WWDC25: macOS Tahoe Breaks Decades of Finder History | Hacker News Reader

WWDC25: macOS Tahoe Breaks Decades of Finder History

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118 pointssyx75 comments

If they really want to improve MacOS they should add synonym based search in Settings. I should not be forced to know by heart the arcane speech their marketing department chose to replace consecrated terms. Just today it took me 5 minutes to unearth the Speech Rate settings.

It feels like using Siri and not knowing the magic words. Come on Apple, synonym matching is easy. Just use a LLM to generate synonyms to all things a user might query in settings! Use a small embedding model if you feel daring, it works fast enough.

Oh, this reminds me that Azure, GCP and AWS also need AI assistants that actually know their way around instead of declining to help for anything above looking up some docs. Why can't I ask Azure in what region the still have A100 GPUs? That's what the assistant should be good at - integration with live data and ability to solve cloud problems.

I would prefer if they re-organized their settings to actually be discoverable, instead of requiring search every time I need to change something.

(Because, yes, I feel your pain.)

Synonym search is rocket science. It will take 20 years after they figure out n-gram search (i.e. “srceen time”, “cellluar”, et al.) and keyword search (“Set charge limit”)

And it applies to all apple operating systems.

Basic UX is not sexy nowadays.

I filed a bug report about a specific setting, "Screen Time" that stopped showing up in Finder, and a couple-few weeks later, it returned to being findable once more.

Filing bug reports about specific instances might be a useful way to help fix this?

synonym search is also easy without an LLM

It wasn’t so bad when it was still control centre - I had used it for at least 15 years and knew the placement of everything. Ever since it became system settings I get lost every time I open the app.

In the age of X ditching Twitter and Tweets, I think brand continuity and identity is underrated. The friendly finder logo is such an essential part of MacOS that it's bizarre (at least to me) that they've changed the color symmetry of the face.

Why would you do that? It's as iconic as the Apple silhouette for Apple users.

If you've ever used MacOS, you've had that face stare back at you. It's a kind face. A friendly face. An old face. An old friend. Let's keep it that way.

edit - on further thought, was this change user tested? I'm fairly certain that even the most middle-of-the-road, suburban dad on his 10th layover will notice something is different when they look at it. It's a strange change.

It's not different enough to force recognition as a new symbol. It's just different enough to be weird.

> In the age of X ditching Twitter and Tweets, I think brand continuity and identity is underrated.

Trying to ditch twitter and tweets. I’ve yet to hear any normal person call it X yet.

Which kind of proves your point.

The overwhelming majority of people I know in real life haven't actually been on the platform for years, if they ever were, and some of those have used X by default in the rare case in comes up. It's slowly changing, but was quickly dying before Trump and Elon got their hands on it. Mileage may vary, but I imagine there's an association between Twitter still being the old place where tired millennials shout about nothing to bots all day

But what do they do on X? Reading tweets or (re)tweeting.

> Why would you do that?

TBH, it's better if this new generation of Apple's UI designers waste their energy on such trivialities instead of trying to "improve" Finder features (not that Finder is all that great to begin with though).

Let them tinker with icons, fonts, colors and "evoking emotions" all day long, at least then they don't break any actually important stuff.

Indeed. I was relieved after reading that alarming click-bait title that it boils down do something entirely inconsequential.

> The friendly finder logo is such an essential part of MacOS that it's bizarre (at least to me) that they've changed the color symmetry of the face.

> Why would you do that? It's as iconic as the Apple silhouette for Apple users.

> If you've ever used MacOS, you've had that face stare back at you. It's a kind face. A friendly face. An old face. An old friend. Let's keep it that way.

I mean ... not all Apple users, not all MacOS users. I've been using Macs since the late 90s (daily since ~2004) and maybe I'm entirely unique in this, but if you'd asked me prior to TFA and this discussion to describe the Finder icon ... I likely wouldn't have been able to tell you anything except "it's topmost in my Dock". Seriously, I couldn't have told you the colours (nor did I notice that Tahoe has flipped them); I definitely wouldn't have said "essential", "kind" or "friendly"; and I probably wouldn't even have recalled that it's a face. It's just that icon that's always topmost in my Dock that I haven't clicked in years because, well, Spotlight.

it's creepy not friendly (especially now, as I somehow never consciously noticed that it's a dead forever smiling face), the new one simply looks amateurish and bad.

The entire UI redesign of "liquid glass" looks horrible in its current state. Right now the readability factor on iOS is at an all time low. It feels like a change just for the sake of change. How is it better?

Maybe it's a subtle way to punish non-native apps that recreate UI elements, but do not use SwiftUI. The user gets used to the native way of UI elements and everything else will look odd after a while, forcing developers to ditch everything that isn't truly native.

I think this point was subtly mentioned on the WWDC State of the Union, around the 40:54 mark.

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2025/102

That was anything but subtle.

> When you use Apple's native frameworks, you can write better apps with less code. Some other frameworks promise the ability to write code once for Android and iOS. And that may sound good, but by the time you've written custom code to adapt each platform's conventions, connected to hardware with platform-specific APIs, implemented accessibility, and then filled in functionality gaps by adding additional logic and relying on a host of plugins, you've likely written a lot more code than you'd planned on. And you are still left with an app that could be slower, look out of place, and can't directly take advantage of features like Live Activities and widgets. Apple's native frameworks are uncompromisingly focused on helping you build the best apps.

I would love to see the top 100 Mac developers finish this sentence in their own words:

> Apple's native frameworks are uncompromisingly focused on ___________

I bet it wouldn't align with what Apple said.

One doesn't need to use SwiftUI for the look. Things like the tab bar, navigation bar are available in Swift too. (for those unfamiliar, Swift is different and older than SwiftUI).

Surely you mean UIKit, not Swift? Swift is indeed older than SwiftUI, but is a language, not a UI framework, and there are no “things like tab bar, navigation bar” available in Swift per se: a framework gotta be used.

Sorry to burst your bubble but users literally do not care "how native it looks" other than the vocal minority online. Never ever heard any non-technical user complain that Spotify does not fit in.

… but people _do_ care about consistency.

They're willing to accept a certain amount of "specialization" for things they care about deeply / use all the time / demand unique approaches, but people like things to look and behave the same when they're pure utility. Which most things are.

People don't complain about Spotify, because (1) the design feels and performs like something Apple would design, and (2) music is something people have feelings about, and so expect differentiation.

> but people _do_ care about consistency.

But Apple doesnt? Why else would they throw away their current design language, and invent something new ("Liquid Glass").

I mean … it looks an awful lot like an evolution of the prior one to me. It's being billed as a major departure, but the elements, relationships, and how you interact with them remain unchanged.

They're rolling it out across their entire product catalog, so more consistency if anything.

Hard disagree. If people cared, then all iOS apps would use standard styling, but the matter of fact is that every app has its own style, which does not stop at colors. They all share the same affordances (top left arrow to go back, bottom tab bar) but the UI is more often than not heavily customized.

Take Slack for example with its fancy menus, not even close to what Apple uses. No feelings expected there. Let's not talk about Google apps, which live in its own UI world.

> If people cared, then all iOS apps would use standard styling, but the matter of fact is that every app has its own style, which does not stop at colors.

This assumes they have a choice between equivalent apps that OS-integrated and one that are not. Many times, they don't.

Anecdotally: while some people don't care about consistency in the art they put on their walls, most do.

Slack is included in the "apps that you use all the time" rule. Also in the "apps you don't have a choice about" rule.

(Edit for spelling and wording)

You might be on to something about change for change's sake. I mean you have a large design team at Apple. Do you expect them to sit on their hands for years and years?

The old Finder logo is a clever ambiguous image. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambiguous_image

The new Finder logo has so much meaning symbolically for me. It actually has a very ugly meaning to me.

I felt that it is the end of the road for me. My first Mac was a Powermac 7300/200.

btw, nobody ever mentioned that the red close button is next to the minimize button. This is similar to the close button being next to the maximize button on Windows. Just reversed.

On Mac OS classic the close window button is on its own. I really miss Mac OS classic.

If you have time to tinker with it, I highly recommend you spend some time with classic Mac OS! It obviously cannot replace the modern computer, but as a sidekick for your brain it is wonderful… Mac OS 9's Acrobat Reader still supports the PDF website captures by Safari in Sonoma.

I use it as an external brain. I love that the Finder is spatial and has a one-to-one relationship between windows and documents and files and icons… and I benefit from it leaving icons where I put them

And sometimes I play great 90s/2k games on my external brain :)

The color change doesn't bother me nearly as much as the change in proportions. Insetting the face on the right and removing its curvature makes the smile look super weird and less "human" to me. I'm sure I'll get used to it, but it feels a little off.

My theory is they straightened it out so it looks almost like half of a representation of a house, i.e. Finder helps you find and organize things in your "home".

The swapping of the colors is pretty bad in and of itself, but I find the change to the right face's chin even more grating.

To the many people ITT who seem to be puzzled by this kind of complaint, the issue is that it suggests someone at some point said "what if we flipped the Finder icon?", for which no valid answer appears to exist, making it unwarranted and unsatisfying. It also suggests their priorities are off.

Actually, for me, on the current icon, I see the "guy on the right", the "smiley face" is secondary.

On the new icon, I see a "smiley face", and if I concentrate a little, there's a "guy in the background".

I like the newer icon.

And, to be fair, this is the most thought I've ever put into it. So, there's that as well to consider.

I wish it would break history and let Spotlight and show me the path for the file it has found.

Is it 2023/accounts.xlsx or 2024/accounts.xlsx or 2025/accounts.xlsx? Who knows!

I'm on the Tahoe beta and holding command with an item selected in spotlight shows the path.

For all matches or only the first?

Whichever one is selected.

Alfred will show you the full path of the search results

https://www.alfredapp.com/

how would one compare alfred and raycast? I've never owned a mac before, just got one a month ago.

Alfred is not as flashy but it's an extremely mature native macOS app.They've been improving it for 15+ years. No subscription either.

Since it was release I've seen people frequently complaining about Raycast's memory consumption.

There's a lot of overlap in terms of features.

Alfred is old and efficient, not very flashy or bling-blingy. And zero AI integration, definitely no subscriptions.

It also Just Works and stays out of the way until you need it.

I've replaced spotlight with Alfred maybe a decade ago and haven't looked back since.

The fun part is that Spotlight used to do this, but they progressively made it worse year after year. It became completely unusable for me maybe a couple of years ago and switched to Raycast, which I use exactly like I used to use Spotlight in 2010 and nothing more.

The new icon looks weird not just because it's a change, but because if you think of the face as being 3D and illuminated by a light source, the new icon doesn't scan as easily as the old one. You'd have to assume the face is turning away from you but the light is slightly backlighting them and putting the closer part in shadow. Anyways it's a small change but I do think it indicates people internally aren't thinking about whether the design makes sense.

I don't mind the change of colors or materials. But that padding in the icon just breaks the whole thing.

This obession of Apple with leaving space is absurd.

In Sequoia they added a window management system which (by default) leaves spaces between windows. What was the point of getting more display real state in laptops to waste it like this?

About the swap, I can see how it happened with the new design code, make layers, put the transparent one below, and they didn't want to have the left side higher than the right one for reasons?

To me the bigger issue is by not having it go to the edge, it really breaks the one face/two face original design.

And it looks worse somehow in dark mode (but to be fair, everything is worse in dark mode right now in beta1, but Safari is the one that needs discussing) : https://ibb.co/CLhJ4XM

It's less evocative of Picasso, which is the whole point of the logo. Evoking Picasso as inspiration is (or, was) part of Apple's brand identity since the 90s because it suggests:

* Brilliant artists use Apple.

* Apple computers help you see from multiple perspectives.

But now that Apple is more in the business of selling bling to strippers and drug dealers, and less in the business of selling gear to creative professionals, sticking to its aesthetic identity is way less important. Not when there are concerns like "blowing up on TikTok" to worry about.

Yes, absolutely. Please Apple, fix this.

Without reading the text, it took me a solid three minutes to realize the difference in the comparison screenshot. Honestly I'm more upset by the non-centered window title.

Why would they do that? I didn't notice at first, but now that I've seen it, it's too distracting. Feels like change for the sake of change.

I believe the titles on iOS's alerts are also left aligned now. Saw it in the preview videos.

This is the kind of thing actual users do not care one bit about. And neither will the nerds after a few months with it either. Apple should spend time improving the design in meaningful ways (there is a lot of work they still need to do before shipping this) rather than wasting time on a minor change to the Finder icon.

I installed the beta immediately yesterday and didn't notice until this post. I've been using Macs for 20 years.

FTA: “The Finder logo has changed over the years, but the dark side has been on the left forever.”

So, ‘forever’, they subtly associated left-handedness with the dark side? About time that they changed that (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bias_against_left-handed_peopl...)

:-)

Left handedness is sinister.

Ha, we also use those designations in organic chemistry for designating chirality in molecules.

Well, look at the etymology of the word "sinister". Sinister.

All this fuss about which side the blue is on has made me think about the Finder icon for the first time ever, and I've decided I hate it, it's stupid. It doesn't convey the use of the Finder app at all, and worst of all, it's smugly smiling at me like it knows its app is going to annoy the hell out of me today.

I'm surprised he didn't call out Picasso paintings as inspiration for the icon. You can look at the Finder smiley either as a face or as 90º profile, at least the right side. Given that dynamic, the new icon does look quite bad as the effect is lost or at least mangled.

That was just one of the icon redesigns that got to me: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2025/06/09/2130

The new one still is distinctly recognizable as Finder. I don't think it's a true issue and this is a case of people panicking over every redesign before getting used to it.

Wow, the original logo from 1996 looks so good. It is like every release they redesigned the previous logo and the current logo is deep-fried.

I had expected the article to be more substantive, however I will agree: nostalgia aside, the color switched icon isn't as effective.

My theory is the icon is more inline with liquid glass, where the translucent half goes into the background.

I loved the part where you explained why there was any objective reason to not change it.

Only Apple users xD

ITT: people going apeshit because some company changed the color of an icon. An icon of a tool that is dogshit anyway. If this ain't peak first-world problem then I don't know what is.

Really should have titled it "Finder: I barely know 'er"

This is simply gatekeeping. I understand writing an article about it but filing a radar?

The only thing the author wants to do here is a fandom flex.

Ironically, his pictures prove that the icons have changed a lot! What’s the canonical face anyway? You can look at the prior icon and argue they broke canon there removing the black center stroke and clipping the overflowing line.

> What’s the canonical face anyway?

Darker on the left, lighter on the right. Flush with the surrounding box. Evokes the feeling of two people: one looking straight at you, and one profile face.

Even the profile face is broken in the new redesign.

I always took it as a Cubist portrait of a face where the perspective is simultaneously from the side and the front. My issue isn't the color swap as much as it being inset, it doesn't invoke the same feeling in me anymore.

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