Tahoe’s Terrible Icons
Apple updated their own app icons on Tahoe, for both the squircle shape as well as the new “Liquid Glass” interface. Mostly, these icons seem dumbed-down, with a loss of detail. For example, here’s Safari’s old icon from MacOS 15 (Sequoia) on the left, and the new Tahoe icon on the right.
To me, the new icon just feels blander, and that’s widely true for all of the updated icons. A small number, such as Screen Sharing and Audio MIDI Setup, may be improvements. Most, however, are not. Let’s review with direct comparisons, all of which again feature the older Sequoia icon on the left and the new Tahoe icon on the right.
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Apple’s scripting application previously featured an awesome little robot dude. On Tahoe, it’s barely clear that’s a robot at all. What a pity.
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These icons, however, make me sad. Perhaps one day, it will again be possible for icons to have shape and personality. We have the technology.
The post is worth reading for Paul’s trenchant commentary, but it also illustrates just how much of a step backward the Tahoe icons are in both concept and execution. I couldn’t quite believe they were as blurry as they looked in his comparisons until I extracted Safari’s icons and compared them by toggling between versions in Quick Look.
The only thing I can say in Apple’s defense is that the Tahoe icons aren’t as objectionable when viewed in isolation—outside of comparisons like this, most of us don’t scrutinize individual icons. But uniform shapes and softened details have real user impact: they increase visual search time in the Dock and make it harder to distinguish apps at small sizes—especially on high‑density displays and for users with low vision.
I can think of no squircle icon that is objectively better than the pre-squircle version. They all look like they’re being forced to compromise. Some, even a few Apple icons, look like they’re trying to show a little flair with parts extending behind the squircle, but even that is verboten in Tahoe.
And, they’re all smaller! A squircle icon isn’t permitted to be full size!
The look and feel of the Mac has always been—if you’ll pardon the pun—iconic. App icons were a place that developers could show off their creativity, and make apps that are instantly identifiable. Squircle jail remains a thing in macOS 26.1 (and, I’d argue, is worse than before, with a new lighter gray background that feels even more jarring). Here’s hoping this trend gets reversed before too long.
They’re ugly, they’re dumb (like the new Apple Calendar icon, showing a month that somehow has only 24 days), and many of them — regardless of whether they’re aesthetically pleasing or not — are inscrutable. The fundamental purpose of an icon is to have meaning. And some of these are meaningless.
Even good styles fall out of fashion as trends change. But good styles come back into style eventually. A few decades from now, no one is going to say “Hey, let’s bring back 2020s-style icons.”
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For a remarkably long stretch, Apple’s in-house icons represented the pinnacle of an art form worth celebrating. They were exquisitely crafted, and quite obviously the work of the most talented artists in the field. […] “Fuck it, who cares” is replacing “Insanely great” as the company’s design mantra for software.
It’s bad enough they fuck up their own icons - but that they actively fuck up everyone else’s icons is unforgivable.
See also: the MacRumors forum.
Previously:
- macOS 26.1
- Shipping Liquid Glass
- macOS Icon History
- One Size Does Not Fit All
- macOS Tahoe 26 Developer Beta 9
- macOS Tahoe 26 Developer Beta 7
- Assorted Notes on Liquid Glass
- macOS Tahoe 26 Developer Beta 2
- macOS Tahoe’s New Theming System
- The macOS App Icon Book
Update (2025-11-12): Jim Nielsen:
While Paul’s post mostly covers icons for the apps you’ll find in the primary
/Applicationsfolder, there’s also a subset of possibly lesser-known icons in the/System/Library/CoreServicesfolder which have suffered a similar fate.When I first got a Mac back in college, one of the things I remember being completely intrigued by — and then later falling in love with — was how you could plumb obscure areas of the operating system and find gems, like the icons for little OS-level apps. You’d stumble on something like the “Add Printer” app and see the most beautiful printer icon you’d ever seen. Who cares what the app did, you could just stare at that icon. Admire it. Take it in. And you’d come away with a sense that the people who made it really cared.
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Whatever one thinks of Apple's icon, the last point is the main one.
They didn't have to ruin everyone else's icons too.
I assume they did this so they could apply the shading effects for transparency and tinting. That is a great example of a terrible trade.
The dock icon can still be drawn into. So it's quite easy to replace the squircle with the old icon. Looks okay on Find Any File but my app is larger and therefore slower to start so it looks weird.
@Beatrix I don’t see the runtime drawing as a good long-term solution because it doesn’t look right when the app isn’t running, in the Finder, or even in the App Store.
In @Sebastian's defense, he's entitled to his opinion. However, I think we can all acknowledge that the icons simply remove so much information. The migration assistant or dictionary is a perfect example. Is the dictionary a font manager now? It just increases the mental load on the user and as with every update these days slows down the workflow.
Purely by happenstance, today my Day One "On this day" widget popped up an entry from 2014, which happened to include a screenshot that included this dock (https://i.imgur.com/wLZlcxk.jpeg). I spent more time than I'm proud to admit simply marveling not only at its aesthetics, but how easily each icon stands out from each other. How are we, 11 years of supposed technological progress and UI know-how later, this worse off?
The hillI die on with this is what was done to Automator's icon - the point of automator, it's conceptual core isn't that it's a robot, it's that it's a *plumbing* application. That's the entire conceptual framework of the application, you pipe files, or data from function to function, and the physicality of that is what makes the app work, and comprehensible to non-programmers (this is why it's also a much better tool than Shortcuts).
Removing the pipe and focussing on the robot is exactly the sort of thing you'd expect someone who doesn't actually use Automator "oh that's the old version of Shortcuts, right?" to have done.
But that shallow mindset is what Apple is these days, shallow and superficial (and boot-licking fasc-tech).
If we think about the process for the design of one of these new icons, it blatantly was not "Let's create a better icon for App X" but rather "We've got a huge todo list of icon updates to plough through - this one's next".
We used to respect alpha channels, and Panic used to fake them.
https://www.panic.com/extras/audionstory/
The squircle jail feels like such a step back.
