BasicAppleGuy’s macOS Icon History
With macOS 26, Apple has announced a dramatically new look to their UI: Liquid Glass. Solid material icon elements give way to softer, shinier, glassier icons. The rounded rectangle became slightly more rounded, and Apple eliminated the ability for icon elements to extend beyond the icon rectangle (as seen in the current icons for GarageBand, Photo Booth, Dictionary, etc.).
With this release being one of the most dramatic visual overhauls of macOS’s design, I wanted to begin a collection chronicling the evolution of the system icons over the years. I’ve been rolling these out on social media over the past week and will continue to add to and update this collection slowly over the summer. Enjoy!
BasicAppleGuy’s fascinating collection traces the evolution of Apple’s system icon design from 2001 to the present, offering a revealing look at how the new Liquid Glass icons in macOS 26 Tahoe compare to their predecessors. The visual history makes it clear that “different” doesn’t always mean “better.”
Of them, I think only the new Stickies icon has improved (though I still prefer the 2000–2020 version), but many other app icons are notably worse.
In particular, Dictionary continues its tumble down the Cliffs of Meaninglessness, devolving from a clear representation of a book into a red blob branded only with a mixed case Aa. Joining Dictionary at the cliff base in Tahoe are Disk Utility and Migration Assistant, thanks to Apple removing their recognizable drive and arrow imagery in favor of meaningless geometric shapes.
And why is Apple putting any effort into redesigning the icons for DVD Player and AirPort Utility?
Agreed. I realize that skeumorphism has fallen out of fashion, but simplifying an icon so far that it no longer conveys any meaning about the object is just nuts.
If the icon is going to be meaningless, then why use them at all? Just go back to text if you’re going to have to read the caption anyway?
I was never a fan of skeumorphism. Looked silly in some instances. But now when I see the evolution of those icons, damn I miss those older icons. They looked really good. Like the Dictionary icon looks like a font folder.
As with all things, context matters.
I liked the green felt background for Game Center, the LCD-like display in iTunes and the woodgrain borders in Garage Band. They were distinctive, directly related to the app, and didn’t really hurt anything.
But the animated tape-reels in the iOS Podcasts app was a pretty gratuitous waste of very limited screen space. (But I still liked looking at it).
Clear example of new is not always better, in this case, clearly worse
Agreed the new ones are awful! Why do they do that? Took me a minute to figure out the new Disk Doctor, it looks more like “Apple Tool” to me but I really had to think about if for a few seconds. Ok nut and a wrench. Not what you really want to use on a disk but sure.
The Arrow…. What???
Dictionary looks like a font. Would it kill them to write “Dictionary” on it? The bookmark means nothing.
Stickies - I like the different colors but again a bit confusing without a couple of words on it.
Is this the point? We don’t know how to read anymore? Or the designers don’t?
It is to balance out the UI: opaque icon meaning, transparent elsewhere.
The 2025 icons truly are dreadful, aren’t they?
Dave
I find the current generation of icons to be largely soulless and sterile. They don’t evoke the instinctive human connection, lacking a warmth present in their predecessors. While minimalism has elements of being clean, futuristic, trendy, and perhaps less cluttered, I feel it comes with a loss of clarity in communication and humanity.
So as usual things like this just confound me when people get hung up about them. It’s the same with typefaces, how curved the corners of windows are or aren’t, etc. I don’t care what the icon looks like - I almost always launch apps that are not in my dock from a search anyway, and I know what each icon on my dock is, and I even sometimes launch apps in the dock from a search.
We clearly have different habits.
I use the Launchpad (with a custom key-mapping so I tap F19, which is easy to find in the upper-right corner of the keyboard).
I can usually spot the app I want from its icon long before I read the text underneath. And I never search - every icon is where I put it, either at the root level or in a folder.
So I definitely get bothered with icons have a significant change, or when they lose their distinctiveness.
One of the issues that needs to be considered by Apple’s design team is that the Mac in particular is a general purpose operating system. In practice, that means that Macs have a lot of different types of users with broad interests and varying preferences, and they work with their Macs in a very wide range of ways.
To accommodate that pattern of usage, it makes sense to focus on designs which allow users to develop a clear, coherent “mental model” of how the Mac works and why it does what it does. That is a difficult task, and it involves some trade-offs. Perhaps the biggest trade-off is the tension behind the principle of “the design should be as simple as possible and as complicated as necessary to do the job”.
It’s also difficult for users to develop a good mental model when the look and feel of an operating system can change on an annual basis, not to mention when more radical changes occur. It’s imperative that Apple takes a deliberate, thoughtful approach to changes, as even small changes can disrupt workflows in unexpected (and sometimes costly) ways.
In contrast, users of the iPhone and iPad presumably have a narrower range of use cases, though I am sure people will debate that point. If my statement is correct, that means that Apple needs to consider fewer requirements when making significant changes.
I am not specifically criticizing Apple here—there are other places to do that.* However, I am pointing out that the Mac has different design constraints than other devices, and that means that designers need to treat the Mac differently as a result.
/* Note that I used an “em dash” instead of a regular dash in that sentence. I’ve been hearing that the use of em dashes is being discouraged in the age of AI. Evidently, AIs like using em dashes, so when they appear in text these days, a lot of people assume the text was AI generated. I understand that there may be AI résumé filters that screen out any document that uses them. I started using em dashes before The Mac is Not a Typewriter came out in 1989, and I’m not going to stop now…and you kids need to get off my lawn!
I’m still peeved about Big Sur’s smaller squircle icons, where macOS icons lose their distinctiveness to make them look like iOS. Apple execs keep wondering why people think Apple’s secret plan is to replace macOS with iOS; this is why. If you loved the Mac, you wouldn’t be hell bent on removing its distinctiveness.
Rumor I heard was that in Tahoe it is even worse. Icons that haven’t bowed down to bland squircleness are forced into squircle jail – the application’s icon, handcrafted to perfection by graphics designers, is forcibly placed by the Finder inside a squircle icon.
“The nail that sticks out gets hammered down” – Japanese saying
I had been wondering about that. I have a couple of older apps with traditional icons, including two in my Dock. They really stand out (in a good way) compared with the “squircles” next to them.
It will be a shame to see them forced in “squircle jail”, but I suppose that is better than Tahoe breaking the apps entirely. At least one of the apps seems unlikely to get any more updates, so I worry every time there is a major new OS release.
I have the Tahoe RC on my MacBook Pro and Sequoia on my Mac Studio. Below is an example of an App icon (actually an alias to an app) that shows the original icon and how it looks in squircle jail.
I have very few icons on my desktop, and the applications folder is used in list format. So, this controversy is not critical for me. However, this icon needs to be on the desktop. By dragging a folder of photos over this icon, I have access to being able to rename groups of photos based on EXIF information.
Did Jony Ive come back? This smacks of his lousy icon design he did years ago. I liked his hardware designs but he was totally inept at software graphics.
Whoever was responsible for the Disk Utility icon re"design" should be demoted to custodial staff for at least six months, and their immediate supervisor should be deposited on a street corner somewhere after dark and told never to contact Apple again.
The Apple logo, a hexagonal nut shape, and a crescent wrench. Obviously (to no one, ever), that suggests “disk utility.”
This certainly isn’t the biggest change Apple in OS 26, but it’s probably the awfulest. Oh, that was supposed to be “awesome,” wasn’t it?
They could have gone with a merging of a disk drive and an emergency medical vehicle to represent Disk First Aid.
Of course, Apple probably would want something that resembles the storage device. I assume that’s why they got rid of the hard-drive image (and floppy-images before that) from the disk utilities.
I think Apple could make a stylized SSD icon. An M.2 2230 is a good shape to replace a floppy or HDD in an icon.
An image of the flash module used in a Mac Studio or Mac Pro would also be about the right shape.
I agree with that. But I still think they’re wrong. The HDD image is easily recognizable to everybody and immediately instills the right idea. We don’t use typewriters anymore and yet everybody still knows what a typewriter is and does, and it would be a perfectly adequate icon for a word processor. It will be a long time before such a HDD icon loses meaning to the point where it becomes unsuitable for a disk utility. Apple would have had more pressing issues, even in icon design, than to mess with stuff like this that worked just fine the way it was.
I’d say other than hobbyists, tinkerers, and frequent troubleshooters, most people today have no idea what a bare HD looks like. Also, the most common storage hardware now, SSDs, look completely different. So switching from the old icon doesn’t really matter much to me. I do agree that Apple’s long running move towards total icon abstraction is bad for usability.
I’d also say computers and typewriters share a common external feature: a keyboard. To my mind, that’s what allows a typewriter icon to continue to work as a word processor icon. Memory and storage, on the other hand, is never seen by the majority of Apple customers.
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ETA
A couple of storage icon ideas, one if Apple wants to appeal to mass-market users, the other for Apple’s aspirations to become a luxury brand:
To a non-techie user, storage is either the computer itself (image of a Mac?) or a USB-attached storage device.
The problem with using a Mac icon for Disk Utility is that you’ll need an icon that matches the installed computer, and it would be (IMO) more effort than it’s worth to make an app’s icon change based on the model computer.
An external SSD image would work, but they’re not very distinctive, especially since Apple can’t use anybody else’s branding. But there may be room for artistic embellishment here.
Of course, the entire name “Disk Utility” doesn’t make sense with solid state media. But one thing at a time.
I’m reminded of the old Xerox ViewPoint systems, which used an icon of a file drawer to represent a local storage device and a file cabinet to represent a remote server. Which worked great, because everybody knows that that’s where you put folders.
So maybe that’s a good starting point for today?
In Tahoe, the icon for an external drive hasn’t changed from the HDD that has been used for years. Here’s the new Time Machine icon.
The perspective and shading is messed up there somehow.
Isn’t that exactly what iTunes used to do with connected iDevices? My memory is it even knew what color my iPod/iPhone was.
It is pretty easy for an application to look up icons to display at run-time. Especially when the OS already has a database of device icons that apps can use.
It’s more difficult for an application to dynamically change its own Finder icon. This icon is typically fixed. And it really should be fixed, because dynamically changing app icons can be confusing to users.
I suppose Apple could add something to the installer package to set the icon at installation time to match the hardware, but that same user confusion is likely if what you see on your computer doesn’t match what other see (and share in news articles and blog posts).
I forget where I saw it, but there was a post recently about ancient device icon resources still being preserved in current OS resource files. Off the top of my head, icons for the iBook, the eMac, and so on. It may even have been something you had posted.
Find Any File comes close – right-click the Dock icon to select different versions of how it looks in the dock.
In Ventura they’re in /System/Library/CoreServices/CoreTypes.bundle/Contents/Resources. There’s even a PowerMac G4 (Graphite) from 1999.
Could it have been this article from July 2014 I just ran across?
If you go here, you can see them:
/System/Library/CoreServices/CoreTypes.bundle/Contents/Resources/The icons don’t go all the way back, but it looks like they do go back to the PowerPC G4 era.
I assume these exist so you can see the right kind of icon when you connect to one of these computers/devices over a network.
There’s also this bundle:
/System/Library/CoreServices/IconsetResources.bundle/Contents/ResourcesThese look like generic icon backgrounds at various sizes that might be used for constructing an icon from a document preview thumbnail.
The SCSI driver kernel extension seems to have icons for various kinds of external drives:
/System/Library/Extensions/IOSCSIArchitectureModelFamily.kext/Contents/Resources/These include some really old icons, including floppy, magneto-optical, and LS-120 super disks.
That wasn’t it. Whatever it was, it was something much more recent. Unfortunately, nothing obvious is showing in my browser histories. Nonetheless, the resources mentioned in the 2014 article are the resources I was thinking of.
Thanks to you and @mschmitt for the information!