macOS Tahoe’s Menu Icons Are “Hard to Justify,” Critics Argue

Apple says icons help you move faster through an interface. macOS Tahoe tries to push that idea further by adding icons to almost every menu item. The result feels cluttered, distracting, and often confusing. Instead of helping you find commands faster, the icons slow you down and demand extra attention.

At the core, icons exist to support scanning. You glance, you recognize, you act. That only works when icons highlight differences. When everything gets an icon, nothing stands out. As the critique itself puts it, “if everything has an icon, nothing stands out.” Tahoe ignores this basic rule. Menus now look busy, yet offer less visual guidance than before.

A great breakdown of these problems comes from UI designer and developer Niki, writing on his blog channel. He calls the new icons “unpleasant, distracting, illegible, messy, cluttered, confusing, frustrating,” and backs that up with clear examples. His analysis draws directly from Apple’s own Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines from 1992, which warn against many of the same mistakes Tahoe now makes.

Icons Fail at Consistency

Icons only work when they behave consistently. Tahoe breaks that trust quickly. The same action often uses different symbols across apps. Sometimes even inside the same app. “New,” “Open,” “Save,” “Delete,” and “Find” all appear with multiple icon styles. Arrows point in different directions. Shapes change without reason. You cannot learn what to look for because Apple does not repeat itself.

Worse, Apple often reuses the same icon for different actions. You see an icon, assume its meaning, then get surprised. That breaks confidence. As the article notes, “No user will find a menu item faster or will understand the function better if all icons are the same.” Tahoe repeats identical icons side by side, sometimes for unrelated actions. That is not helpful. It is noise.

Too Much Detail, Too Little Space

Tahoe menu icons are tiny. Most fit inside a 12 by 12 pixel area. At that size, details disappear. Thin strokes blur. Small symbols lose meaning. Icons rely on subtle differences that the human eye simply cannot see at normal viewing distance.

The problem gets worse because Apple uses vector-based symbol fonts instead of pixel-aligned bitmaps. This choice favors scalability over clarity. Lines land between pixels. Shapes look soft. As the critique explains, icons “look blurry and mediocre everywhere.” The design assumes users can notice microscopic differences. They cannot.

Confusing Metaphors and Text Icons

Icons also fail as metaphors. Some symbols do not clearly represent the action they trigger. Others reuse familiar shapes for unrelated meanings. A book replaces a bookmark. Dots suggest permissions. A checkbox icon means “Uncheck.” These icons do not just fail to help. They mislead.

Tahoe also introduces text-based icons, such as plain letters used as symbols. That creates another problem. Text looks like text, not an icon. Users must stop and interpret instead of scanning. The Human Interface Guidelines warned against this decades ago, yet Tahoe leans into it.

Some argue that the guidelines from 1992 no longer apply. Screens changed. Software evolved. People did not. Vision, attention, and memory work the same way they always have. Good interface rules come from human limits, not hardware trends. As long as people use screens, those limits matter.

Conclusion

Apple tried to add icons everywhere. That goal was flawed from the start. There are not enough clear metaphors for every menu action. Even so, Tahoe executes the idea poorly. Icons lack consistency, rely on invisible details, and break menu scanning.

The frustrating part is that these mistakes were already documented decades ago. The knowledge existed. Tahoe ignores it anyway. That makes the interface harder to use, not easier.

Niki’s original post is worth reading, especially if you care about good interface design.