It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Snow Effect and Blog UX Irony

  • Many readers found the falling-snow animation over the text highly distracting, CPU‑intensive, and even overheating phones and GPUs. Several resorted to browser reader modes or disabling JS.
  • The snowflake toggle was widely criticized: delayed stopping of particles, hidden once you scroll, and coupled with jarring color changes (bright yellow background, “flashlight” dark mode).
  • Some saw it as deliberate parody of bad UX or seasonal “whimsy”; others saw it as trolling HN readers or evidence the author’s own design judgment is poor, undermining the critique of Apple.
  • A minority liked the playful touches (snow, flashlight cursor, hamburger hamburger), seeing them as harmless on a personal blog, unlike OS‑level design.

Reactions to Tahoe Icons and Menus

  • Many commenters agreed strongly with the article’s critique: Tahoe’s “icon everywhere” approach is cluttered, inconsistent across apps and menus, often illegible, and breaks long‑standing HIG principles.
  • The misalignment and reuse of icons for different actions, and different icons for the same action, were seen as signs of deep sloppiness and lack of system‑wide stewardship.
  • Some pointed to older UIs (Office 2000, Win2k/XP, Mac OS 9, early OS X, classic KDE) as clearer, denser, and more coherent than Tahoe’s menus.

Liquid Glass and Wider macOS Tahoe Problems

  • Liquid Glass was widely panned on desktop: visually noisy, reduces legibility, wastes battery, and adds motion and translucency that don’t convey affordances.
  • Complaints extended beyond visuals: sluggish UI on recent Macs, broken window behaviors, permissions glitches, Tahoe‑specific bugs (e.g., Spotlight lag), and Finder regressions.
  • Several say they are freezing on Sequoia or downgrading, treating Tahoe as a “UI abomination” until Apple walks it back.

Broader Design Decline and Causes

  • Many see Apple’s software design as in long‑term decline: less coherence, more churn, more iOS‑style gimmicks on macOS, and no one enforcing consistency across teams.
  • Proposed causes include: promotion incentives for visible change, design teams justifying their existence, leadership that values demos over daily usability, and loss of the “taste + authority” figure who can veto bad design.
  • Others push back that this is overblown “bikeshedding”: most users don’t notice menu icons, and Apple’s issues are minor compared with ad‑driven enshittification elsewhere.

Disagreement on Icons and Menus

  • Some commenters genuinely like Tahoe’s icons, saying they scan menus faster by shape than by text, especially as newer Mac users.
  • Others argue icons work only when sparse, consistent, and supported by color; Tahoe’s blanket, monochrome, inconsistent usage turns them into pure noise.