It's hard to justify Tahoe icons @ tonsky.me
Apple's 1992 Human Interface Guidelines warned against "unpleasant, distracting, illegible, messy, cluttered, confusing, frustrating icons"—then macOS Tahoe violated every single principle, using 50+ different icons for "New," the same icon for different actions, and details literally too small to see at modern DPI.
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TLDR
• Icons only help when they differentiate—adding icons to everything makes menus harder to scan, not easier (colored icons would work better but Apple uses monochrome)
• Massive inconsistency: "New" has 50+ variations, "Save" uses different arrows, "Close" switches between X and minus—even for identical operations across apps
• Same icons mean different things: square-and-pencil is both "New Note" and "Edit Address"; eye icon means both "Quick Look" and "Show Completed"
• At 254 DPI, 24×24 pixel icons are physically smaller than Windows 95's 16×16 icons at 72 DPI—details like 2-pixel-tall letters and window traffic lights are invisible
• Using vector fonts instead of pixel-aligned bitmaps creates blurry icons; text-based icons (Abc, BIU) are indistinguishable from actual menu text and break vertical scanning
In Detail
The author systematically dismantles macOS Tahoe's menu icons by comparing them against Apple's own 1992 Human Interface Guidelines, which explicitly warned against the exact problems Tahoe created. The fundamental mistake: trying to add icons to every menu item. Icons only help users find things faster when they differentiate—but when everything has an icon, nothing stands out. The article proves this with side-by-side comparisons showing how much faster you can spot "Save" or "Share" when only important items have icons.
The inconsistency is staggering. Basic operations like "New" have 50+ different icon variations across apps. "Save" can't decide which direction its arrow points. "Close" switches between X and minus symbols. Even within the same app, toolbar and menu icons for identical operations look different (Preview's Info icon is a circle in the menu but an "i" in the toolbar). The same icon gets reused for completely different actions: square-and-pencil means both "New" and "Edit," the eye icon means both "Quick Look" and "Show Completed."
The technical execution is worse. At 254 DPI on modern MacBooks, these 24×24 pixel icons are physically smaller than Windows 95's 16×16 icons at 72 DPI—yet they rely on details like 2-pixel-tall letters, window traffic lights, and camera viewfinders that are literally invisible. Apple used vector fonts instead of pixel-aligned bitmaps, creating blurry icons that don't snap to the pixel grid. Text-based icons (Abc, BIU) are indistinguishable from actual menu text, and the inconsistent alignment (some items have icons, some have checkmarks, some have both) breaks vertical scanning. The article concludes that the task was impossible from the start—there aren't enough good metaphors for every menu action—and even with infinite resources, Apple couldn't overcome a fundamentally flawed premise.