It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

Summary

It’s hard to justify Tahoe icons I was reading Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines from 1992 and found this nice illustration: accompanied by explanation: Fast forward to 2025. Apple releases macOS Tahoe. Main attraction? Adding unpleasant, distracting, illegible, messy, cluttered, confusing, frustrating icons (their words, not mine!) to every menu item: Sequoia → Tahoe It’s bad. But why exactly is it bad? Let’s delve into it! Disclaimer: screenshots are a mix from macOS 26.1 and 26.2, taken from stock Apple apps only that come pre-installed with the system. No system settings were modified. Icons should differentiate The main function of an icon is to help you find what you are looking for faster. Perhaps counter-intuitively, adding an icon to everything is exactly the wrong thing to do. To stand out, things need to be different. But if everything has an icon, nothing stands out. The same applies to color: black-and-white icons look clean, but they don’t help you find things faster! Microsoft used to know this: Look how much faster you can find Save or Share in the right variant: It also looks cleaner. Less cluttered. A colored version would be even better (clearer separation of text from icon, faster to find): I know you won’t like how it looks. I don’t like it either. These icons are hard to work with. You’ll have to actually design for color to look nice. But the principle stands: it is way easier to use. Consistency between apps If you want icons to work, they need to be consistent. I need to be able to learn what to look for. For example, I see a “Cut” command and next to it. Okay, I think. Next time I’m looking for “Cut,” I might save some time and start looking for instead. How is Tahoe doing on that front? I present to you: Fifty Shades of “New”: I even collected them all together, so the absurdity of the situation is more obvious. Granted, some of them are different operations, so they have different icons. I guess creating a smart folder is different fro...