Nikita Prokopov, after reading the Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines from 1992 (“Don’t … overload the user with complex icons”):

Fast forward to 2025. Apple releases macOS Tahoe. Main attraction? Adding unpleasant, distracting, illegible, messy, cluttered, confusing, frustrating icons (their words, not mine!) to every menu item: It’s bad. But why exactly is it bad? Let’s delve into it!

Prokopov catalogues in tremendous detail the myriad ways macOS 26 Tahoe’s use of icons is inconsistent, confusing, and downright maddening. For example, Prokopov identifies twelve different icons for a “New” menu item.

It’s a brutal and well-deserved takedown.

My take is that the icon inconsistency is clearly iOS-inspired, where (virtually) all menu items have an associated icon, and seemingly stems from an apparent remand that all macOS menu items should also have icons for “consistency,” as if someone decided that consistency across operating systems was more important than decades of Macintosh user interface design—despite the current HIG explicitly stating “Not all menu items need an icon.” (It’s easy! Just pick one of the thousands of icons we’ve already designed! I can imagine that someone saying.)

I’m still running macOS Sequoia 15.5 on my main MacBook Air which—with few exceptions—doesn’t use icons in menus, and I’ve never once felt I was missing out.

(I have no plans to “upgrade” this system to macOS 26 Tahoe unless it becomes untenable. I use Tahoe on a test system. It’s… painful.)

I hold out hope that someone at Apple sees this icon transgression and is humble enough to fix it.

Update: Unrelated, but the snowfall effect on Prokopov’s article made it difficult to read and caused my iPhone 17 Pro to heat up to the point of being hard to hold. Disabling the snowfall also swapped an otherwise readable blue background with a garish yellow one. Every creative has their unmurdered darlings.