It’s not just Apple. Big Tech has been doing this for over a decade. I saw it when wireless companies wouldn’t talk with me about the lousy quality of cellular voice a dozen years ago. They want to control the media, and our job in the press is to tell the truth.
Great essay.
Blogger Jim Nielson on Tahoe Menu Icons
John Gruber at Daring Fireball has weighed in:
I think it renders differently on mobile or it was changed recently. When I first saw it on desktop it was as described, but looking later on mobile it just has the blue background with no snowflakes, which is fine.
Considering the Alan Dye saga, it’s hard to say. On the one hand it’s very worrying that they let him do so much damage with such free reign and then he just left on his own, apparently much to leadership’s surprise. So there clearly is/was a problem at the top with basic judgement here.
The only hope is that this debacle has finally opened their eyes to just how badly they let it get, and that Dye’s replacement is already making plans to undo the worst mistakes. Like this clearly fundamentally misguided directive to add icons to every menu item for no particular reason.
Until I read this article I have not even noticed that there are sooo many icons in the menus now.
I use shortcuts whenever possible and when using the menus I just ignore the icons.
(Just my personal opinion)
2 posts were split to a new topic: Adding a contact from a call in iOS 26
Siri says: so true!
Niki’s brilliant takedown of Apple’s poor interface implementation should be mandatory reading for all graphic information designers and UI designers. Pretty ‘stuff’ should not be used just for embellishment. It should serve a purpose. A bit like some of the Liquid Glass shenanigans eg when I can’t see the buttons to enter the passcode on my iPhone then something is seriously wrong with the design team and sign-off process at Apple.
As someone who does not have dyslexia or a similar reading disability, could it be true that using icons makes it easier for people with disabilities to understand and recognize individual menu elements based on icon rather than text, or perhaps as a combination? (I ask humbly as I simply do not know the answer, but I am thinking that there may be people on this forum who are trained to know the answer definitively.)
Yes, if the icons are meaningful, consistent, and clear. Tahoe’s menu icons fail on all three counts here. Their meanings are often obscure in relation to the menu items they’re used with, they’re not used in any consistent manner (both with one menu item having different icons in different apps and with one icon being used with different menu items in different apps, or even sometimes in the same app), and they’re so small that their actual form is extremely blurry and hard to discern.
That’s why these icons are drawing so much negative attention: they add nothing of actual communicative value to the menus, and in fact make things more confusing if you pay attention to them than if you just ignore them altogether. They feel very much like “we did it because we can” rather than “we did it because it should be helpful”, even though those who decided to do this probably were thinking the latter.
Weirdly, until I read this article I literally never noticed all the menu icons at all. I paid attention only to the menu text.
Now that I do see the icons, I can’t unsee them…and wow, are they annoying.
Can the menu icons (as distinguished from the menu bar icons) be turned off?
I still don’t notice them. If they had been there for years I never would have been able to tell you how long they were there. Perhaps part of that is that I use a lot of keyboard shortcuts and taskbar icons.
There’s a part of me that still thinks I’m being gaslit with all of the negative tech press about Tahoe. To me, with the exception of the rounded window corners and an issue with the mail app when it reports syncing increasing numbers of messages over time, it’s just fine. And the rounded corners are only mildly annoying. And the mail issue - which doesn’t affect performance at all - is easily solved with a quit and restart.
Not in menus like these; the reason that these icons are rightly and intuitively considered “interference” is that even when we humans are reading a menu, we (a) have already voiced our intent internally and (b) are reading these icons using words, and they don’t match our intention. For example, we don’t want to use a trash can in front of the word “Delete” because our intention is, “I need to delete this file,” not “I need to trashcan delete this file.” Commands in menus like those on the Mac should be verbs, and they should not have iconic decorations in front of them.
(On the other hand, toolbars, ideally but not always made up of distinct, intuitive, scannable icons that save space, can often benefit the user by having clarifying labels under them.)
I think that Apple now does things because everyone else is doing them. Google and Android apps have been full of this type of pointless decoration for years.
I’m not personally all that perturbed by Tahoe’s icons because I barely see them.
In my case, literally. Using a Studio Display, and needing reading glasses, the upper lefthand corner (for instance) of the Finder is a place where I can read the text on the pulldown menu, but without a careful look, none of the line-drawing icons stand out (at least in Dark Mode, which is what I use). Looking right now, the App Store and Shut Down… icons make sense when I pull doen the Apple menu, but none of the other ideograms.
Why does Apple even have them?
One possible reason is so automation can select a menu item by its icon, instead of by text which varies by language.
I hope not. Automation shouldn’t be screen-scraping to look for graphical elements.
Every GUI system has a standard API for menus. An automation system should be able to get the underlying IDs for each menu item (which should be well-known for standard apps like the Finder) and send corresponding events to the app.
I’m certain that these icons are there entirely for looks because someone thought they were a good idea.
Not likely, as many menus have identical leading icons on different items.
As the leading icons become just visual noise, the signal to noise ratio decreases, reducing ease of comprehension.The lack of standard icons (see stop and yield signs) leads to time devoted to “WTF” instead of productive activities. UI is not supposed to be a game of “develop some new and inconsistent grammars to fool grandpa”. Any engineer and most any efficiency expert should be able to explain that to the UI designers.