macOS 27 Golden Gate removes the menu item icons introduced in Tahoe

Daring Fireball's John Gruber reports that macOS 27 Golden Gate, shown at WWDC this week, removes the menu item icons that macOS 26 Tahoe introduced. In Tahoe, Apple added a small graphic next to nearly every command in every app's menus; in Golden Gate the menus are back to plain text, as before.

The Tahoe decision drew unusual agreement among designers. Jim Nielsen and Nikita "Tonsky" Prokopov both wrote about it in January, with Prokopov documenting that the implementation was inconsistent as well: different Apple apps used different icons for the same menu item. Several third-party developers rejected the design outright, adopting open source code from Brent Simmons to switch the default behaviour off.

Apple updates its own guidelines

Prokopov noted the change on Mastodon with before-and-after screenshots, and pointed out that Apple has rewritten the relevant section of its Human Interface Guidelines. The new text says menu item icons should be used sparingly and with purpose: they help people find items faster and clarify what a command does, so they belong on the most common actions, key features, file system locations, connected devices, visual concepts such as rotating an image, and user-generated content like folders and documents. If no icon clearly represents a command, the guidelines say, don't show one.

Gruber calls the updated guidance perfect and notes that Tahoe, across Apple's own apps, now serves as a living illustration of the "what not to do" examples in the same document.

Why the reversal matters

Gruber writes that this is his favourite news of WWDC week. Partly, he says, because he disliked the Tahoe icons so much, and partly because the reversal is evidence that "the rot has been rooted out of Apple's software design team". He adds that the designers who pushed the change left with Alan Dye, and that people he spoke to on Apple's design team this week are enthusiastic about the direction the platforms are taking. Rolling back the menu icons, in his view, was a necessary first step.