Sweet Jeebus, macOS 27 Golden Gate Removes the Dumb Icons from Menu Items

eepaga about 4 hours ago 34 commentsRead Article on daringfireball.net

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Discussion (34 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

talkingtab•37 minutes ago

"it’s proof that the rot has been rooted out of Apple’s software design team"

I know little about Apple, but have quite a bit of experience with how software products get "designed". Goofy and offensive things happen when corporations decide not to pay attention to customers.

The decision to ignore customer and focus on market wow is not the software design team. It is a systemic and structural thing.

eviks•about 1 hour ago

No good reason to be excited about the old garbage UI returning after the new garbage had been trashed.

> This updated advice in the HIG is perfect.

> Use an icon to highlight the most common actions and key features of your app

Saving a document is the one of the most common actions in your average app, but I * never* need an icon there in the menu, there is no benefit in focusing my attention on an action I always do with a shortcut!

The perfect advice would be easy and powerful user customization, so that, for example, I could right click on the app's File>Save menu and select an option to hide the icon, reformat the rich text field and have this change propagate in all the other apps. Or click on a web link from someone who has already done it better and add the theme. Then I wouldn't even care about the back and forth design changes between major OS releases.

And that could also fix another sin in the screenshot - the text is not vertically aligned! "visual consistency" misunderstood

DonHopkins•about 1 hour ago

The garbage that threw itself out was "the untalented magazine-designer hacks with clout and influence [who] all left with Alan Dye" and that's worth celebrating. Especially because Meta collected the trash.

https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/bad_dye_job

>My favorite reaction to today’s news is this one-liner from a guy on Twitter/X: “The average IQ of both companies has increased.”

https://x.com/shipulin/status/1996318006335401997

michelb•about 1 hour ago

A good correction. But think about the months of work that has been wasted on creating those icon iterations. What a waste!

garyrob•18 minutes ago

The icons in menu items is one of the reasons I'm still on Sequoia. This settles it; I'll just stay on Sequoia until Golden Gate is released.

I can't say the following for sure, but there's evidence of it: One of Apple's real strengths and differentiators is that it listens to customer feedback to the point that it will say: "Hey, this was dumb. Customer feedback proves it. Let's just get rid of it like it never happened."

Other examples include getting rid of the earlier getting rid of Magsafe.

I don't know whether it's something taught in Apple School, but in the absence of not doing dumb things in the first place, which seems to be unavoidable in the real world with real people, it's probably the next best thing. And it may be enough better than the norm from tech companies that it's a real cultural differentiator.

philistine•4 minutes ago

People tend to ascribe to Apple only the Jobs years. That Apple might have reset after he came back. The truth is far from that. The people in the company were great, they just needed a massive amount of refocus. Apple has people who have been there decades and have had to reverse incredibly stupid decisions.

dlcarrier•about 2 hours ago

You'd think they'd go the other direction and remove the text.

I installed VLC on my phone, and I couldn't figure anything out, because it was covered in vague post-skeuomorphic icons without text.

philistine•13 minutes ago

VLC has atrocious UI, but don't complain, everybody loves the story of the app so it must be perfect in every way!

bloomca•2 minutes ago

VLC does have atrocious UI but it works great, while macOS stuff both looks bad and does not work well, so I would take VLC easily.

rsynnott•about 3 hours ago

Aw. I may have been the only one, but I kind of liked those.

adriand•about 2 hours ago

I’m still on Sequoia because of all the Tahoe complaints. Not so much the rounded corners, but I heard performance was poor. Have updates to Tahoe improved things?

Y-bar•29 minutes ago

Performance was so-so, some minor degradations on my Studio. No change comparing today to half a year ago.

But my Apple TV 4K 2nd Generation turned into a 15 fps mess until I turned off the worst parts of transparency effects.

chronogram•40 minutes ago

I've always used reduced transparency and reduced animations and haven't noticed any performance issues.

dgellow•37 minutes ago

Done the same, that should really be the default experience. Reducing animations so often makes things feel snappy again, and less distracting

SSLy•about 2 hours ago

For me Tahoe's performance was alright, but cmd-space spotlight search disappeared after second keystroke wayy too often. Reverted to Sequoia.

Shank•about 2 hours ago

I’m on an M1 Max device and the GPU performance drops have not gotten back to Sequoia levels on Tahoe patches. Golden Gate hasn’t changed anything either.

nottorp•about 2 hours ago

They toned down the effects in Golden Gate but the backend is doing the same amount of work to blend all that pointless stuff in.

You'd get the performance back if they gave up on the translucently to the point of removing the code.

LoganDark•40 minutes ago

I'm so upset that Liquid Glass is visibly pixelated now. Like, it's barely even blurred at the least transparent setting -- it just looks like a very obviously downsampled background. Like distractingly/annoyingly downsampled. Ugh!!

Screenshots:

https://logandark.net/files/3SQ5P9OP-PP373NQ7-RS6RP2QR-P772S...

AmVess•about 1 hour ago

Nope. Genuinely made my new Mac Mini feel broken. The only fix was going back to Sequoia.

librasteve•about 4 hours ago

good - I have resorted to a config setting to suppress these bad icons on Tahoe

xandrius•about 3 hours ago

Can you share it?

SoKamil•about 3 hours ago

In terminal:

defaults write -g NSMenuEnableActionImages -bool false

nsbk•about 2 hours ago

"But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough can you see the stars"

triyambakam•about 3 hours ago

This is also what's annoying with most model generated artifacts. They want every bullet point with an emoji. Even worse is an HTML artifact will be littered with chips/pill style "informative" boxes. So much useless distraction. I need something fine tuned by Tufte

hegelguy•about 3 hours ago

Meh - these icons were bad, but I don't see the disaster

torben-friis•about 3 hours ago

It was death by a thousand cuts. I am not a designer and Tahoe bothered me enough that, after trying it at work, I've been actively stopping my personal Mac to update, and it was a factor in moving to android.

Grombobulous•9 minutes ago

Liquid Glass motivated me to sell my Mac. But also, Linux becoming genuinely amazing and being able to play all my PC games played a role there as well.

I don’t find Android nearly as compelling, and Liquid Glass seems at least a bit less of a disaster on the iOS platform.

My suggestion to you is follow the Panther Lake laptops that are coming out as your potential future Mac off-ramp. I have a Framework 13 Pro on preorder [1] but some other laptops are also showing impressive results on battery life and GPU performance. If I had more money to blow I would totally grab a Zephyrus G14 2026 with the panther lake CPU and RTX 5070Ti. Although as a programmer’s laptop, the Framework is excellent and the 13 Pro looks like it’s shaping up to be a dream system.

[1] Unfortunately you can’t get the kind of RAM deal that I got for my 13 Pro anymore. As soon as the 13 Pro was announced I pounced on some new old stock of Crucial LPCAMM2 memory, which isn’t available anymore. I paid about $250 for 32GB, which is a “deal,” apparently. As of now you pretty much have to buy it from Framework as nobody else has it at a more reasonable price.

MattDamonSpace•about 3 hours ago

Dead canary

JumpCrisscross•about 3 hours ago

Dyed canary.

CoastalCoder•about 1 hour ago

You're just parroting the GP.

xdennis•about 3 hours ago

You have to make accommodation for designers, that's simply their language. If something is misaligned by 1 pixel, it's not an annoyance, it's a catastrophe.

The icons were bad, but the real issue with the new theme is the waste of space and wasting time computing transparencies.