macOS 26 Tahoe's Dead Canary Utility App Icons

https://daringfireball.net/2025/08/macos_26_tahoes_dead_canary_utility_app_icons

82•Bogdanp•1h ago

Comments

wk_end•1h ago

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?

bluedino•1h ago

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.

ghqst•1h ago

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".

stmpjmpr•1h ago

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...

rgovostes•1h ago

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.

keepamovin•16m ago

Serious question - this is a very clear and insightful answer - can you bring any of this clarity to a description of the current US political market segments? If you have that insight I’d love for you to help me understand it.

happytoexplain•59m ago

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.

riffic•1h ago

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.

_fzslm•1h ago

OK, a couple bad icons here. But am I the only one who thinks the wrench metaphor actually looks good?

xattt•58m ago

Also forms a U for utility.

refactor_master•58m ago

Well, I’ve been stethoscoped more than I’ve fixed any computer with a wrench of all tools, so not really.

postalcoder•55m ago

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.

LeoPanthera•42m ago

Yeah they look fine to me. They're not icons you're going to put on your dock and look at every day.

dkga•13m ago

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.

ianred•59m ago

The wrench is proportionally and esthetically all wrong. Where do they get their designs and designers from.

postalcoder•52m ago

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...

steve_adams_86•41m ago

> 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.

strange_quark•28m ago

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.

lh7777•31m ago

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.

pasquinelli•20m ago

that is unfortunate. icons having a variety of silhouettes makes it easier to identify them and gives things a little personality.

micromacrofoot•24m ago

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

bapak•20m ago

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.

lapcat•15m ago

> 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"

keepamovin•20m ago

I cried a little inside seeing this. Apple without its icons look cool game isn’t Apple

PlunderBunny•16m ago

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!