[HN Gopher] macOS Icon History
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macOS Icon History
Author : ksec
Score : 98 points
Date : 2025-07-05 15:25 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (basicappleguy.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (basicappleguy.com)
| prymitive wrote:
| 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.
| mrweasel wrote:
| 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.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| > 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.
| cyberax wrote:
| "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.
| ashvardanian wrote:
| 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.
| rekenaut wrote:
| 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.
| danieldk wrote:
| 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.
| JoRyGu wrote:
| 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.
| ezst wrote:
| 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.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| What do you dislike about modern Macbooks compared to 2012?
| jug wrote:
| 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.
| Maskawanian wrote:
| I would assert that iChat evolved into messages. There are a few
| more icons that could be added in that category.
| danillonunes wrote:
| 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.
| ericmay wrote:
| > 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.
| gyomu wrote:
| > 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.
| derefr wrote:
| 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.
| andrepd wrote:
| 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.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _ubiquitous universal rounded rectangle_
|
| Squircle.
| alberth wrote:
| 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.
| ryandrake wrote:
| 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.
| nntwozz wrote:
| 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.
| phillco wrote:
| 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.
| fainpul wrote:
| 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)
| gffrd wrote:
| 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.
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| I miss the Finder plugsins pre-SIP that overrode built-in and
| added custom icons for special folders not based on resource
| forks.
| joshdavham wrote:
| It's interesting how each of these icons looked new to us at one
| point. Now most of these icons seem quite old-looking.
| dsego wrote:
| At least the system preferences icon has improved, the 2020 one
| looks like it's AI generated.
| pavlov wrote:
| 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.
| rhet0rica wrote:
| 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)
| russellbeattie wrote:
| 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.
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(page generated 2025-07-05 23:00 UTC)