Apple’s Mac icons in Tahoe have come under fire from quite a few people. Adjectives that have been applied to them include terrible, awful, amateurish, dumbed down, and objectively bad.
With the announcement of Apple Creator Studio, the company has gone even further in terms of minimal icons for its creative apps, provoking further controversy …
We should just note that the Apple Creative Studio (ACS) icons are not replacements for the standard ones, but rather specific versions unique to the new subscription plan.
However, if you plot a path from the original versions of each through the macOS 26 version to the ACS implementations, you can clearly see a trajectory from skeuomorphism to minimalism. This path was highlighted on Mastodon by BasicAppleGuy (above image).
Ben Cotterill summed up the opposition:
Nobody knows what icons are for now. A Tron teleporter means pixelmator. The purple McDonalds logo is motion. Stacked wooden building blocks is compressor. A signpost in the rain is something to do with music.
Héliographe went even further in a post on Threads.
John Gruber agrees.
Go back in time and each previous Pages icon had more detail and looked cooler. And then you get back to the original Pages icon and that one clearly belongs in the App Icon Hall of Fame.
I’ll wholeheartedly agree with him on the latter point: the original Pages icon was indeed a classic, and I still feel a great deal of affection for it.
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