Sweet Jeebus, macOS 27 Golden Gate Removes the Dumb Icons from Menu Items

Apple has apparently heard the screaming. In the next Mac update, macOS 27 Golden Gate, the tiny pictures that showed up next to almost every menu option in macOS 26 Tahoe are being scaled way back, and for many people online, this is less a design tweak and more a public apology without the apology. The original complaint was simple: the icons were confusing, cluttered, and weirdly inconsistent. Critics said they made the Mac look cheap and messy, like the kind of interface Mac fans usually roast elsewhere. Now Apple’s own design advice has been updated to basically say: use icons only when they actually help. Ouch.

The comments are where the real fun starts. One camp is celebrating like a bad roommate finally moved out. One user admitted they’d already dug up a hidden setting just to suppress the icons, while another compared the whole style to modern AI-made junk that slaps an emoji on every bullet point and fills pages with pointless little “helpful” boxes. That led to one of the funniest lines in the thread: a plea for design “fine tuned by Tufte,” meaning less noise, more clarity. But not everyone joined the parade. A few brave souls wandered into the anti-anti-icon zone, with one shrugging, “I don’t see the disaster,” and another confessing, almost sheepishly, that they kind of liked those. Then came the real punchline: if designers keep going this way, joked one commenter, they’ll remove the words next and leave us all tapping vague little symbols like confused archaeologists. The debate is petty, passionate, and very, very Mac