Apple's macOS Tahoe adds icons to every menu item, resulting in menus that are hard to use and go against the long-standing Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines
accompanied by explanation: — Fast forward to 2025. Apple releases macOS Tahoe. Main attraction?
tonsky.meNiki Tonsky
Context & Ripple Effects
Tahoe’s Liquid Glass overhaul was introduced as a broad macOS redesign, while early hands-on coverage already found the visual treatment uneven and Spotlight’s improvements more compelling than parts of the interface. This menu critique narrows that broader concern to a basic desktop interaction. Early Tahoe testing called Liquid Glass occasionally overwrought.
The complaint also extends a pattern seen in later coverage, which characterized Tahoe’s interface as resembling an awkward iOS import. It matters because menus are a persistent navigation layer rather than an optional new feature. A later hands-on described the interface as a poorly imported iOS design.
First-order effects
Tahoe users must scan icon-and-text rows in everyday menus, adding visual clutter to an interaction model historically organized around concise labels and keyboard shortcuts.
Apple’s desktop design team faces a concrete usability objection to a design-system choice within its larger Tahoe visual overhaul.
Second-order effects
Developers and interface designers have a fresh example of how decorative or redundant iconography can make dense command surfaces harder to parse, particularly on desktop software.
If users and reviewers treat the issue as part of Tahoe’s broader design problem, Apple may face pressure to simplify menu presentation or make it more configurable in future updates.
Third-order effects
The episode suggests a continuing tension in platform design: visual consistency across devices can conflict with desktop conventions optimized for information density and expert use.
If this pattern persists, operating-system redesigns will be judged less by visual novelty alone and more by whether they preserve the speed and legibility of established interaction primitives.
The trend: Desktop platforms are increasingly testing how far mobile-influenced visual systems can extend before they erode the efficiency of mature desktop workflows.
This is a superb article on a horribly ugly website lol. As a lifelong Mac user, I've been thrown back into the deep end with Tahoe. And I hate it. HIG means nothing anymore and Liquid Glass on the Mac is absolutely wretched.
This blog post on the proliferation of icons in macOS Tahoe makes the decision clear: I'm never updating to this cluttered mess. Where did your aesthetic taste go, Apple? Yuck. 🤮 — Left: Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines — Right: macOS Tahoe — Read the post: …
nearly all of the graphic design of new MacOS is awful, including these icons (click the snow icon at the top to stop it snowing) — tonsky.me/blog/tahoe-i...
I only now learned that Tonsky also created the #FiraCode programmers' font. If you develop #code of any kind, do yourself a favor and check it out: — https://github.com/...
Glad someone else wrote this. IDGAF about macOS Tahoe app icons because they're something I see for a split-second when launching apps, but the new contextual menu icons are far more of a nuisance to trying to use apps. So much visual noise. https://tonsky.me/...
If the Mac is really getting touch support over the next year, as rumored, there's very little chance of UI metrics or iconography going back to how it was in earlier releases. Those are the before-times now, no matter who is in charge of design. — It's way more likely to *inh…
“Apple [UI design] took on an impossible task... And even if the premise was solid, I still wish I could say: they did the best they could, given the goal. But that's not true either: they did a poor job consistently applying the metaphors and designing the icons themselves.” —…
I couldn't read the blog post with the fucking snow. — I know there are ways to stop or avoid the snow, but I refuse to do it on principle. The user-hostile animations in the blog post are much worse than anything in Tahoe, and that's saying a lot, because Tahoe is quite user-…
This is the most in-depth, most spot-on piece I've read about what's wrong with icons in menus in Mac OS Tahoe. Well worth your time. — https://mastodon.online/...
An exceptional writeup of UX, UI, and icon design: https://tonsky.me/... A kind of classical look at ‘less is more’ with lots of images to prove the point.
On Tahoe, why is the image next to the save command in the File menu “square.and.arrow.down”, but the export and share commands are “square.and.arrow.up” and import has the arrow pointing _down_? — [image]