Old Icons

A nostalgic look at early Mac app icons has turned into a full-on comment-section melodrama, with one side yelling “free the icons” and the other basically saying, “Actually, I’d rather delete icons from my life entirely.” The article revisits the original Macintosh days, when app images were tiny black-and-white 32-by-32 squares, often showing a tilted page with a little hand sticking out. Those strict limits, the writer argues, still had personality—something many people think modern app icons have lost in today’s smooth, samey “squircle” era.

And the community absolutely ran with it. One of the strongest reactions came from users arguing that icons are supposed to be instant visual shortcuts—little memory triggers your brain can spot in a split second. Their complaint? When every app starts looking like the same rounded blob, that whole benefit goes out the window. But not everyone was waving the retro flag: one commenter delivered the spiciest anti-icon take of the bunch, declaring they’ve lived mostly icon-free since around the year 2000 and still somehow got sentimental over the old Mac designs. That’s right: even the icon haters are catching feelings.

Then came the expected hero worship: Susan Kare got the obligatory legend treatment, while another commenter flexed just how hard it is to make tiny old-school icons readable at all. And because no internet debate is complete without a wild side quest, someone else crowned the colorful old MagicWB style the true icon peak. So yes, this started as design history—but the real show is a crowd of people arguing over whether tiny computer pictures are dead art, sacred memory, or both.