RIP to the Macintosh HD hard drive icon, 2000–2025 | Hacker News Reader

RIP to the Macintosh HD hard drive icon, 2000–2025

arstechnica.com

12 pointsduxup11 comments

I'm honestly not crazy about these. I was hoping they'd replace this with a chip on a board or something a bit more literal.

> maybe the icon had started clicking, and Apple just wanted to replace it before it suffered from catastrophic icon failure—but regardless, the switch is logical

this is clearly the right explanation

Yeah, the trouble is making it look different — at a glance — from so many other things that would look roughly similar. A chip on a board could be CPU, GPU, or RAM, right?

I get wanting to move away from the spinning drive look, but it's kind of weird that they've replaced it with what looks to me like an external drive (but also looks like the power brick for the AVP, or battery pack.

Can anyone explain what the three little holes and one big one are supposed to represent?

They look like air vents? Or like the speaker holes at the bottom of an iPhone? Honestly, I'm not sure what they are supposed to be.

No other Finder icon is represented as a chip on a board. The CPU, GPU, and RAM aren't even represented in the Finder. So I don't see the issue with using that as a design.

The System Information application has a chip and calipers or something.

But regardless, even if CPU/GPU/RAM aren't represented in the Finder, it's still confusing to use such an icon (in many places — presumably Disk Utility and other applications also) since users wouldn't know which of those many things it could represent. TBH, many people don't know the difference between CPU/GPU or RAM/SSD, so they wouldn't know what would/should be shown where.

It kinda does look like an external disk - maybe that's why it got vents or led indicators?

Apple!, person (restroom style), basketball (as described to someone who has never seen one), trash (drag down to open?).

The perspective of the new icons matches the non-euclidean plane of existence Apple's current designers famously occupy, but they're a little uncomfortable to try to make sense of to a regular Earth-dweller like me.

Whilst I understand a spinning hard disk is not really relevant in this day and age, I question changing the icon to something that doesn't particularly resemble a modern storage solution. I feel apple are moving away from clarity for the majority.

None of Apple's icons resemble anything these days other than this uniform blobby whatever. I cannot imagine why.

Yeah, the first thing that struck me when I looked at the images was how detailed and accurate the old icon was and how generic the new one is. It's just a blob with an Apple logo on it (for the internal drive, at least).

I agree, the save icon is a floppy disk in many cases, people don't use those disks much anymore, but everyone knows what it is.

> but everyone knows what it is.

That's why they need to change it: so nobody knows what it is anymore. It looks like the hamburger icon is the quintecence of modern UIs.

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