray Tahoe squircle background, to force them into squircle compliance.
I've been replacing some app icons with their older, non-square versions for years (Firefox is probably my favorite). Will be disappointing to lose that option -- I've never understood why Apple feels the need to standardize app icons like this.
that is unfortunate. icons having a variety of silhouettes makes it easier to identify them and gives things a little personality.
Adobe app icons are really the poster child for icons that are difficult to identify: https://as1.ftcdn.net/jpg/03/75/14/18/1000_F_375141824_Urr3G...
Icons were not meant to be text to read.
Take a look at the icons for Google’s mobile apps.
Oh, that redesign was ludicrous https://nathanboomsma.medium.com/why-googles-new-logos-suck-...
I am in general quite dismayed with macOS becoming more and more iOS-like. There is a reason the two operating systems were different, and it was quite nice, to be honest. Not to say that I don't like sharing the liquid glass design language, but stuff like this this forced squircle is really sad to me, too.
I feel like that's the crux of everything that sucks about computing these days: everything tending toward the lowest common denominator of a smartphone UI and a cheap whore of a webpage
I'd like someone running macOS 26 to weigh in here, but I'm not sure it's true that - if you replace an app icon (presumably by pasting in the Finder Get Info window) - the replacement is also confined to squircle jail?
no.
A crescent wrench is a brand of adjustable wrench. I believe Gruber meant open-end wrench, or, because I’m Canadian a British etc roots, I call it a spanner. Either way, I agree the “artist” who drew this has never used such a device, and may not, in fact, qualify as an artist.
> Either way, I agree the “artist” who drew this has never used such a device, and may not, in fact, qualify as an artist.
I was surprised when the article originally leaped to the insane conclusion that someone who created a stylized software icon with (what may not even be) a less-than-perfectly-accurate depiction of a wrench has never used one, but I’m not surprised to see this kind of doubling down on the absurdity from the HN comment section.
Conversely, I disagree; and assert that it is rather John Gruber who has not used nearly enough open ended spanners.
If one has only ever used modern forged steel spanners, then one might think that they aren't this width, and have the jaws at an angle. But try looking at antique tools. There have been a lot of spanners over the past couple of centuries that have looked like the picture.
If I saw a spanner like this in real life, I'd be thinking first half 20th century, possibly from a motorcycling kit, and Imperial and useless. (-:
I don't know if Gruber has ever used a wrench in any serious capacity, because he doesn't mention how the handle in the icons comes exactly at 0 degrees (instead of 15 degrees as in real life.)
As it stands, both the old and the new icons depict handles at 0 degrees, and the old ones depict octagonal open wrenches and not hexagonal ones.
I think it's a mistake to pick apart the wrench icon, but if you're going to make a major issue out of it, at least be exhaustive and consistent in your criticism.
My guess is they wanted to give more space to the "nut" in the center so you can actually make out what the app is at the expense of realism.
"Hey, it's just an icon, not working wrench after all"
A crescent wrench is 1: adjustable, and 2: always the wrong tool.
That there is a open-end wrench, or half a combination wrench.
(It could be a crow's foot but we'll leave that aside.)
In the rare instance an adjustable wrench is an appropriate tool, I'm partial to the Knipex "pliers wrench".
Most things that seem to call for a crescent wrench really want a pipe wrench or vice grips.
Crescent wrench is more or less a genericized trademark like Kleenex where I'm from.
I don’t think anyone is saying it’s a brand of wrench. Just that it is a generic term for a very different kind of wrench with an adjustable jaw. Famous for rounding off the corners of perfectly serviceable nuts, bolts, and all manner of pipe fittings. The wrench in the logo is an open end wrench (typically would have a closed end wrench on the other side)
The NextSTEP people have all retired. The real canary in the coalmine was the release of SwiftUI, which to this day is unusable for real UI work, and yet they keep pushing it. A company that once prided itself on its polished user interfaces, is pushing a fundamentally broken UI framework (they even customized the Swift language itself to make it work!), for no sensible reason, other than to pander to web developers socialized on React.
It's a tired trope, but Steve Jobs is rolling in his grave.
I’m an old school Cocoa dev. I even wrote the UI for a bunch of the built in apps on your iPhone.
I love SwiftUI. I know it inside and out and I’ve talked to its creators. It’s not “done” yet but it is a joy to use. And its power is in saving you from doing “the other 80%” of the work for all the myriad a11y jobs most people don’t bother doing.
Yes of course it panders to web devs. Apple has the same problem MSFT did when webapps with js were invented: if good software can exist in the browser, who cares what OS you have?
SwiftUI is existential for Apple. They are betting the farm on it and Liquid Glass in the hope that native apps are more appealing to users than web apps.
Apple dies if everyone moves to a Google desktop and mobile stack.
i do have to say though that while i love it for the paradigm and design, i don't love it for the bugs/holes of which are many compared to uikit/appkit..
swiftui itself needs a "snowleopard" release imo
Both SwiftUI and Jetpack Compose rewrites, despite all their issues, are still miles ahead on WinUI turned out to be after five years, this is how bad Windows desktop development has become.
UI on Windows is a lost cause at this point. It's over. Windows UI is in the state the Wehrmacht was on April 29, 1945. Fragmented, beaten, disillusioned, out of fuel.
Unfortunely I have to concur. At least, Win32, Forms/WPF and DirectX isn't that bad.
that's a very low bar for whataboutism
There is nothing whataboutism on my comment, other than asserting the fact that Apple and Google are currently much better at execution than Microsoft, in what concerns their OSes.
> But the new ones in MacOS 26 Tahoe are objectively terrible.
Has the word "objectively" recently taken on the alternative meaning of "subjectively", similar to how "literally" can also mean "figuratively"?
I also don't love the new icons, and he does raise a few objective facts to support his argument - but I don't think it's possible for an icon to be "objectively terrible".
People also have a tendency to be resistant to design changes at first, but over time as they become more familiar they become less offensive. I find myself running into this with new car designs a lot.
for example, ask a user to find disk utility app in old ui vs new, measure both time and brain activity it takes to find it etc, there are ways, just takes money and time
To me it's insane to pick on these 4 icons when it's obvious that they were just bolted on together in the previous version as well. Now suddenly a whole Mac Pro laid on top of 2 tools is supposed to be a "great icon by Apple"? Get outta here.
> Now suddenly a whole Mac Pro laid on top of 2 tools is supposed to be a "great icon by Apple"?
No, Gruber said, "I don’t think the old icons for these apps from MacOS 15 were particularly good"
Correct, then why suddenly the replacements are "dead canary"? The post doesn't make sense. To me they're an improvement, even if a bit flat (flatness we've seen 12 years ago in iOS 7 already)
To me this post sounds like a typical "Steve Jobs wouldn't do this" nonsense.
"This was not great, but this is worse: clearly nobody is paying attention" is, actually, valid criticism.
Call me when macOS Tahoe is out of beta. Nobody is paying attention because the post is judging a beta product that literally has not completed the QA cycle.
By all means there are plenty of things to judge in macOS and there have been for a very long time. These for icons today are not it. The canary has left a very long time ago.
A public beta period is for receiving feedback from developers and customers.
Beta is not an excuse for shoddy workmanship. Beta is to figure out the last outstanding issues and bugs before shipping to production, not to hastily fix a ton of obvious issues, or to redraw icons
macOS Sequoia was released Monday September 16, 2024. The likely release date of macOS Tahoe is Monday September 15, 2025. That's only 20 days from now. Those icons have already been redesigned in Tahoe. What do you expect to happen in the next 20 days? There will maybe be one final beta.
Tahoe will be out of beta in like 4 weeks.
Do you really think there are going to be significant UI design changes in that time? Beta 8 came out today and Beta 9 will probably be or be close to the RC.
> The post doesn't make sense. To me they're an improvement
Obviously the post wouldn't make sense to you if you think the new icons are somehow an improvement.
Would you mind sharing how you see the new ones as an improvement? I’m having trouble imagining how.
At least 3 of the 4 previous icons were pretty easy to recognize on sight (all but expansion slot utility). I would never guess 3/4 of the new ones (only wireless utility), and I probably would have a hard time recognizing them even after I knew what they were.
Sure.
- Disk Utility: not an improvement but not a loss either. "Disks" haven't looked like that in a long time, so it makes sense that it's updated. "Disk" as intended now, it's an abstract concept, so I sort of see why the icon would be abstract.
- Expansion Slot Utility: if you looked at a Mac Pro's expansion slots, you'd see exactly why the new icon makes a lot more sense, it has 3 slots in it.
- Wireless Diagnostics: looks perfect to me.
- Apple Script Utility: both suck equally, I struggle to see why an editor/compiler share the same icon style as configuration/diagnostic apps.
So they're either just as bad or slightly better. Neither version shines for quality. The old one only looked slightly "better" because the individual pieces were in high quality, but once overlapped they just looked like slop.
All I'm saying is that these icons have obviously never mattered to anyone, you'd expect more from the author.
> All I'm saying is that these icons have obviously never mattered to anyone
That's not true. You can see the history of the Disk Utility icon here: https://basicappleguy.com/basicappleblog/macos-icon-history
Look at the original 2001-2007 version, which was the nicest. It's only gotten worse over time, unfortunately. The 2020 version got an unnecessary rounded rect because macOS Big Sur introduced iOS rounded rects as a new style, and then the 2025 went completely rounded rect because Tahoe enforces it on every app.
I personally have Disk Utility in my Dock, by the way.
Re: Disk Utility - that old school disk still represents disks just as the old school floppy icon still represents save even though most of us haven't used floppy disks in decades now.
> They all look like placeholder icons made by a developer who would be the first to admit that they’re not an artist.
Maybe. Some developers get really passionate about their work and try hard. The results can often fail on execution, but often show signs of overthinking things, and wanting to work.
I’ve been working with a design studio on a data science domain that isn’t your every day (ag tech analytics) and I find the results really disappointing. They can make things conventionally nice. It’s better than a generative solution, yet it’s still very “conventional” and “safe”. Every time we get to a chance to do some innovative infographic, they give it a half hearted effort and then say “let’s just use words” and get all typography geeky.
Point being, my experience is that quality iconographics are not the automatic domain of the gatekeepy designer profression (to be fair, I have worked with some design people that just have a knack).
OK, a couple bad icons here. But am I the only one who thinks the wrench metaphor actually looks good?
I'd call them "non-icons": they don't communicate in any way, they don't add significance or separate one application from the other at first glance, they don't really mean anything without the file name, they are really not much better than default icons. And this is probably what they are: default icons for a group of applications with a bit of variation sprinkled on top.
At this point, does it need that residual variation or is this just adding noise? Also, a shape inside a shape inside a shape inside a shape isn't anything anyone is likely to parse – how many bits of information is this? So maybe just go with a simple default wrench icon for all of them?
PS, Another way to put this: are these still icons, as in "indicative of something", or are they merely ornamental, particularly in their individuality? And, if the latter, how good are they as ornaments? Is there even a need or a place for ornaments in an interactive environment that is meant to be tuned for efficiency?
(In my experience, if an interface elements raises questions, even more so, if these are fundamental questions, you do have a problem. If not for other reasons, just for the few more bits of awareness spent on these questions, every time you see them.)
Indeed, all you can do is learn and memorise what they represent. But a square filled with a solid color can do the same ("yellow is the hard disk thingy"), and that would actually be more glanceable and quicker to distinguish.
If your icon loses to a yellow cube, it is not a good icon.
Back in the day, when you could still have custom icons in the sidebar of the Finder and file dialogs (well, Snow Leopard…), I used colored spheres as identifiers for project folders, for minimal 1-bit attention. Which may be a proper use case for such a thing. (There's a clear relationship, but this is also subject to change.)
I think they're okay, except for Disk Utility. The old icon had an out of date image of an HDD, but why would you associate an Apple logo with disks? It's not like it only works on drives sold by Apple. The wrench part is fine, but the nut is all wrong.
I actually agree with all of the comments. I strongly disliked those new icons. In a way, to my sense of aesthetics, they are worse then when I saw the icons in Windows XP compared to previous Windows versions.
Well, I’ve been stethoscoped more than I’ve fixed any computer with a wrench of all tools, so not really.
The metaphor is fine for me, but the arbitrary inversions of lightness are not acceptable. They make the icons look like the same icon that have been inverted for light/dark mode.
I like the wrench and the only icon that feels particularly unclear to me is the one for Disk Utility. Expansion Slot Utility is also a bit non-obvious, but the old one was even worse since there was just a small image of a Mac Pro slapped in the middle. That could mean it's for just about anything related to the system.
I find amusing that they used this wrench and bolt symbols for their utility applications while making it harder for years to actually physically fix their devices.
And for the overall style, these kinda look like taken from pling.com where people share their packages of customized icons that try to mimic MacOS "squircle" style on Linux
Yeah they look fine to me. They're not icons you're going to put on your dock and look at every day.
I have Disk Utility in my dock, and I hate the icon (the old one with the tiny stethoscope and spinning HDD.)
Also forms a U for utility.
Yeah I liked it overall. Guess you can't please everyone :)
I am probably the only one, but I like those new icons apart from the disk utility one. I think they are better than the old ones and follow more of the design standards of Tahoe (good or bad), so they fit better.
I feel like when I'm presented with most modern criticism of Apple devices/software I tend to agree, but despite all the mostly valid criticisms I see batted about, who is doing consumer tech better?
I've recently (finally) managed to purge the last instance of Windows from my life when I replaced Windows on my gaming desktop with Linux. So I've got Linux on the (gaming) desktop, a Steam Deck and Debian stable on a server, which is great.
But I mean, that covers my home office? I still need a phone (iPhone), a smart watch (Apple Watch) and while not critical, certainly adds a lot of value for me. The things that connects to the TV (AppleTV) is the best of all I've tried when compared to any other type of solution (Firestick, Chrome Cast, Home Media Server, Built-in TV Smarts). I've also got an M4 MacBook for dev, which is frankly fantastic when compared to whatever other hardware I could get here in NZ and would involve going back to Windows anyway?
So I mean, what are the actual valid options really? Apple still offer great devices and the integrations between them are the best on the market imo.
Perhaps in a perfect world Pine64 devices would be rock solid and I could run Linux everywhere, but failing that, what else ya gunna do?
Nobody. Apple's still doing the best by far. Apple Silicon chips. Safari having the strongest anti-tracking of any platform's browser (AAPL, GOOG, MSFT). Privacy on the Apple TV. Using 100% renewable electricity for their AI data centers (Private Cloud Compute) and not using its data for model training, unlike everyone else. They're even starting to compete on price with the $600 Walmart MacBook Air. But then there's all the bad stuff we're all familiar with.
The worst part to me is that I don't think any systemic solution (like antitrust) can ensure it remains that way, or make the others fix their shit. Apple is this way because of the decisions, personalities and whims of a handful of individuals that lead Apple. The other companies are fuckups for the same reason. Maybe the only safeguard is ideology (i.e., up-and-coming Apple employees who dogmatically believe in their marketing on privacy, energy efficiency, speed, etc). From the outside all we can do is impose a PR cost on them and their competitors when they fall short, and on the margin, that helps strengthen that internal faction of dogmatically principled employees against their colleagues who don't care.
> who is doing consumer tech better?
Nobody. It's possible to be the best without being good.
I'm surprised a consumer-focused RedHat hasn't come along to build an offering of just-works-but-still-open devices. There are companies out there that do parts of it but nobody does the full personal device stack thing like Apple. I'm still disappointed they went the cloud route instead of everything lives on your AirPort. If I ever win the lottery ten times this is the startup I'll build.
The fear is that Apple is losing the expertise and attention to detail that resulted in that best-in-class consumer tech.
And, to GP’s point, there is no one to replace them.
As someone who lived Apple stuff were between a rock and a hard place. What we loved is dissolving away into mediocrity or worse. And we don’t like the competition better. If we did we’d already be over there.
Add in that lots of companies like to follow Apple’s design leads, for better or worse, and we’re left with nowhere to go.
So we really want the thing we liked to be good again. Or at least to stop getting worse for no good reason.
This is exactly how I feel as someone who enjoyed the Mac during the Jobs era of Mac OS X and has been quite disappointed with the state of personal computing since then. The Apple experience is not the same today as it was during the Snow Leopard days. It seems to me that the old guard at Apple is gone and that the people making the key decisions at Apple in the past decade or so are taking Apple in a different direction than what I would like, as someone who is a big fan of both the classic Macintosh and Jobs-era Mac OS X.
What I'd give for a modern OS with an interface designed with the principles of people like Don Norman and Bruce Tognazzini in mind, combined with rock-solid underpinnings taking advantage of the best that OS research had to offer in the past 30 years. In other words, I want an updated Smalltalk/Lisp machine with a classic Mac interface brought up to 2020s standards regarding networking, security, and other concerns.
Modern macOS to me is a disappointment compared to Mac OS X Snow Leopard, and don't get me started on the lack of user-upgradeable RAM in modern Macs. However, Windows 10/11 is even more disappointing to me compared to Windows 7, which was a nice OS and is my second favorite version of Windows, my favorite being Windows 2000. Desktop Linux seems to be in an eternal Sisyphean cycle of churn.
So, today I begrudgingly use Windows on my personal machines and macOS on my work-issued MacBook Pro, longing for a compelling alternative to appear one day that pushes personal computing forward.
It really feels like Apple is very slowly going the way of enshittification. What's a consumer to do, switch to another platform? Don't make me laugh. Windows and Linux drive me insane. Apple's operating systems are the only ones that seem to 'get' me, which really makes it suck that they're in such danger.
Tahoe is the first macOS that I don't "get", and its fucking scary. I can stay on Sequoia for another year or so, and then what?
When Tahoe came out, I tried it for a day, liked some of it, hated most of it. I gave it a week. Still hated most of it.
The end of that week I bought a used ThinkPad and installed Arch on it. My future is no longer on the Mac. I have a few years to try and transition, but I am otherwise done with them. Butt ugly uber-rounded bouba squircles for fucking windows that cut off the content in my PDFs? That can't even help but cut off the buttom of the scroll bars? This piss ugly grey on light grey on grey with the most pathetic, cowardly whisper of texture they call "glass"? It's fucking over. At least until Alan Dye crawls back into whatever print ad shithole he crawled out of.
> The problem isn’t that one little bird has died. The problem is that the bird might be dead because the whole mine is filling with deadly carbon monoxide or highly flammable methane gas
This is where I'm at with Apple at the moment.
I know this sounds crazy or stupid, and people on reddit made sure to tell me as much, but the recent iOS, macOS, and watchOS betas have actually caused me to abandon the Apple ecosystem. As far as I'm concerned, there isn't one bird dead, but a whole bunch of birds. I suppose I'm a little more sensitive than Gruber. I find the design language (or lack thereof?) in Apple's recent work to be largely void of life, inspiration, purpose, craft, or anything else I'd come to expect over the last 25 years of using their platform. The quality in terms of performance, efficiency, bugs, intuitive user interfaces, and so on has been dropping for years now. The last OS revision is exemplary of this decline in a deeply concerning way.
I've been so disheartened by things like this, and I'm confident it represents the end of an era so to speak, that I've already come to terms with it and started moving off of Apple's ecosystem.
For me, the move is a matter of pursuing systems which allow me a bit more freedom. Apple has restricted me in ways that I permitted for decades now, but I permitted it because the compromise was worth it. I don't see it being worth it in 5 or 10 years, so I'm starting the transition now. I sold my watch, gave away my iPhone, and started shopping for a ThinkPad.
It's hard to give up macOS and Apple hardware (the value prop has become kind of insane, really), but seeing their recent OS work takes the sting away. I'd love to see them recognize their mistakes and correct course, but... I don't think I'm their target customer anymore, frankly. The people who think I'm an idiot on reddit are their target market, I suppose. That's fine. I'll learn to love Linux and Windows for different reasons and regain some privacy and control over my machines.
My family will certainly stay on Apple's ecosystem.
My dad went to school near Cupertino and got a student prerelease of the first Mac in '84. I've been in this ecosystem as long as I've been alive.
As many others have said elsewhere in these comments, Apple has been stagnating in quality for a long time. Even the Jobs-era iPhones were buggier than anyone inside the Reality Distortion Field (and most of the tech press at the time) would admit. I'd have to really squint to think of anything good that came from bringing iPhone tech to the Mac.
All that said, the sorts of things I need a computer for have been a mostly-solved problem, by Apple, for most of this millennium. There were year-on-year improvements in the early years of X, but I can't tell you the last Mac feature that made me go "OMG I want that."
Unfortunately, the "by Apple" part of that sentence is load-bearing. So far as I can tell, desktop Linux is still largely the work of hobbyists on GitHub. I don't expect there to be a unified design philosophy, and I do expect it to need constant tweaking to get each package to work how I'd like and to keep them working with one another.
Even if Apple's desktops have been stagnating for at least as long as they've been naming them after landmarks, I don't know of an alternative that's worth the effort of switching.
> the sorts of things I need a computer for have been a mostly-solved problem, by Apple, for most of this millennium.
For a long time now, I find that Apple and Microsoft get in the way and solve the wrong problems. The Walled Garden, GateKeeper, the "Recall" misfeature, invasive CoPilot LLM bling, abusive telemetry exfiltration...
I use Linux exactly because it solves (or provides a solution for) the problems that are important to me.
> I can't tell you the last Mac feature that made me go "OMG I want that."
I can tell you that I look at the OS and often say, "OMG I don't want that!"
> "OMG I don't want that!"
This is exactly what's motivating my decisions.
I don't think it's fair to characterise Jobs-era iPhones as buggy; they were significantly less buggy than Android, Meego and Symbian.
I think only BlackBerry OS was more polished, but it had significantly fewer things that people actually wanted.
There were bugs, sure, but I was working at Nokia at the time and what was cooking us was not "the luxury brand experience" (because, that comes later): it was that Apple had gotten the software of a mini-computer right, and they executed on it really well.
Android distributors tended to throw much more powerful hardware at the problem to achieve similar results to the consistency of experience.
Linux development is mostly funded by corporations working on the server side. The desktop is an afterthought, and it very much shows. They haven’t even managed to fully expunge X yet. NeXT showed people how to put a proper UI on top of Unix in 1989!
I would say that Sun with NeWS did as well.
UNIX was developed as an headless OS for timesharing terminals, and to this day it shows that doing proper UIs as never been a strong UNIX culture, which Steve Jobs famously didn't had in high regard.
As someone whose job required using Windows for the last 3 years, I can say without any doubt or reservations, Windows is (much, much) worse. I like Linux and can imagine reasonable price:performance can be found w/ recent high-end hardware... but IME nothing comes close to my m4 macbook air.
I agree, I will mostly use Linux. Windows is more so something I'd use out of necessity. I'll keep a MacBook around too, but not as a daily driver. It'll be essential for managing my family's Apple accounts and Screen Time.
I agree that a lot of Apple stuff has gotten worse recently, both in terms of objective quality in the number of bugs, incomplete features that don't work properly when shipped, and in terms of the company trying to coerce even more control over its platforms and simultaneously enshittifiying them. It's ridiculous that they region lock OS-level stuff like 3rd party app stores and alternative browser engines.
But from where I'm sitting, everyone else is doing what Apple's doing times 100. The latest Windows releases are aesthetically groetesque, both Google and Microsoft are trying to jam chatbots into everything, both Windows and Android are jammed full of ads and nagging "suggestions" to try some useless feature. Now Google is cracking down on Android sideloading.
Desktop Linux I guess? I don't have time for that, and the hardware is so much worse than a MacBook.
There's simply no winning, unfortunately.
> There's simply no winning, unfortunately.
This is the hard truth, I think. All options available require significant compromises.
I agree re: Apple, but Windows giving you more privacy? Come on now. And I have used Linux for years, most recently pop, and there is certainly no ‘past-apple’ level design there either, but best of luck finding what works for you! I despise my thinkpad, personally.
I didn't mean to imply that Windows offers more privacy at all. I think it's mostly a disaster of an operating system, but it does have a lot of useful software that I'd like to have access to. For example, programming the PLCs I use for automation absolutely requires Windows.
As far as privacy goes, I'd depend on Linux. As for nice user interfaces, cohesion, consistency, any kind of unification: I just have to leave it behind.
But I think I can eventually develop and find something 'good enough' that isn't dependent on Apple to maintain and improve. No mandatory regressions.
Decades ago when we made a version of our Win32 desktop app for the USA, we changed the icon on our settings button from a wrench to something else (I can't remember what) because we were told that - for Americans - a wrench signified that something was broken and needed to be fixed. I guess it was about as good as all the other advice we got!
Wow. As an American, I didn't know we had special feelings about wrenches!
Heh! Your feelings are so strong that you don't even call a spanner a spanner because the word entered mainstream English (during the industrial revolution) after U.S.A. independence. (-:
Yeah, I didn't believe it at the time - it was just one of those overly broad generalisations people do.
I cried a little inside seeing this. Apple without its icons look cool game isn’t Apple
the wrench is uncanny, weird if you regularly see wrenches in real life... they likely did this to make the bolt larger, but it ruins the concept
might have been better off simply going with the bolt metaphor, sans wrench, even though it's less apparent... though the squircle also kind of fights with other shapes as containers
the old stethoscope on a disk icon is super cheesy, but at least it means something
When even Gruber start criticising Apple. You know it is bad. From Apple invented USB-C, to selling AirPod below cost, and invented big.LITTLE CPU computing. Sometimes still persist to this day before of his story.
But if even its die hard fans cant find excuses for the appalling Ads they are putting out, design changes that makes no sense, and App icons etc. May be Apple has really changed.
As someone on HN recently stated, in many ways Google Pixel and Android now feels more old school Apple than modern Apple.
I'm honestly curious why Apple (and other OS vendors like MS and various Linux distributions) still feel the need to tweak their UIs many, many years after having reached maturity.
How many iterations does it take before you get it right?
I get that there's a certain sense of fashion to it, but so often these changes are either neutral or worse, and it just seems so pointless. I don't see any concrete benefits of this year's UI design over what was already there 10-20 years ago.
Operating systems from the biggest companies are rather stable and feature rich beneath for years now but that doesn't make these attractive in long term. Certainly not for the daily consumers. So they introduce all sorts of meaningless "featurettes" and UI/UX changes to pretend they work hard and thoughtfully on their products to create these never-ending "exciting experiences".
It's not about polishing to get it right nowadays but rather making a change for sake of changes because that looks good in terms of marketing.
As for this particular Apple case with all "26" versions and Liquid Glass: the backlash they got in June puts their actions along Microsoft's with Windows 8/8.1.
No one gets a promotion for saying “yep still looks good. “
though one then has to wonder, why do we need a new os every year...
The sad thing is that Apple used to have an excellent and simple way to show the status of an application as a Utility - they were rendered in grey-scale where as regular apps were full-colour
The expansion slot icon looks like a hamburger menu—so I’d expect it to let me customize macOS menus. Pretty bad.
Why would you ever need to take a wrench to a disk? How many of apple’s users have ever actively used or even held a wrench?
Every time I visit that site I'm appalled at how horribly bad and inaccessible it is.
How ironic that Daring Fireball, with its eternally drab background color and microscopic font size, is endeavoring to criticize Apple's icons.
No doubt Apple's icons have worsened, but Daring Fireball is throwing rocks from its exceedingly brittle glass house.
It's not ironic at all. From the article: "They all look like placeholder icons made by a developer who would be the first to admit that they’re not an artist."
I think Gruber would be the first to admit that he's not a designer but rather a writer. His business is one person, himself. In contrast, Apple has over a hundred thousand employees, including quite a few professional full-time designers. You would expect Apple to do vastly better at design than Gruber.
What's ironic is if Alan Dye is no better at design than John Gruber.
Sorry, but what does one have to do with the other?
Are you one of those people who think you can’t criticize a movie unless you’re a director yourself?
> Sorry, but what does one have to do with the other?
Let me spell it out for you:
Daring Fireball has a really ugly website. On that really ugly website, they are criticizing Apple's ugly icons. This is ironic.
> Are you one of those people who think you can’t criticize a movie unless you’re a director yourself?
No.
Alright, then my analogy holds.
He can’t criticize Apple unless he first makes a really pretty website.
You can’t criticize the movie unless you first direct a better one.
Who else remembers the term ‘mystery meat navigation’?
That's for sure a lot of words for something of such low value. But then it's Gruber, what do we expect.
The wrench is proportionally and esthetically all wrong. Where do they get their designs and designers from.
These icons are just another example that Apple's lost its way.
Disk Utility, like a lot of the apps, has been progressively getting worse, IME. Even the way OS X mounts an external drive has become unreliable.
[flagged]
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45021041 and marked it off topic.
The path to off topic is sometimes laid with the best intentions
the 37 signal guy is building a linux distro so that might be another canary to consider.
you know what'd be rad though? an Eames Office of computing. You'd need figures like Charles and Ray though.
Those icons look AI generated to me
> The problem isn’t that one little bird has died. The problem is that the bird might be dead because the whole mine is filling with deadly carbon monoxide or highly flammable methane gas.
I don't get it, you've already been poisoned by those gases and can hardly breath, why do you need to look at dead birds for any signal?
I'm pretty sure the issue with carbon monoxide poisoning is that you don't actually feel it clearly enough and that it doesn't manifest as "can hardly breathe".
"Gases such as ammonia and chlorine are ir- ritating to the skin, eyes, and throat and have a very definite smell. CO, however, has no odor or other warning properties." [1]
1- https://www.msha.gov/sites/default/files/Alerts%20and%20Haza...
I'm pretty sure your own link is consistent
> Medium exposure... will produce ... and breathing difficulties.
I think the difference comes down to prolonged exposure to lower levels (eg medium exposure) vs short-term exposure to high levels.
The canary is for the latter scenario.
If the EPA says it can kill "in minutes" [1], then I'd be inclined to believe them over "you'll feel it if you're exposed to it for hours".
1- https://www.epa.gov/indoor-air-quality-iaq/protect-your-fami...
That’s the thing. The canaries died before the miners realized they were in danger, due to their sensitivity of carbon monoxide and other bad stuff.
But in this case the miners died long before the icons were redesigned?
In my hobby we have "grognards" - the grumpy old farts that detest everything new and pick on every little change. That opinion piece was written by a full on grognard who cries with bullshit arguments about the collapse of civilization because "corpo changed product" from inarticulate icons to inarticulate icons.
I find it fascinating that the flashpoint is utility app icons. Not the OS architecture, not some major new feature... just icons. Are we just in an era of polishing spoons because there's nothing new to build?
It’s not. We’re all pissed about a TON of what they’re going this year.
It’s more “This? You can’t even get this right? You could have left it alone and it would have been better. You have to crap up everything no matter how small with a poorly conceived bad redesign?”
Did you not read the story? The point is not that the icons are important, it’s that the lack of care is telling. You might think it’s cheesy, but care and details are important, even in the back of a cabinet.