macOS 27 Golden Gate ditches Tahoe's universally panned menu item icons

Apple has reversed one of macOS 26 Tahoe’s most criticized design decisions: in macOS 27 Golden Gate, announced at WWDC, the icons that Tahoe stuffed next to every menu bar item are gone. The icons had drawn sustained fire from designers and developers — Jim Nielsen compared them to the cluttered UI conventions Mac users mock in Google Docs and Windows, and Nikita Prokopov documented how inconsistently they were implemented, with different Apple apps using entirely different icons for identical menu commands. The backlash was strong enough that prominent third-party developers adopted open source code from Brent Simmons specifically to suppress the default behavior in their own apps.

Alongside the removal, Apple rewrote its Human Interface Guidelines to say menu icons should be used sparingly and purposefully — only where an icon genuinely clarifies an action or marks a key feature, and never when no clear visual representation exists. As John Gruber notes, Tahoe itself now reads as a system-wide example of the updated HIG’s ‘what not to do’ illustrations.

Gruber frames the reversal as more significant than a cosmetic fix: he reads it as evidence that Apple’s software design culture is recovering after the departure of Alan Dye and the design leadership behind Tahoe’s direction, citing conversations with current Apple designers who are enthusiastic about the platforms’ new trajectory. For longtime Mac watchers, a small UI rollback doubles as a signal about who now holds influence inside Apple’s design org.

(Note: the source text contained an out-of-place line about ‘WorkOS launches auth.md’ that is unrelated to the article and was excluded as likely feed contamination or injected content.)