macOS Tahoe, again

After less than two months since the official release, Tahoe seems poised to become another one of those macOS versions to be forgotten, like Lion, Mavericks, Sierra, Catalina, or Ventura.

Aside from Liquid Glass, which I’ll discuss in a moment, what does Tahoe have that’s memorable? There’s the telephone‑call filter, which actually belongs more to iOS than macOS and still has many limitations, and there are also improvements to Spotlight search. But is it really worth upgrading an operating system just for that?¹

Liquid Glass should be the real novelty of macOS 26 Tahoe, but Macworld first compared it to Vista and then declared it dead in the cradle. If Macworld says so – not PCWorld, not Linux Pro -— there’s definitely something to be concerned about!

Moreover, Liquid Glass went wrong from the very beginning, when some joker thought of inverting the colors of the Finder icon. Without any particular reason, just for sake of change.

The criticism was so destructive that Apple had to backtrack quickly, restoring the historic design of the Finder icon, the one we’ve known for thirty years and that is one of macOS’s distinctive marks.

Haowever, when it came to disk icons Apple managed to do even worse. In the very early betas of Tahoe the disk icons were identical to the ones we’ve been used to for years: the image of a mechanical hard‑disk for internal drives and a rounded orange rectangular prism for external drives. Very skeuomorphic, but also very clear and even pleasant to look at, with all those little screws, colored LEDs, and even a label warning us not to open the disk.

With the fifth beta of Tahoe, Apple throws the old hard‑disk icon into the trash and replaces it with a more stylized image that should represent the SSD installed in all Macs for years.² While it’s at it, it also freshens up the other disk icons (external, network, and removable) and the result is shown below, where the top row displays the disk icons up to Sequoia and the earliest Tahoe betas, while the bottom row shows the updated icons.

– Source: Ars Technica.

Soon after, the internal‑disk icon loses all front elements, that perhaps were meant to represent ventilation slots or activity LEDs, and becomes as minimal as the others.

Admittedly, the new icons are bland, having lost all detail in favour of greater simplicity, just as has happened to the rest of the graphical interface built around Liquid Glass. But so far that’s fine.

What’s incomprehensible is why the icons were redesigned to appear narrower in the front and wider in the back, defying the laws of perspective and how we’ve been accustomed to seeing them up to Sequoia. It’s merely an optical illusion; in reality (I checked) the icons have perfectly parallel sides, but the play of light and shadow makes them look odd and out of place.

The effect worsens when the icons are placed side-by-side, because the differing reflections make the gray internal‑disk icon look more natural and less distorted compared to the external units.

Now, I can understand the need to adopt a homogeneous and well-defined graphic language, but wasn’t it possible to design icons that looked more natural? Susan Kare managed it with just 32×32 pixels, how can we think that today’s Apple designers, who today have immense fields of pixels at their disposal, can’t do the same?

If Cupertino can’t even produce a convincing disk icon, how can we trust that Tahoe and Liquid Glass are serious projects?