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
Every single one of these icons is getting progressively worse with almost every design change. They go from beautifully crafted, easily readable and supremely distinguishable icons to generic, repetitive blobs of colour, void of any personality, artistry, or usability considerations. Also, Apple’s new icon design language makes the icons look fuzzy, like they’re not being rendered properly. It’s very unnerving.
The one exception is probably the generic folder icon, which looks fine in all of its incarnations. Then there’s the classic Platinum, pixelated version from Mac OS 9 and earlier, which, together with icons from Windows and BeOS from the same time period, are a whole different style that I don’t think most people would accept anymore these days, but that I absolutely adore.
Mostly I’m just sad that the craft of making exquisite icons for operating systems is dying, replaced by what almost look like “AI” generated blobs of indeterminate meaning, that rely more on preexisting knowledge of the operating system and its applications in question than on being recognisable and decipherable by anyone. I truly hope Windows and the various open source desktops don’t follow in Apple’s footsteps here.
I suppose the target market evolves, many could argue the same about Linux and Windows, and we could also argue not all change is good. Variety is the spice of life.
Yes, but these screenshots look like you can only make the UI usable by turning on all contrast options in accessibility.
I move they rename “accessibility” to “cut the eye candy, I just want to use my phone”.
I think part of the problem is blind, lazy assumption that icons are now rendered in highdpi.
This is MacOS, so they are all gonna be High DPI. You could force the issue by running on a low-resolution external display, I guess.
mac minis and studios.
I’ve upgraded my apple desktop to Mx but I still use my 1920×1200 monitors.
What use is 2480 dpi when they’re all 16:9?
“macOS 26”? What happened to macOSes 11 through 25?!?!?!?
We’re on macOS 15 right now, but there won’t be a 16 through 25. New versions will be named after years from now on, so macOS 26 for 2026. Also macOS, iOS, tvOS, etc. will all be synced to the same number so they aren’t all over the place anymore.
Apple doing again like the others did before.
“Good artists copy; great artists steal” – Pablo Picasso
I think it’s disingenuous to accuse Apple of “stealing” such an idea. You might as well accuse them of stealing the idea of a clock on the lock screen of the iPhone from swiss pocket watch makers of the 18th century.
Some of them are fine, the new sticky notes icon is pretty bad though. The game center icon has been stupid and meaningless since 2014. The Maps icon looks like it has something to do with Star Trek. Dictionary icon is awful, it no longer looks like a book at all.
Argh… what annoys me the most is the forced unified shape. Icons were great by having distinct shape but nooooo… some moron at Apple though that having same shape will be awesome. And now it’s harder/even so slightly slower to find the required app…
And now with the glass the only thing we had – distinct contour – are turned into fuzzy blobs…
The best icon scheme MacOS (then OS X) ever had was during Snow Leopard. Beautiful 3D icons that spoke to their function and didn’t have the boring, anonymous flat pastel aspect that Ives and his kindergarten-addled team foisted off on us. I still run Snow Leopard in a VM to run some of the older software, and every time I start it up, I am reminded just how bad the OS looks today.
Still a bit worse than 10.4 Tiger. The icons for Music, Pictures, Documents, etc was quite colorful and very easy to distinguish from one another.
I’d take the 10.5-10.6 look with the 10.4 icons.
10.4 was the pinacle of apple ÓSX icon design.
However i LOVE the Rhapsody SVG icons that follow the Platinum look, but it not pixly, those are my favourite mac icons of all time. For BeOS It is McClintock icons, for AmigaOS i love Ken’s iconset and for linux i use the same icon set as with the amiga. Back when i used windows my favourite iconset was SteelDragon by far.
Finally someone said it, liquid glass is FUGLY
Alt least it is a bit less flat, and that is an improvement.
Is there anything good from Crapple anymore? iPhones have nothing to show, regardless what shilling youtube muppets tell their viewers while smiling next to Tim Coock in (undisclosed) paid videos?
– Macbooks are meh, iOS is outdated locked down mess,
– Mac Pro is a joke (what’s “pro” about it? soldered crucial components that can’t be upgraded? Or 1TB SSD that’s laughable size in a “pro” machine)
– macOS is opposite of what it used to be
– “Apple Intelligence”? How fair do apple employees have their heads up their arses that they include “apple” in “AI”.
Jobs said that their technologies are 20 years ahead of everything else. 20 years passed long time ago and the competition is already years ahead.
I loved the 97-2001, a bit of 3D and contrast! I think they just change them for the sake of changing but in the process they Enshittification everything. I think white on white would be the end goal!
They’ve been shifting their UI/UX from being higly skeuomorphic to contemporary homogenized minimalism, including their icons. At least each one has their own shape and colors, unlike Google’s 4-colored ones.