I understand free-shaped icons can sometimes be really bad designed and look really shitty, but one of Apple's distinguished features was their high-quality icons. It was even transmitted to other software companies that target Apple devices. You could tell with high confidence when a software was made specifically for Mac and when it was ported just looking at the icon.
Now everything is this sad rounded cornered square.
> Now everything is this sad rounded cornered square.
You see this a lot in the absurd “modernist” design of clean lines, sharp edges, and lack of texture and depth across all industries.
Whether that’s your Thuma furniture where the price is high and your marketed to be told that the design is good, but it’s not at all - devoid of meaning and a sense of place, never mind that the quality of the materials are low and have no specific origin, or your run of the mill drone light show where we are fooling ourselves into thinking that drawing pictures of things like the Statue of Liberty (oh after the drones do the ads, brought to you by your local auto dealer) are good and should be appreciated instead of the vibrancy and brilliance of fireworks instead.
Apple has begun to transition this way too. There aren’t any designers working there. Look at the Calculator app as a great example.
They say perfection is not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. But there is a point where you take away more and more and more and your left with creations devoid of meaning or purpose.
Once you start seeing this in your day to day life you can’t unsee it. Sorry ahead of time for those who read this comment and become more attune to this phenomenon.
> Apple has begun to transition this way too. There aren’t any designers working there
This is a dumb “no true Scotsman” argument, there are undoubtedly designers working there by any stretch of the imagination.
The more interesting discussion to have is why the field of software design has come to the point it’s at today, and why many designers think that work like the kind Apple is doing is good design.
> This is a dumb “no true Scotsman” argument, there are undoubtedly designers working there by any stretch of the imagination.
It’s a rhetorical device, not an argument. Of course there are people with that title working there.
I don’t think it has too much to do with software though, I meant to address a general cultural malaise that we can see (or I can see) surface in design broadly across industries. The software industry (writing code and papers about it and such) is probably, I say as I haven’t really felt the need to commit to an opinion here, one of the better design oriented industries precisely because the design of software, elegant code that is efficient and elastic to demand, reliable, and performant, seems to me to be progressing quite nicely.
But software by its very nature isn’t meant to be superfluous - unlike say, good architecture with ornamentation and carefully selected materials that are adapted for a given environment.
To serve the purpose of an interesting conversation, I don’t think focusing on a rhetorical comment as very important. Maybe engage with the substance (or lack thereof if that’s your opinion) of the content instead? Not to sound like a jerk I don’t mean to - just that it may be more interesting.
My hypothesis is that, at least on VisionOS, some apps are full of — almost cluttered with — 3D objects; and so Apple felt that, for the sake of your eye being easily able to jump to "where the UI is" amongst all that, the user needed to be able to visually differentiate/distinguish action buttons (incl. "buttons that launch apps" — essentially what these app icons are, esp. on the mobile OSes) from those 3D objects. This was achieved by ensuring that action buttons are always button-shaped, rather than allowing them to be arbitrary-object-shaped.
Note that, in this UX-design paradigm, the icon on (in?) a button still can be its own standalone object of arbitrary shape, rather than being forced to be button-shaped itself (see e.g. the Stickies or Game Center icons in TFA.) But that standalone object has to then be "encased" in the "app button" glass (as if encasing something in a puck of pourable resin), to make it visually obvious that this object is functionally a button, rather than just being some random 3D object with its own arbitrary interaction semantics.
Funny enough, this is almost exactly the complement to the problem of visually differentiating action buttons from 2D content. In a 2D UI, you want to make the action buttons more 3D-looking than the 2D stuff around them, to help them stand out. Thus the Windows XP / macOS 9 era of "jelly" buttons with that visually bulge toward the screen — standing proud of the content, affording touch.
But if everything is 3D / stands proud in arbitrary ways, then overlaid actions will stand out better if they're less 3D — making it clear that they're sitting "on the HUD" rather than "in the world." Such objects can be literal 2D — or you can get fancy and choose some unusual middle-ground, like the sort of 2.5D papercut-diorama look that "liquid glass" achieves.
but one of Apple's distinguished features was their high-quality icons
This was one of the things I loved when I switched to OS X in 2007. The Photo Booth, Pages, Preview, etc. were so beautiful. Also very easy to distinguish apps by icons. Now they all look the same-ish.
There was a lot more whimsy as well. The Adium instant messenger had its green bird logo as an icon. And the bird icon in the Dock flapped its wings when you had a new message (this was pre-native notifications, though Adium may have had Growl support already). I think it would also open its eyes when you started the app.
The upside of this 'button-as-icon' interface is that you have a predicable area to hit with the mouse. In macOS of today, if you don't click the area the icon fills, you miss the target. Each icon may have a unique area to hit.
Came here to comment this. Why the obsession with the ubiquitous universal rounded rectangle? There must be some reason these corporations figured out because they're all doing the same.
I think it's because it reads as "app", which is a more contemporary and encompassing conception than for users than just an icon or logo. Blame the very first iPhone for choosing slightly-Aqua-like roundrects for everything.
Yes, it looks weird to old eyes on the desktop, where the button-like shape is more familiar as a touch target, but we still recognize that they're apps.
It also allows the developer some control over the canvas that their arbitrarily-shaped logo is painted on, rather than just dropping it right on your user's wallpaper of their kids birthday party.
(As an aside, I'm on a Pixel that uses circles, but the Play Store (whose logo is a triangle) uses roundrects, so there's also a certain flexibility in app icons being a canvas within a platform-variable container shape, even if that's not a roundrect everywhere.)
I find the 2025 versions to be a nicer looking than pre-2025 variants, so it’s overall an improvement. But I also find the 2014 to be usually a lot better (clearer and more obvious). So incrementally it’s an improvement, but historically still worse.
Yes, macOS/iOS aesthetics reached their peak around 2013-14. Hardware-wise, the story is similar; the 2012 MacBook Pro was the most marvelous piece of hardware I've ever bought.
I miss that feeling. No part of me would agree that Apple is a more impressive company today than it was 13 years ago, despite its market cap.
I started using MacBooks in 2007. The generations from around that time until 2012 or so we're marvelous.
- With some models you could open the battery with a simple handle.
- Some models had a small LED bar that you could check the battery status with, without opening the lid.
- Replaceable RAM and disk. In one Pro I replaced the hard drive with an SSD (almost nobody had an SSD yet) and it would fly. I could open all Creative Suite apps (which were still optimized for spinning rust) in three seconds.
After that started the dark ages. Soldered RAM, soldered SSD, no more MagSafe, only USB-C ports, keyboards that could be destroyed with specs of dust. And the overheating Intel CPUs.
In 2019-2021 there was a rebound. First the scissor keyboard returned, then Apple Silicon, and good amounts of ports again.
Hardware-wise the peak is obviously the M-series. Ditching x86 while simultaneously nearly flawlessly emulating x86 apps via Rosetta - making the transition to ARM64 completely painless - was a landmark achievement.
As a non Apple user, yeah, M series are neat in the sense that the premium you pay goes into barring the competition from accessing the current nodes at TSMC, making Apple look good on benchmarks for 12-18 months or so. Apple used to have something else to offer, a sense of novelty, excitement, taste, and couldn't care less about performance. Apple of today is just Samsung/Gates' Microsoft "look at how big mine is!", with more bucks and even more user-hostile practices.
Easy to disagree on this one. MacBooks are easily the best-manufactured computers money can buy. The entry level MacBook is just unbeatable for value, which is very unusual for Apple.
Depends on what you value. To me, MB Pro's keyboard is terrible, and MacOS is abysmal. On an ideological level, I defend right to repair, right to upgrade and oppose vendor lock-in. What does that leave me with? An admittedly decent CPU, a good display and speakers? That's pretty weak to entertain Apple's consumer-hostile charade with my own money.
In fact, now is the best time in the last 20 years for either: fully integrated SoC’s inside laptops (with all the pros and cons of better battery life, lower heat, smaller size - but irrepairability) and almost entirely modular laptops.
I understand that most people want socketed CPU’s in machines, but speaking genuinely storage used to be upgraded more than ram, and ram more than a CPU; CPU’s limit how much ram we can have so having soldered RAM isn’t that big of a deal in reality to most people.
I feel like a heathen saying it, because emotionally I don’t want it to be true, but it’s definitely the truth.
Come on, there’s no way you wrote that down unironically and didn’t struggle breathing through the strong chemical copium smells.
> goes into barring the competition from accessing the current nodes at TSMC
I know it’s en vogue to hate on Apple and make them out to be this big evil corporation, but you’re naming it sound as if they’ve been jerking off while sitting on TSMC’s capacity just to fuck with the competition and purely to make it impossible to compete, when in reality they’ve continued to make exponential improvements on their silicon platform.
> making Apple look good on benchmarks for 12-18 months or so
What are you on about?
They’ve essentially been in a league of their own since the M1, especially if you take into consideration the power envelope and how performance is available with just passive cooling.
There isn’t really anything like it.
Even the salty argument of Apple hogging TMSC nodes just crumbles apart if you give more than a second of thought.
For starters, yes, sure Apple is great at managing their logistics and supply chain, which is why, when Cook was in charge of that, it impressed Jobs so much and it proved to be so essential to Apple’s success, that Jobs decided to hand pick Cook as his successor.
I don’t see how that is a useful argument against Apple, moral or otherwise.
Nothing is stopping competitors from optimizing their process to the point where they can call TSMC and offer to buy their capacity for the next year or two. To say nothing of the efforts made outside of TSMC like Samsung GAAFET 3nm and MBCFET 2nm process and whatever Intel is dicking around with on their 2nm process.
More importantly though, it’s silly to make it seem as if that’s the only reason for the fruits of Apple’s labor.
Take AMD’s HX 370 for example, released last year, courtesy of TSMC’s N4P process.
It still struggled to provide a PPA similar to the M1 Pro, which wasn’t only 3 years older at the time, it was a product of TSMC’s older N5 process.
Clearly having access to newer TSMC nodes isn’t a guaranteed win.
> and couldn't care less about performance
You’ve got it mixed up. Apple has never cared about raw specs, but they always have and always will care about performance.
If you’re inclined to read their every move through the big bad filter then you might say they never cared about raw performance because they’ve always been able to get more out of less and this way they could charge high spec prices without the high spec cost (and without, historically, advertising specs), and it clearly worked out for them.
Their stuff is being sold as if it’s given away for free, in doing so they’ve proven that the average user couldn’t give two fucks about bigger numbers as long as it works well, and their competitors have to pack their phones and other devices with higher specs and cooling solutions like vapor chambers (something Apple has managed to avoid so far) to keep up.
In a way they’ve always had to care more about performance than their competitors because they’ve mostly worked with hardware that’s “lesser” on paper to maximize their margins.
> to offer, a sense of novelty, excitement, taste
I don’t know about you but single-handedly making x86_64 look like an ancient joke with something that would’ve been considered a silly mobile processor 10 years ago is quite novel and exiting. If nothing else it lit a fire under Intel, even if they’ve seemed to have decided to let themselves be turned into a well done steak.
This was essentially what Intel had in mind with their Atom series for netbooks back in the day and Intel never managed to crack the code.
I remember being amazed when I received my developer transition kit, running macOS on an A12Z like it was nothing.
Even now, if I want to be more comfortable and do some coding or video editing work on the couch I can use my off-the-shelve base model M3 MacBook Air to do most of what I can on my M1 Max, that’s quite the leap in performance in such a short time.
There’s no accounting for taste or course and what I like might not be to your liking, and there is plenty about Apple that deserve legitimate criticism, so I don’t understand the need to make something out of nothing in this instance.
I'm not taking away from Apple's push towards ARM, that was ballsy, and well executed (also, they had little choice but to ditch Intel, and with AMD not being an option it's pretty obvious in retrospect). That said, I'm tired of the rhetoric and attitude that somehow Apple's chips are made of angel dust or something, especially on this "tech"/"science" forum.
> You’ve got it mixed up. Apple has never cared about raw specs, but they always have and always will care about performance.
Apple a decade and a half ago was selling you "unique" products or clever features. Today's Apple announcements is Tim showing you benchmarks.
> I don’t know about you but single-handedly making x86_64 look like an ancient joke
No, they haven't. They did put intel to shame, but so did AMD, and that came as a surprise to nobody.
Perhaps it’s just nostalgia on my part, but I really don’t understand imposing the constraint of making every Mac app look like the rounded iPhone app buttons. To me, it makes it harder at a glance to distinguish one app from another compared to the older designs.
I'm actually typing this reply on a 2012 MacBook Pro which is still working pretty well. I've also used several recent MacBook models at work so am familiar with those. Things that I like better about the 2012 MacBook Pro compared to newer models is that it's easier to replace/upgrade items. On my 2012 MacBook Pro I've replaced the original hard drive with a SSD, upgraded the memory, and replaced the failed battery (which shouldn't be unexpected for such an old laptop) which were all fairly simple to do.
I also do not like that Apple has completely removed all USB type A ports on the newer MacBooks. USB type A plugs are still very common and I wish Apple left one or two on the newer MacBooks in addition to the USB-C ports. Yes, you can use USB-C to USB type A adapters but it is annoying.
I also do not like that Apple has removed the Ethernet and microphone jacks. Both jacks are still useful to have on modern computers. I'll make an exception for removing the Ethernet jack on the MacBook Air to accommodate a thinner chassis but wish the MacBook Pro chassis was kept thick enough to accommodate the Ethernet jack.
> I also do not like that Apple has removed the Ethernet and microphone jacks. Both jacks are still useful to have on modern computers
Ethernet is available over the ports via fairly cheap adapters if you need it. There's so much bandwidth on a thunderbolt port that it can do that and a display or two at the same time.
2012 Retina model had all the relevant ports, a great keyboard & screen, an Intel CPU and Nvidia GPU - the go-to choices for professional software development to date, making it much easier to design locally & deploy remotely.
Build quality was also stunning. It’s still good, but the gap between brands is shrinking.
Arguably the worst part about modern MacBooks is software. I don’t know anyone who finds it more stable/convenient to use or pleasant to develop for :(
Yes, I like how they're striking a balance between minimalism and skeumorphism. They often try to do more with less. The Photo Booth one is a good example. Away with that camera: Let's focus on the strip from a photo booth (and don't use actual photos because that's too messy at smaller sizes).
It looks like sometimes this approach has led to more details or an entirely different design, and sometimes less details. Almost like a normalization of sorts to better standardize around a level of details and amount of contrast and brightness.
It was weird to have a real person’s photo as an icon. But the new versions are much less clear. The 2025 icon is especially difficult if you don’t know the macOS camera application is called Photo Booth.
Game Center is probably the only one I can honestly say is worse. Generally speaking most the other examples are iterations done to keep up with design trends, but Game Center have lost meaning after the first iteration. Without context it's impossible to tell what the four bubbles are suppose to be.
> Generally speaking most the other examples are iterations done to keep up with design trends
And that is what I believe to be the crux of the problem. The trends have been regressions rather than improvements.
I have a few theories as to why this happens too but none of them are particularly complimentary towards Apple, et al.
And to be clear, Apple are far from the worst offenders here. Pretty much every company that releases new software or hardware feels the need to change things so it looks “fresh” and people keep buying their stuff. It doesn’t matter if it results in design regressions because by the time people realise they don’t like it, they’ve already bought that shiny new thing.
"Notes" are now indistinguishable from the "Calendar" at the first glance. "Game Center" is ridiculous, I have no idea what it even symbolizes. "Dictionary" looks more like spell checking settings?
And "Photo Booth" looks like a mouth with a strange tongue sticking out.
Nicely executed. The website, I mean. It's like a memorial to principle.
If y'all like icons, I'm not above plugging my free Mac screensaver, Iconic, an "Aqua Icons" screensaver remake which attempts to showcase the icons you didn't know you have, and highlight some noteworthy icons of Mac history:
Unrelated but I wish Mac one day releases 'all new' classic old mac style UI. When they do that, everyone as usual will copy them and some sanity in modern UI world will be restored.
I loved and love the look of macOS 9. I like how the menu interactions work, everything. I’ve been thinking about going back to it as my primary for personal/non dev computing. I anticipate some challenges with the browser, etc though and not sure if all can be overcome. Modern macOS brings me no joy.
I had a similar love for the BeOS UI, happy to see Haiku humming along.
Not just muted--I look at them and I genuinely feel like my vision is getting worse. I have this giant, beautiful high DPI display, but the icons don't look sharp anymore--they look like someone downsampled then upsampled them with a gaussian blur. Very weird choice for a company that used to pride themselves on the "retina" resolution of their display technology.
I feel like peak Apple icon design was around 2014, where they were high-resolution and clearly depicted what the application was. Since then, they are all moving towards these indistinct, abstract hieroglyphics.
What if they took a page out of Microsoft's icon playbook, where all their icons look the same? To this day I still accidentally click the wrong Office icon on my work computer because they all look so similar.
Squint/blur your eyes as you skim the list of icons. Think of this as an approximation of peripheral / partial vision. Some new icons fare well, other are a muddy mess.
The glass metaphor seems inconsistently used in iconography, and semi-transparent gears are just plain silly, even if it’s in keeping with the aesthetic standard.
Nice, but quite the short list (iTunes, Safari would be nice).
A lot of experimentation went on with the iTunes icon in particular (and iTunes in general). It was the UI playground for new ideas before they would release in the next OS version.
I miss the design language of OS X where things were supposed to have the perspective of being viewed from above resting on a flat surface, but with some depth. Most things looked beautiful like that, the things that didn't (Internet Explorer) stuck out. iPhoto, Stickies, Mail, had beautiful icons.
Tragically missing the NeXT and Rhapsody versions that preceded many of these programs. Rhapsody DR2 has its own Stickies icon that got skipped, along with the checkmark-monitor Preferences from NeXTSTEP 4.0PR1 Mecca.
No doubt about it, the icons from the early 2000s up until 2012 are the ones I generally still like best, especially in this direct comparison with the later ones. The later ones are not exactly bad, but they just lack the panache.
One thing to note that isn’t captured by the graphics on the site, is that the new 2025 icons are layered and have material effects. So they look flatter on the site than they do in use.
I tried to find a site with more examples than the linked post, and I think https://guis.org/macos/icons/ is a pretty good overview for those who may be interested.
Is it me or do others find that always 2020-2025 category icons were the best looking compared to 2025- except for podcasts icon? (And I do not give a damn for podcasts :D )
They can still keep the 2001 aesthetic while giving themselves more work: we have higher resolution screens now so a 1024x1024 icon is probably in order; we have pervasive OS-level dark mode support now so they can create dark and light versions of the icon; as UI fashions change they can add or reduce the amount of shadow and glass effect.
The evolution of the App Store icon from drawing utensils (pencil, brush and ruler) to transparent popsicle sticks is definitely the most interesting. Ask someone today what the A icon represents, and they would probably have no idea, or think something like building blocks.
Game Center is definitely the worst. The bubbles have never represented anything remotely intelligible. Multi-colored blobs equals games? If you say so, Apple.
I never liked that the App Store icon took the blueprint portion of the Xcode icon, but at the same time it made sense - designing and building apps in Xcode and the finished product in the App Store. Now Xcode uses the same lame elongated capsules.
I don’t think it’s unpopular for normal humans who just want to find the app they’re looking for. It’s only unpopular to designers who are chasing fashion trends.
macOS has a history of app icons which are highly detailed and almost photo-realistic. I think this trend started with OS X and the skeuomorphism hype. In my opinion, this is exactly the opposite of what a good icon should be like (reduced, stylized, simplified to the extreme).
Some bad examples you can see in the latest version of macOS:
- Xcode (photorealistic hammer)
- TextEdit (photorealistic pen)
- Automator (rendered robot)
- System Settings (gearwheels with tiny details)
- Preview (literally a photo, with a photorealistic "loupe" in front)
A good icon should telegraph to the user as soon and as swiftly as possible the identification and purpose of the app/folder/thing it represents.
Photorealism is pretty good at that, since objects tend to look like themselves and nothing else, meaning they are unambiguous, and afford familiarity because even if your trash can at your desk looks nothing like the old photorealistic silver mesh trash can from Macs of yore, you can still probably figure out what it is really fast.
I am sick and tired of overwrought artsy fartsy mimmimulizsm hierogplyhic “icons” instead of something I can actually fucking see and recognize.
There is no reason why an icon can't be skeuomorphic. Flat design was inspired by Swiss design, which really only existed because of technical constraints of graphic design in the 50s and 60s.
An icon should indicate what the program does, and with higher quality displays, there's no reason why more detail in the icon would be worse. Icons aren't logos in the sense they have to be adapted for every possible use case (where those use cases may have technical limitations), e.g. on a huge box truck, embroidered on a shirt, or as a favicon.
I understand free-shaped icons can sometimes be really bad designed and look really shitty, but one of Apple's distinguished features was their high-quality icons. It was even transmitted to other software companies that target Apple devices. You could tell with high confidence when a software was made specifically for Mac and when it was ported just looking at the icon.
Now everything is this sad rounded cornered square.
> Now everything is this sad rounded cornered square.
You see this a lot in the absurd “modernist” design of clean lines, sharp edges, and lack of texture and depth across all industries.
Whether that’s your Thuma furniture where the price is high and your marketed to be told that the design is good, but it’s not at all - devoid of meaning and a sense of place, never mind that the quality of the materials are low and have no specific origin, or your run of the mill drone light show where we are fooling ourselves into thinking that drawing pictures of things like the Statue of Liberty (oh after the drones do the ads, brought to you by your local auto dealer) are good and should be appreciated instead of the vibrancy and brilliance of fireworks instead.
Apple has begun to transition this way too. There aren’t any designers working there. Look at the Calculator app as a great example.
They say perfection is not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. But there is a point where you take away more and more and more and your left with creations devoid of meaning or purpose.
Once you start seeing this in your day to day life you can’t unsee it. Sorry ahead of time for those who read this comment and become more attune to this phenomenon.
> Apple has begun to transition this way too. There aren’t any designers working there
This is a dumb “no true Scotsman” argument, there are undoubtedly designers working there by any stretch of the imagination.
The more interesting discussion to have is why the field of software design has come to the point it’s at today, and why many designers think that work like the kind Apple is doing is good design.
> This is a dumb “no true Scotsman” argument, there are undoubtedly designers working there by any stretch of the imagination.
It’s a rhetorical device, not an argument. Of course there are people with that title working there.
I don’t think it has too much to do with software though, I meant to address a general cultural malaise that we can see (or I can see) surface in design broadly across industries. The software industry (writing code and papers about it and such) is probably, I say as I haven’t really felt the need to commit to an opinion here, one of the better design oriented industries precisely because the design of software, elegant code that is efficient and elastic to demand, reliable, and performant, seems to me to be progressing quite nicely.
But software by its very nature isn’t meant to be superfluous - unlike say, good architecture with ornamentation and carefully selected materials that are adapted for a given environment.
To serve the purpose of an interesting conversation, I don’t think focusing on a rhetorical comment as very important. Maybe engage with the substance (or lack thereof if that’s your opinion) of the content instead? Not to sound like a jerk I don’t mean to - just that it may be more interesting.
My hypothesis is that, at least on VisionOS, some apps are full of — almost cluttered with — 3D objects; and so Apple felt that, for the sake of your eye being easily able to jump to "where the UI is" amongst all that, the user needed to be able to visually differentiate/distinguish action buttons (incl. "buttons that launch apps" — essentially what these app icons are, esp. on the mobile OSes) from those 3D objects. This was achieved by ensuring that action buttons are always button-shaped, rather than allowing them to be arbitrary-object-shaped.
Note that, in this UX-design paradigm, the icon on (in?) a button still can be its own standalone object of arbitrary shape, rather than being forced to be button-shaped itself (see e.g. the Stickies or Game Center icons in TFA.) But that standalone object has to then be "encased" in the "app button" glass (as if encasing something in a puck of pourable resin), to make it visually obvious that this object is functionally a button, rather than just being some random 3D object with its own arbitrary interaction semantics.
Funny enough, this is almost exactly the complement to the problem of visually differentiating action buttons from 2D content. In a 2D UI, you want to make the action buttons more 3D-looking than the 2D stuff around them, to help them stand out. Thus the Windows XP / macOS 9 era of "jelly" buttons with that visually bulge toward the screen — standing proud of the content, affording touch.
But if everything is 3D / stands proud in arbitrary ways, then overlaid actions will stand out better if they're less 3D — making it clear that they're sitting "on the HUD" rather than "in the world." Such objects can be literal 2D — or you can get fancy and choose some unusual middle-ground, like the sort of 2.5D papercut-diorama look that "liquid glass" achieves.
but one of Apple's distinguished features was their high-quality icons
This was one of the things I loved when I switched to OS X in 2007. The Photo Booth, Pages, Preview, etc. were so beautiful. Also very easy to distinguish apps by icons. Now they all look the same-ish.
There was a lot more whimsy as well. The Adium instant messenger had its green bird logo as an icon. And the bird icon in the Dock flapped its wings when you had a new message (this was pre-native notifications, though Adium may have had Growl support already). I think it would also open its eyes when you started the app.
The upside of this 'button-as-icon' interface is that you have a predicable area to hit with the mouse. In macOS of today, if you don't click the area the icon fills, you miss the target. Each icon may have a unique area to hit.
In the days of freeware (pre-App Store "free"), you could pretty well tell the quality of the software by the quality of its icon.
Came here to comment this. Why the obsession with the ubiquitous universal rounded rectangle? There must be some reason these corporations figured out because they're all doing the same.
I think it's because it reads as "app", which is a more contemporary and encompassing conception than for users than just an icon or logo. Blame the very first iPhone for choosing slightly-Aqua-like roundrects for everything.
Yes, it looks weird to old eyes on the desktop, where the button-like shape is more familiar as a touch target, but we still recognize that they're apps.
It also allows the developer some control over the canvas that their arbitrarily-shaped logo is painted on, rather than just dropping it right on your user's wallpaper of their kids birthday party.
(As an aside, I'm on a Pixel that uses circles, but the Play Store (whose logo is a triangle) uses roundrects, so there's also a certain flexibility in app icons being a canvas within a platform-variable container shape, even if that's not a roundrect everywhere.)
ubiquitous universal rounded rectangle
Squircle.
Before anyone downvotes, this isn’t mere semantics. Apple changed from rounded rectangles to squircles in iOS 7.
https://blog.minimal.app/rounded-corners-in-the-apple-ecosys...
Even worse, the slightly rounded rectangle looks much better than the squircle.
I find the 2025 versions to be a nicer looking than pre-2025 variants, so it’s overall an improvement. But I also find the 2014 to be usually a lot better (clearer and more obvious). So incrementally it’s an improvement, but historically still worse.
Yes, macOS/iOS aesthetics reached their peak around 2013-14. Hardware-wise, the story is similar; the 2012 MacBook Pro was the most marvelous piece of hardware I've ever bought.
I miss that feeling. No part of me would agree that Apple is a more impressive company today than it was 13 years ago, despite its market cap.
I started using MacBooks in 2007. The generations from around that time until 2012 or so we're marvelous.
- With some models you could open the battery with a simple handle.
- Some models had a small LED bar that you could check the battery status with, without opening the lid.
- Replaceable RAM and disk. In one Pro I replaced the hard drive with an SSD (almost nobody had an SSD yet) and it would fly. I could open all Creative Suite apps (which were still optimized for spinning rust) in three seconds.
After that started the dark ages. Soldered RAM, soldered SSD, no more MagSafe, only USB-C ports, keyboards that could be destroyed with specs of dust. And the overheating Intel CPUs.
In 2019-2021 there was a rebound. First the scissor keyboard returned, then Apple Silicon, and good amounts of ports again.
It was really hard to be a Mac user ~2016-2020.
Some models had a small LED bar that you could check the battery status with, without opening the lid.
On older Mac’s (2009-10?), the LEDs were built into the battery. Very handy to quickly check if your spare has more charge than the one you’re using.
PowerBook G4 (and iBook, I think) has LED-in-battery.
Hardware-wise the peak is obviously the M-series. Ditching x86 while simultaneously nearly flawlessly emulating x86 apps via Rosetta - making the transition to ARM64 completely painless - was a landmark achievement.
As a non Apple user, yeah, M series are neat in the sense that the premium you pay goes into barring the competition from accessing the current nodes at TSMC, making Apple look good on benchmarks for 12-18 months or so. Apple used to have something else to offer, a sense of novelty, excitement, taste, and couldn't care less about performance. Apple of today is just Samsung/Gates' Microsoft "look at how big mine is!", with more bucks and even more user-hostile practices.
Easy to disagree on this one. MacBooks are easily the best-manufactured computers money can buy. The entry level MacBook is just unbeatable for value, which is very unusual for Apple.
Depends on what you value. To me, MB Pro's keyboard is terrible, and MacOS is abysmal. On an ideological level, I defend right to repair, right to upgrade and oppose vendor lock-in. What does that leave me with? An admittedly decent CPU, a good display and speakers? That's pretty weak to entertain Apple's consumer-hostile charade with my own money.
You can go and buy a framework laptop.
In fact, now is the best time in the last 20 years for either: fully integrated SoC’s inside laptops (with all the pros and cons of better battery life, lower heat, smaller size - but irrepairability) and almost entirely modular laptops.
I understand that most people want socketed CPU’s in machines, but speaking genuinely storage used to be upgraded more than ram, and ram more than a CPU; CPU’s limit how much ram we can have so having soldered RAM isn’t that big of a deal in reality to most people.
I feel like a heathen saying it, because emotionally I don’t want it to be true, but it’s definitely the truth.
Come on, there’s no way you wrote that down unironically and didn’t struggle breathing through the strong chemical copium smells.
> goes into barring the competition from accessing the current nodes at TSMC
I know it’s en vogue to hate on Apple and make them out to be this big evil corporation, but you’re naming it sound as if they’ve been jerking off while sitting on TSMC’s capacity just to fuck with the competition and purely to make it impossible to compete, when in reality they’ve continued to make exponential improvements on their silicon platform.
> making Apple look good on benchmarks for 12-18 months or so
What are you on about? They’ve essentially been in a league of their own since the M1, especially if you take into consideration the power envelope and how performance is available with just passive cooling.
There isn’t really anything like it.
Even the salty argument of Apple hogging TMSC nodes just crumbles apart if you give more than a second of thought.
For starters, yes, sure Apple is great at managing their logistics and supply chain, which is why, when Cook was in charge of that, it impressed Jobs so much and it proved to be so essential to Apple’s success, that Jobs decided to hand pick Cook as his successor. I don’t see how that is a useful argument against Apple, moral or otherwise.
Nothing is stopping competitors from optimizing their process to the point where they can call TSMC and offer to buy their capacity for the next year or two. To say nothing of the efforts made outside of TSMC like Samsung GAAFET 3nm and MBCFET 2nm process and whatever Intel is dicking around with on their 2nm process.
More importantly though, it’s silly to make it seem as if that’s the only reason for the fruits of Apple’s labor.
Take AMD’s HX 370 for example, released last year, courtesy of TSMC’s N4P process. It still struggled to provide a PPA similar to the M1 Pro, which wasn’t only 3 years older at the time, it was a product of TSMC’s older N5 process.
Clearly having access to newer TSMC nodes isn’t a guaranteed win.
> and couldn't care less about performance
You’ve got it mixed up. Apple has never cared about raw specs, but they always have and always will care about performance.
If you’re inclined to read their every move through the big bad filter then you might say they never cared about raw performance because they’ve always been able to get more out of less and this way they could charge high spec prices without the high spec cost (and without, historically, advertising specs), and it clearly worked out for them.
Their stuff is being sold as if it’s given away for free, in doing so they’ve proven that the average user couldn’t give two fucks about bigger numbers as long as it works well, and their competitors have to pack their phones and other devices with higher specs and cooling solutions like vapor chambers (something Apple has managed to avoid so far) to keep up.
In a way they’ve always had to care more about performance than their competitors because they’ve mostly worked with hardware that’s “lesser” on paper to maximize their margins.
> to offer, a sense of novelty, excitement, taste
I don’t know about you but single-handedly making x86_64 look like an ancient joke with something that would’ve been considered a silly mobile processor 10 years ago is quite novel and exiting. If nothing else it lit a fire under Intel, even if they’ve seemed to have decided to let themselves be turned into a well done steak.
This was essentially what Intel had in mind with their Atom series for netbooks back in the day and Intel never managed to crack the code.
I remember being amazed when I received my developer transition kit, running macOS on an A12Z like it was nothing.
Even now, if I want to be more comfortable and do some coding or video editing work on the couch I can use my off-the-shelve base model M3 MacBook Air to do most of what I can on my M1 Max, that’s quite the leap in performance in such a short time.
There’s no accounting for taste or course and what I like might not be to your liking, and there is plenty about Apple that deserve legitimate criticism, so I don’t understand the need to make something out of nothing in this instance.
> Come on, there’s no way you wrote that down unironically and didn’t struggle breathing through the strong chemical copium smells.
What a way to out yourself as some kind of irrational zealot.
>> goes into barring the competition from accessing the current nodes at TSMC
> I know it’s en vogue to hate on Apple […] when in reality they’ve continued to make exponential improvements on their silicon platform.
Have they? M3 to M4 is roughly 20% more perfs for 10% higher TDP.
> What are you on about? They’ve essentially been in a league of their own since the M1
Are they?
> Take AMD’s HX 370 for example,
Indeed, AMD is *very* close perfs-wise, while sitting on TSMC's 4nm, versus the new M4 Pro's 3mn Gen2.
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/6143vs6346/AMD-Ryzen-AI...
> It still struggled to provide a PPA similar to the M1 Pro
…and not far-off when talking energy efficiency, again, with a whole gen of difference
https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Zen-5-Strix-Point-CPU-anal...
so, within single digit precents.
I'm not taking away from Apple's push towards ARM, that was ballsy, and well executed (also, they had little choice but to ditch Intel, and with AMD not being an option it's pretty obvious in retrospect). That said, I'm tired of the rhetoric and attitude that somehow Apple's chips are made of angel dust or something, especially on this "tech"/"science" forum.
> You’ve got it mixed up. Apple has never cared about raw specs, but they always have and always will care about performance.
Apple a decade and a half ago was selling you "unique" products or clever features. Today's Apple announcements is Tim showing you benchmarks.
> I don’t know about you but single-handedly making x86_64 look like an ancient joke
No, they haven't. They did put intel to shame, but so did AMD, and that came as a surprise to nobody.
Perhaps it’s just nostalgia on my part, but I really don’t understand imposing the constraint of making every Mac app look like the rounded iPhone app buttons. To me, it makes it harder at a glance to distinguish one app from another compared to the older designs.
What do you dislike about modern Macbooks compared to 2012?
I'm actually typing this reply on a 2012 MacBook Pro which is still working pretty well. I've also used several recent MacBook models at work so am familiar with those. Things that I like better about the 2012 MacBook Pro compared to newer models is that it's easier to replace/upgrade items. On my 2012 MacBook Pro I've replaced the original hard drive with a SSD, upgraded the memory, and replaced the failed battery (which shouldn't be unexpected for such an old laptop) which were all fairly simple to do.
I also do not like that Apple has completely removed all USB type A ports on the newer MacBooks. USB type A plugs are still very common and I wish Apple left one or two on the newer MacBooks in addition to the USB-C ports. Yes, you can use USB-C to USB type A adapters but it is annoying.
I also do not like that Apple has removed the Ethernet and microphone jacks. Both jacks are still useful to have on modern computers. I'll make an exception for removing the Ethernet jack on the MacBook Air to accommodate a thinner chassis but wish the MacBook Pro chassis was kept thick enough to accommodate the Ethernet jack.
> I also do not like that Apple has removed the Ethernet and microphone jacks. Both jacks are still useful to have on modern computers
Ethernet is available over the ports via fairly cheap adapters if you need it. There's so much bandwidth on a thunderbolt port that it can do that and a display or two at the same time.
2012 Retina model had all the relevant ports, a great keyboard & screen, an Intel CPU and Nvidia GPU - the go-to choices for professional software development to date, making it much easier to design locally & deploy remotely.
Build quality was also stunning. It’s still good, but the gap between brands is shrinking.
Arguably the worst part about modern MacBooks is software. I don’t know anyone who finds it more stable/convenient to use or pleasant to develop for :(
Yes, I like how they're striking a balance between minimalism and skeumorphism. They often try to do more with less. The Photo Booth one is a good example. Away with that camera: Let's focus on the strip from a photo booth (and don't use actual photos because that's too messy at smaller sizes).
It looks like sometimes this approach has led to more details or an entirely different design, and sometimes less details. Almost like a normalization of sorts to better standardize around a level of details and amount of contrast and brightness.
It was weird to have a real person’s photo as an icon. But the new versions are much less clear. The 2025 icon is especially difficult if you don’t know the macOS camera application is called Photo Booth.
Game Center is probably the only one I can honestly say is worse. Generally speaking most the other examples are iterations done to keep up with design trends, but Game Center have lost meaning after the first iteration. Without context it's impossible to tell what the four bubbles are suppose to be.
> Generally speaking most the other examples are iterations done to keep up with design trends
And that is what I believe to be the crux of the problem. The trends have been regressions rather than improvements.
I have a few theories as to why this happens too but none of them are particularly complimentary towards Apple, et al.
And to be clear, Apple are far from the worst offenders here. Pretty much every company that releases new software or hardware feels the need to change things so it looks “fresh” and people keep buying their stuff. It doesn’t matter if it results in design regressions because by the time people realise they don’t like it, they’ve already bought that shiny new thing.
"Notes" are now indistinguishable from the "Calendar" at the first glance. "Game Center" is ridiculous, I have no idea what it even symbolizes. "Dictionary" looks more like spell checking settings?
And "Photo Booth" looks like a mouth with a strange tongue sticking out.
Mac seem to have maintained consistency with most of icons. Windows icons on the other side are all over the place. https://www.howtogeek.com/733912/a-visual-history-of-windows...
Almost every one of the 2025 icons look worse.
EDIT: And most of them seem to have adopted this bloom effect which just makes them look blurry.
Nicely executed. The website, I mean. It's like a memorial to principle.
If y'all like icons, I'm not above plugging my free Mac screensaver, Iconic, an "Aqua Icons" screensaver remake which attempts to showcase the icons you didn't know you have, and highlight some noteworthy icons of Mac history:
https://github.com/Rezmason/iconic
Unrelated but I wish Mac one day releases 'all new' classic old mac style UI. When they do that, everyone as usual will copy them and some sanity in modern UI world will be restored.
I loved and love the look of macOS 9. I like how the menu interactions work, everything. I’ve been thinking about going back to it as my primary for personal/non dev computing. I anticipate some challenges with the browser, etc though and not sure if all can be overcome. Modern macOS brings me no joy.
I had a similar love for the BeOS UI, happy to see Haiku humming along.
I find the 2025+ icon style difficult to discern.
Something about the lower contrast and fuzzier/blurs - makes the icons too muted for my liking.
Not just muted--I look at them and I genuinely feel like my vision is getting worse. I have this giant, beautiful high DPI display, but the icons don't look sharp anymore--they look like someone downsampled then upsampled them with a gaussian blur. Very weird choice for a company that used to pride themselves on the "retina" resolution of their display technology.
I feel like peak Apple icon design was around 2014, where they were high-resolution and clearly depicted what the application was. Since then, they are all moving towards these indistinct, abstract hieroglyphics.
In actual use, the icons are layered and have more visual separation than is shown when flattened down.
Still might not address your concerns, but I also don’t think the site currently shows them accurately
What if they took a page out of Microsoft's icon playbook, where all their icons look the same? To this day I still accidentally click the wrong Office icon on my work computer because they all look so similar.
Squint/blur your eyes as you skim the list of icons. Think of this as an approximation of peripheral / partial vision. Some new icons fare well, other are a muddy mess.
The glass metaphor seems inconsistently used in iconography, and semi-transparent gears are just plain silly, even if it’s in keeping with the aesthetic standard.
I miss the Finder plugsins pre-SIP that overrode built-in and added custom icons for special folders not based on resource forks.
My favorite will always be the TextEdit icon with the Think Different text.
Nice, but quite the short list (iTunes, Safari would be nice).
A lot of experimentation went on with the iTunes icon in particular (and iTunes in general). It was the UI playground for new ideas before they would release in the next OS version.
https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/itunes-app
As you can see the icon changed multiple times even within the same year or same OS version.
Most people think of the brushed metal, but I've always liked the iTunes 10 dalliance with vertical window controls as a good example of this.
2014-2020 was the best in every category. That calculator icon was perfect.
I miss the design language of OS X where things were supposed to have the perspective of being viewed from above resting on a flat surface, but with some depth. Most things looked beautiful like that, the things that didn't (Internet Explorer) stuck out. iPhoto, Stickies, Mail, had beautiful icons.
Tragically missing the NeXT and Rhapsody versions that preceded many of these programs. Rhapsody DR2 has its own Stickies icon that got skipped, along with the checkmark-monitor Preferences from NeXTSTEP 4.0PR1 Mecca.
I have a big dump of 48x48 NeXT icons here if anyone craves them: http://rhetori.ca/next/
(but holy shit you better not tell ClaudeBot about it or i'll scream)
This is dope, thanks for sharing!
No doubt about it, the icons from the early 2000s up until 2012 are the ones I generally still like best, especially in this direct comparison with the later ones. The later ones are not exactly bad, but they just lack the panache.
I used to love the CandyBar app by Panic. It was fun to customize my Mac and people shared such amazing icons and themes. Miss those days.
One thing to note that isn’t captured by the graphics on the site, is that the new 2025 icons are layered and have material effects. So they look flatter on the site than they do in use.
I recommend folks watch the introduction to icon composer video they put up https://youtu.be/4usD1hP1nYY?si=XRKba9Png6Gju12_
I’d be very interested in a survey that presents each group in random (non-chronological) order, asking to pick a favourite for each.
I went through and I have favourites that are all over, and not just a specific era.
I really like the 2010-2015 era. Something seems lost after that.
It's interesting how each of these icons looked new to us at one point. Now most of these icons seem quite old-looking.
I tried to find a site with more examples than the linked post, and I think https://guis.org/macos/icons/ is a pretty good overview for those who may be interested.
Is it me or do others find that always 2020-2025 category icons were the best looking compared to 2025- except for podcasts icon? (And I do not give a damn for podcasts :D )
I would assert that iChat evolved into messages. There are a few more icons that could be added in that category.
I agree, I also would argue that this counts as an earlier incarnation of the System Settings icon: https://i.imgur.com/cqtpKhI.png
It most definitely did.
The Chronicles of Enshittificarnia
At least the system preferences icon has improved, the 2020 one looks like it's AI generated.
Honestly the 2001 one looks the best. It’s clean and obvious with no fussy gear detail.
But designers don’t get paid to keep things the same.
They can still keep the 2001 aesthetic while giving themselves more work: we have higher resolution screens now so a 1024x1024 icon is probably in order; we have pervasive OS-level dark mode support now so they can create dark and light versions of the icon; as UI fashions change they can add or reduce the amount of shadow and glass effect.
The evolution of the App Store icon from drawing utensils (pencil, brush and ruler) to transparent popsicle sticks is definitely the most interesting. Ask someone today what the A icon represents, and they would probably have no idea, or think something like building blocks.
Game Center is definitely the worst. The bubbles have never represented anything remotely intelligible. Multi-colored blobs equals games? If you say so, Apple.
I never liked that the App Store icon took the blueprint portion of the Xcode icon, but at the same time it made sense - designing and building apps in Xcode and the finished product in the App Store. Now Xcode uses the same lame elongated capsules.
design by committee: icon version
the older ones are much nicer. they have more character and charm. it feels like the work of a human.
the new ones are bland, samey, flat, corporate, soulless.
It's progressively got worse.
I miss 2014.
Man, that 2012-2014 Game Center Icon. Love it in retrospect. Also please bring back the green, that 2025- icon looks so stale compared to the others.
The entire catalog just prior to 2015 was so good. I know that's an unpopular opinion these days.
I don’t think it’s unpopular for normal humans who just want to find the app they’re looking for. It’s only unpopular to designers who are chasing fashion trends.
Notes 2012 icon, the best !
I think photo booth had the most depressing “evolution”.
from all of these examples, the only new icons I prefer are PhotoBooth and Podcasts.
macOS has a history of app icons which are highly detailed and almost photo-realistic. I think this trend started with OS X and the skeuomorphism hype. In my opinion, this is exactly the opposite of what a good icon should be like (reduced, stylized, simplified to the extreme).
Some bad examples you can see in the latest version of macOS:
- Xcode (photorealistic hammer)
- TextEdit (photorealistic pen)
- Automator (rendered robot)
- System Settings (gearwheels with tiny details)
- Preview (literally a photo, with a photorealistic "loupe" in front)
- Trash bin in the dock (photorealistic bin)
A good icon should telegraph to the user as soon and as swiftly as possible the identification and purpose of the app/folder/thing it represents.
Photorealism is pretty good at that, since objects tend to look like themselves and nothing else, meaning they are unambiguous, and afford familiarity because even if your trash can at your desk looks nothing like the old photorealistic silver mesh trash can from Macs of yore, you can still probably figure out what it is really fast.
I am sick and tired of overwrought artsy fartsy mimmimulizsm hierogplyhic “icons” instead of something I can actually fucking see and recognize.
"In my opinion, this is exactly the opposite of what a good icon should be like (reduced, stylized, simplified to the extreme)."
Now we have icons where you basically can't tell what this is about and more and more icons look extremely similar. Not sure this is better.
> this is exactly the opposite of what a good icon should be like (reduced, stylized, simplified to the extreme)
Why do you believe that? Is an icon a pictogram or ideogram?
There is no reason why an icon can't be skeuomorphic. Flat design was inspired by Swiss design, which really only existed because of technical constraints of graphic design in the 50s and 60s.
An icon should indicate what the program does, and with higher quality displays, there's no reason why more detail in the icon would be worse. Icons aren't logos in the sense they have to be adapted for every possible use case (where those use cases may have technical limitations), e.g. on a huge box truck, embroidered on a shirt, or as a favicon.