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.
dijit · 2h ago
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.
delta_p_delta_x · 2h ago
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.
anonymars · 1h ago
I feel like I gave up less compatibility for Vista than for Windows 11, and for...what?
skydhash · 1h ago
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.
anonymars · 1h ago
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
Waterluvian · 1m ago
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.
postalcoder · 3h 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...
wk_end · 4h 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?
rgovostes · 3h 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.
coolandsmartrr · 1h ago
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.
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".
nozzlegear · 2h ago
> 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.
JohnBooty · 2h ago
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.
bluedino · 3h 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.
happytoexplain · 3h 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.
apple4ever · 1h ago
Yes this is a proverbial canary in the coal mine.
Gruber has criticized Apple, but never to this extent.
LaughingGoat · 1h ago
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.
bragr · 1h ago
Crescent wrench is more or less a genericized trademark like Kleenex where I'm from.
MobiusHorizons · 14m ago
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)
bombcar · 51m ago
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.)
travisgriggs · 2h ago
> 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).
bapak · 3h 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 · 3h 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"
bapak · 2h ago
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.
MobiusHorizons · 7m ago
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.
dijit · 1h ago
"This was not great, but this is worse: clearly nobody is paying attention" is, actually, valid criticism.
lapcat · 1h ago
> 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.
lh7777 · 3h 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.
PlunderBunny · 2h ago
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?
pasquinelli · 3h ago
that is unfortunate. icons having a variety of silhouettes makes it easier to identify them and gives things a little personality.
LoganDark · 2h ago
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.
anonymars · 1h ago
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
doesnt_know · 2h ago
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?
mulmen · 1h ago
> 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.
LoganDark · 2h ago
The fear is that Apple is losing the expertise and attention to detail that resulted in that best-in-class consumer tech.
MBCook · 1h ago
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.
linguae · 1h ago
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.
_fzslm · 3h ago
OK, a couple bad icons here. But am I the only one who thinks the wrench metaphor actually looks good?
masswerk · 2h ago
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?
gs17 · 13m ago
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.
dkga · 3h 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.
ziml77 · 2h ago
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.
postalcoder · 3h 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.
refactor_master · 3h ago
Well, I’ve been stethoscoped more than I’ve fixed any computer with a wrench of all tools, so not really.
LeoPanthera · 3h ago
Yeah they look fine to me. They're not icons you're going to put on your dock and look at every day.
xattt · 3h ago
Also forms a U for utility.
b_e_n_t_o_n · 2h ago
Yeah I liked it overall. Guess you can't please everyone :)
PlunderBunny · 3h 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!
JohnBooty · 1h ago
Wow. As an American, I didn't know we had special feelings about wrenches!
steve_adams_86 · 3h 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.
bsimpson · 2h ago
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.
dijit · 1h ago
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.
KerrAvon · 1h ago
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!
strange_quark · 3h 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.
chrisweekly · 2h ago
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.
keepamovin · 3h ago
I cried a little inside seeing this. Apple without its icons look cool game isn’t Apple
ideasphere · 58m ago
Who else remembers the term ‘mystery meat navigation’?
micromacrofoot · 3h 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
No comments yet
ianred · 3h ago
The wrench is proportionally and esthetically all wrong. Where do they get their designs and designers from.
thepryz · 2h ago
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.
The path to off topic is sometimes laid with the best intentions
riffic · 3h 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.
judge123 · 2h ago
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?
MBCook · 1h ago
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?”
eviks · 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
But by God do I miss when icons actually used to represent something visually
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.
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...
Was I wrong about Gruber or is this a proverbial canary in the coal mine?
- 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.
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...
For that reason, even if one thought he agreed with Apple too often at least one always knew why.
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.
To be frank, Apple earns (earned?) the majority of its applause.
Gruber has criticized Apple, but never to this extent.
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.)
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).
No, Gruber said, "I don’t think the old icons for these apps from MacOS 15 were particularly good"
To me this post sounds like a typical "Steve Jobs wouldn't do this" nonsense.
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.
Obviously the post wouldn't make sense to you if you think the new icons are somehow an improvement.
> 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'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. 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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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.
you know what'd be rad though? an Eames Office of computing. You'd need figures like Charles and Ray though.
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?”
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?