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Hide macOS Tahoe's Menu Icons
- irenetusuq 7mo ago[dead]
- john_alan 7mo agoGreat now just need the same for the window corners and ridiculous Finder overlays.
- 0xFEE1DEAD 7mo agoExactly. I blame apple for making me run an old macOS version because I don't want to look at this ugly mess they've created. I've been running macOS since 2008, and unless they manage to turn things around, my next laptop won't be an apple.
- reddalo 7mo agoI agree. I also tried Tahoe, and reverted back to Sequoia right away. Either Apple is going to turn things around, or I'm done with Apple for good.
- username223 7mo ago> unless they manage to turn things around, my next laptop won't be an apple. Meh. I ran Linux on a PowerBook back in the day, because Apple made the best hardware and behind-the-times software, before deciding that Mac OS X was "Unix with decent office software" and wholesale switching. I'm fine going back to FVWM on a MacBook if macOS 27 is as bad as 26.
- josteink 7mo agoI just stopped using Finder all together. Bloom is a fairly cheap one-time purchase and infinitely more capable. https://bloomapp.club/ https://bloomapp.club/
- dawnerd 7mo agoThere's actually a built in way to remove them in settings. System Settings -> Menu Bar. You can uncheck or drag items around in the menu bar and group some inside of the menu bar control (and even create new menu bar controls). I wish you could add third party apps to them, maybe that'll be next. But it's nice you can hide any apps icon right there.
- k2enemy 7mo agoThis is for the icons in the drop-down menus, not the icons in the menu bar.
- Etheryte 7mo agoThis is not what the article is about though?
- hyperhello 7mo agoIt could have used a screen shot.
- watt 7mo agoRead Tonsky for that. https://tonsky.me/blog/tahoe-icons/ https://tonsky.me/blog/tahoe-icons/ a disgrace. https://tonsky.me/blog/tahoe-icons/writing_direction@2x.webp?t=1772581464 https://tonsky.me/blog/tahoe-icons/writing_direction@2x.webp...
- NetOpWibby 7mo agoThis is disgusting. Like, I'm using macOS but just seeing this standalone makes me cringe.
- andy_ppp 7mo agoUsually I like Apple’s OS updates but Tahoe is absolutely awful from the glass to the noddy sizing of everything. MacOS does not have to harmonise with VisionOS at all and it’s been a disaster for macOS to try.
- reddalo 7mo agoI agree. Tahoe is disgustingly unusable; I'm happy that Alan Dye left Apple. I hope Apple will backtrack on Liquid Glass after Tahoe. Otherwise, I'll just switch to Linux.
- radicaldreamer 7mo agoThey will likely tweak it but very unlikely that they’ll remove it altogether, especially with the upcoming touch screen MacBook Pro. Companies like Apple typically don’t make reversals quickly (the butterfly keyboard took years to remedy).
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- ChrisArchitect 7mo agoRelated: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46497712 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46497712
- hooch 7mo agoit's as if the icons get added by a lazy LLM prompt during CI
- 9dev 7mo agoWhich is probably exactly what happened. Reportedly Apple is all-in on Claude across the board.
- nayroclade 7mo agoNah, blaming AI is too easy. It's more likely that Apple's design culture got rotted out under Alan Dye https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/bad_dye_job https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/bad_dye_job Now that Dye is gone, I still hold out hope that Apple will change direction and start fixing their UI. But that fact that it got this bad in the first place implies things are seriously broken at a senior leadership level.
- saagarjha 7mo agoWhat makes you think that things aren't bad under him?
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- ChrisArchitect 7mo agoSource: https://mastodon.social/@stroughtonsmith/116262411548746327 https://mastodon.social/@stroughtonsmith/116262411548746327 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47468034 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47468034)
- zahirbmirza 7mo agoI still miss launchpad. Which is made worse by the fact the spotlight has become terrible. Safari is unusable due to some weird sync that happens whenever I open a new window ( i dont use tabs) and adding bookmarks takes about 10-15 seconds. Please Apple, help? Apple seem to have lost their cultish drive to satisfy UI obsessive like me who often didn't even know what we wanted until they gave it to us. Now, we know what we want, but Apple can't give it to us.
- halapro 7mo agoAs much as I resisted it, I switched to Alfred years ago and I don't see myself switching back anytime soon.
- xoxxala 7mo agoOh, thank you for posting this. Just ran the Terminal command and it’s a vast improvement.
- neom 7mo agoI was really happy when they added the pictures! Dyslexia, the icons are 100% faster for me, I don't use those menus often enough to know what is in there word wise, but I can read the icons super fast.
- cosmotic 7mo agoHow can you read the icons if they mean different things in different apps?
- LeoPanthera 7mo agoCan you provide some examples of this? In my experience, they're quite consistent.
- OJFord 7mo agohttps://tonsky.me/blog/tahoe-icons/ https://tonsky.me/blog/tahoe-icons/ (second section on consistency)
- thenthenthen 7mo agoThe later examples are pretty wild, 3 different ‘minimize’ icons? Why? Different teams?
- inatreecrown2 7mo agoThis guy is doing free design work/critique for Apple
- hirvi74 7mo agoA lot of those icon examples are being rather disingenuous. Some of the icon symbol changes amongst the various apps are justified because the actions being represented are different despite using the same English word. Take the "New" icon example. Adding a new reminder is not the same thing conceptually as creating a new note.
- 7mo ago
- theturtle 7mo ago[dead]
- VimEscapeArtist 7mo agoNo screenshot? Dunno what’s all about. What menu?
- seidoger 7mo agoYeah, I was wondering (I haven't updated, patiently waiting for the next major). But here's a great piece about them: https://tonsky.me/blog/tahoe-icons/ https://tonsky.me/blog/tahoe-icons/
- troupo 7mo agoIf you read beyond just the headline, you can see a description of the problem with a bunch of links in literally the first paragraph of the article.
- c-hendricks 7mo agoAnd if you run the command you can see that there's still lots of icons in menus
- chkhd 7mo agoAfter a good decade of Mac Tahoe made me go back to Linux + tiling WM for my main machine. I just could not stand the awful mess anymore. Result? inner peace. It is so calm here, and everything is so familiar and fast. And the MBP hardware seems to be getting shittier too :/ have trackpad issues on both my latest personal and work M4 MBPs.
- jayrot 7mo agoI strongly disagree. Tahoe is horrible but Mac hardware is terrific. Have you seen a Neo? I think Apple is hitting it out of the park (falling behind in many other areas)
- gib444 7mo agoThey're referring to reliability btw
- thenthenthen 7mo agoWindow management on OSX/macOS cost me so much time of my life, still the hardware and overall experience is pretty nice.
- JSR_FDED 7mo agoCurrently I’m blocking the Tahoe updates with Little Snitch. If that becomes untenable I’ll just run Sequoia in a VM.
- testing22321 7mo agoI setup a do not disturb to run all day everyday. I have not had a notification to update to Tahoe in over a month.
- mholm 7mo agoI don't even have any special handling set and haven't had any Tahoe prompts beyond maybe the first one. I often forget that I'm not on the latest anymore.
- testing22321 7mo agoWith all “auto updates” off I was getting a notification at least once a day.
- AnonC 7mo agoI’d like to know what rules you use to prevent Tahoe updates while allowing Sequoia updates. It would be quite useful to me, and I guess, to others here who use Little Snitch.
- mrtesthah 7mo agoJust enable the Sequoia developer/beta channel. You won’t see other updates then.
- orion7 7mo agoI use Linux at home and MacOS at work; I am quite fond of every visual change in Tahoe with sole the exception of the obscenely large radius rounded window corners which make no sense on a rectangular screen and make resizing windows a relatively slow and arduous task. I really wish they could be disabled.
- m463 7mo agoarguably rounded corners have been an apple brand-image thing for a long time, like the icons on ios. I kind of wonder if this is like overdoing your watch logo stuff like in this article: https://paulgraham.com/brandage.html https://paulgraham.com/brandage.html
- stevekemp 7mo agoI've used Linux at home for 20+ years, and sometimes mac at work. To be honest I struggle to notice many changes, my machine was already configured the way I liked it and at work I basically live in only four applications: Firefox for personal-browsing, chrome for work-browsing, terminal for running terraform, git, etc, and emacs for all development work. Sure resizing is less good, but I do that once a day, in the morning, when I login. The rest of the changes I just don't notice or care about.
- nsxwolf 7mo agoI never noticed the icons were even there until I read this.
- elgrantomate 7mo ago"apps will respect this change after relaunching" ...? I'm not seeing that happen. restart required?
- masswerk 7mo agoI guess, this means logging out as the current user and logging in again, so that the various services are relaunched with changed settings.
- Razengan 7mo ago> I really dislike Apple’s choice to clutter macOS Tahoe’s menus with icons. > It makes menus hard to scan I disagree, I like them, and I'm glad there's an option With billions of users, it doesn't make sense to offer just one style for everything for everyone, like all the OSes are these days. Hell the Switch and Switch 2 still doesn't have much options beyond Bright/Dark mode. The only actual solution is customizability; let users fuck themselves up however they want, but always leave a quick "Reset to Defaults" panic button within reach :)
- slaiyer6 7mo agoI just want brushed metal Aqua with Lucida Grande back. Seems to be too much to ask for.
- reserve 7mo agoGreat. Thank you for sharing this tip!
- fainpul 7mo agoWith all these commandline and registry hacks to make macOS and Windows bearable, why not use Linux? You will also have to use the commandline if you want total customizability, but at least the OS doesn't actively fight you.
- hirvi74 7mo ago> at least the OS doesn't actively fight you. That was not my experience with Linux in the slightest. I used various distros for many years, and it eventually became just a waste of time. I got fed up with trying to play whack-a-mole with fixing driver issues. It has been some years though, so maybe things have improved in this regard. However, I felt like using Linux as my daily driver served as an outlet for procrastination when my time would have been better solved working on the tasks I needed the OS for in the first place.
- alifeinbinary 7mo agoI use my Mac for film scoring and music production, so I have a long-standing practice of keeping my operating system one major version behind for stability reasons. If you want to do the same and at the same time avoid those annoying Tahoe update notifications then simply enable beta updates for OS 15 in settings. I don’t imagine I’ll ever update to Tahoe because I dislike the UI so much but honestly OS 15 is rock solid and it looks great, I’d be very happy sticking with it until EOL for this machine.
- amelius 7mo agoWhat option do I use if I want to disable the icons only in some cases?
- amelius 7mo agoSomething to think about for Apple fans: Why should OS presentation be tightly coupled to kernel version? Or why should it even be coupled to the vendor of the hardware? And you can ask the same question about content filters, app stores, ...
- taminka 7mo agonobody actually likes it, it's just macos is still the least terrible to use option
- LatencyKills 7mo agoNot sure I'd call myself a fan, but I was an engineer on the Xcode team for a decade. The answer to your question about coupling is "ease of testing and coherence". Prior to Apple, I was a senior engineer on the dev tools team at Microsoft. We did the same exact thing wrt full-release testing and vendor hardware. I'm not saying I agree with the way either company handles coupling, lock-in, etc. but if you don't think that the Windows UI is coupled to ring-0 you don't understand how it works.
- ndr42 7mo agoNice, except it doesn't work in Safari. Some are hidden in the Edit menu but most are still there.
- ProllyInfamous 7mo agoDoes anybody know a good solution of bringing "file labels" (color coding files) back to being more than just adjacent circular dabs — i.e. the previous behavior where the selected-color would illuminate behind the entirety of filename.text?
- jtagen 7mo agoSpectacular! I haven't played minesweeper in many many years.... learned that the Mac trackpad has very inconsistent right-click detection. Frustrating!
- luxuryballs 7mo agoI haven’t upgraded yet but seeing this is a surprise, Apple seems to go hard on Accessibility yet there’s really no toggle for this??