from Hacker News

WWDC25: macOS Tahoe Breaks Decades of Finder History

by syx on 6/10/25, 10:52 AM with 75 comments

  • by visarga on 6/10/25, 3:16 PM

    If they really want to improve MacOS they should add synonym based search in Settings. I should not be forced to know by heart the arcane speech their marketing department chose to replace consecrated terms. Just today it took me 5 minutes to unearth the Speech Rate settings.

    It feels like using Siri and not knowing the magic words. Come on Apple, synonym matching is easy. Just use a LLM to generate synonyms to all things a user might query in settings! Use a small embedding model if you feel daring, it works fast enough.

    Oh, this reminds me that Azure, GCP and AWS also need AI assistants that actually know their way around instead of declining to help for anything above looking up some docs. Why can't I ask Azure in what region the still have A100 GPUs? That's what the assistant should be good at - integration with live data and ability to solve cloud problems.

  • by areoform on 6/10/25, 3:05 PM

    In the age of X ditching Twitter and Tweets, I think brand continuity and identity is underrated. The friendly finder logo is such an essential part of MacOS that it's bizarre (at least to me) that they've changed the color symmetry of the face.

    Why would you do that? It's as iconic as the Apple silhouette for Apple users.

    If you've ever used MacOS, you've had that face stare back at you. It's a kind face. A friendly face. An old face. An old friend. Let's keep it that way.

    edit - on further thought, was this change user tested? I'm fairly certain that even the most middle-of-the-road, suburban dad on his 10th layover will notice something is different when they look at it. It's a strange change.

    It's not different enough to force recognition as a new symbol. It's just different enough to be weird.

  • by hmate9 on 6/10/25, 3:17 PM

    The entire UI redesign of "liquid glass" looks horrible in its current state. Right now the readability factor on iOS is at an all time low. It feels like a change just for the sake of change. How is it better?

  • by cyrc on 6/10/25, 4:04 PM

    The old Finder logo is a clever ambiguous image. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambiguous_image

    The new Finder logo has so much meaning symbolically for me. It actually has a very ugly meaning to me.

    I felt that it is the end of the road for me. My first Mac was a Powermac 7300/200.

    btw, nobody ever mentioned that the red close button is next to the minimize button. This is similar to the close button being next to the maximize button on Windows. Just reversed.

    On Mac OS classic the close window button is on its own. I really miss Mac OS classic.

  • by yusefnapora on 6/10/25, 3:19 PM

    The color change doesn't bother me nearly as much as the change in proportions. Insetting the face on the right and removing its curvature makes the smile look super weird and less "human" to me. I'm sure I'll get used to it, but it feels a little off.

  • by airstrike on 6/10/25, 3:07 PM

    The swapping of the colors is pretty bad in and of itself, but I find the change to the right face's chin even more grating.

    To the many people ITT who seem to be puzzled by this kind of complaint, the issue is that it suggests someone at some point said "what if we flipped the Finder icon?", for which no valid answer appears to exist, making it unwarranted and unsatisfying. It also suggests their priorities are off.

  • by whartung on 6/10/25, 3:29 PM

    Actually, for me, on the current icon, I see the "guy on the right", the "smiley face" is secondary.

    On the new icon, I see a "smiley face", and if I concentrate a little, there's a "guy in the background".

    I like the newer icon.

    And, to be fair, this is the most thought I've ever put into it. So, there's that as well to consider.

  • by noja on 6/10/25, 3:14 PM

    I wish it would break history and let Spotlight and show me the path for the file it has found.

    Is it 2023/accounts.xlsx or 2024/accounts.xlsx or 2025/accounts.xlsx? Who knows!

  • by lsy on 6/10/25, 3:17 PM

    The new icon looks weird not just because it's a change, but because if you think of the face as being 3D and illuminated by a light source, the new icon doesn't scan as easily as the old one. You'd have to assume the face is turning away from you but the light is slightly backlighting them and putting the closer part in shadow. Anyways it's a small change but I do think it indicates people internally aren't thinking about whether the design makes sense.

  • by pier25 on 6/10/25, 3:35 PM

    I don't mind the change of colors or materials. But that padding in the icon just breaks the whole thing.

    This obession of Apple with leaving space is absurd.

    In Sequoia they added a window management system which (by default) leaves spaces between windows. What was the point of getting more display real state in laptops to waste it like this?

  • by cwizou on 6/10/25, 3:27 PM

    About the swap, I can see how it happened with the new design code, make layers, put the transparent one below, and they didn't want to have the left side higher than the right one for reasons?

    To me the bigger issue is by not having it go to the edge, it really breaks the one face/two face original design.

    And it looks worse somehow in dark mode (but to be fair, everything is worse in dark mode right now in beta1, but Safari is the one that needs discussing) : https://ibb.co/CLhJ4XM

  • by bitwize on 6/10/25, 3:30 PM

    It's less evocative of Picasso, which is the whole point of the logo. Evoking Picasso as inspiration is (or, was) part of Apple's brand identity since the 90s because it suggests:

    * Brilliant artists use Apple.

    * Apple computers help you see from multiple perspectives.

    But now that Apple is more in the business of selling bling to strippers and drug dealers, and less in the business of selling gear to creative professionals, sticking to its aesthetic identity is way less important. Not when there are concerns like "blowing up on TikTok" to worry about.

  • by mdavid626 on 6/10/25, 3:15 PM

    Yes, absolutely. Please Apple, fix this.

  • by bastawhiz on 6/10/25, 3:08 PM

    Without reading the text, it took me a solid three minutes to realize the difference in the comparison screenshot. Honestly I'm more upset by the non-centered window title.

  • by basisword on 6/10/25, 3:42 PM

    This is the kind of thing actual users do not care one bit about. And neither will the nerds after a few months with it either. Apple should spend time improving the design in meaningful ways (there is a lot of work they still need to do before shipping this) rather than wasting time on a minor change to the Finder icon.

    I installed the beta immediately yesterday and didn't notice until this post. I've been using Macs for 20 years.

  • by Someone on 6/10/25, 3:05 PM

    FTA: “The Finder logo has changed over the years, but the dark side has been on the left forever.”

    So, ‘forever’, they subtly associated left-handedness with the dark side? About time that they changed that (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bias_against_left-handed_peopl...)

    :-)

  • by drcongo on 6/10/25, 3:23 PM

    All this fuss about which side the blue is on has made me think about the Finder icon for the first time ever, and I've decided I hate it, it's stupid. It doesn't convey the use of the Finder app at all, and worst of all, it's smugly smiling at me like it knows its app is going to annoy the hell out of me today.

  • by rcarmo on 6/11/25, 6:34 AM

    That was just one of the icon redesigns that got to me: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2025/06/09/2130

  • by jeberle on 6/10/25, 3:13 PM

    I'm surprised he didn't call out Picasso paintings as inspiration for the icon. You can look at the Finder smiley either as a face or as 90º profile, at least the right side. Given that dynamic, the new icon does look quite bad as the effect is lost or at least mangled.

  • by charcircuit on 6/10/25, 3:11 PM

    The new one still is distinctly recognizable as Finder. I don't think it's a true issue and this is a case of people panicking over every redesign before getting used to it.

  • by whazor on 6/11/25, 6:46 AM

    Wow, the original logo from 1996 looks so good. It is like every release they redesigned the previous logo and the current logo is deep-fried.

  • by waffletower on 6/10/25, 3:39 PM

    I had expected the article to be more substantive, however I will agree: nostalgia aside, the color switched icon isn't as effective.

  • by sampton on 6/10/25, 3:11 PM

    My theory is the icon is more inline with liquid glass, where the translucent half goes into the background.

  • by rzz3 on 6/10/25, 3:41 PM

    I loved the part where you explained why there was any objective reason to not change it.

  • by skeledrew on 6/10/25, 4:48 PM

    Only Apple users xD

  • by anal_reactor on 6/10/25, 8:35 PM

    ITT: people going apeshit because some company changed the color of an icon. An icon of a tool that is dogshit anyway. If this ain't peak first-world problem then I don't know what is.

  • by skalidindi3 on 6/10/25, 3:16 PM

    Really should have titled it "Finder: I barely know 'er"

  • by laborcontract on 6/10/25, 3:04 PM

    This is simply gatekeeping. I understand writing an article about it but filing a radar?

    The only thing the author wants to do here is a fandom flex.

    Ironically, his pictures prove that the icons have changed a lot! What’s the canonical face anyway? You can look at the prior icon and argue they broke canon there removing the black center stroke and clipping the overflowing line.