Paul Kafasis, writing at One Foot Tsunami:

While Apple had previously urged developers to use squircle icons on our apps, they’ve now taken things much further to ensure compliance. It’s a shame.

Apple updated their own app icons on Tahoe, for both the squircle shape as well as the new “Liquid Glass” interface. Mostly, these icons seem dumbed-down, with a loss of detail. For example, here’s Safari’s old icon from MacOS 15 (Sequoia) on the left, and the new Tahoe icon on the right:

To me, the new icon just feels blander, and that’s widely true for all of the updated icons. A small number, such as Screen Sharing and Audio MIDI Setup, may be improvements. Most, however, are not. Let’s review with direct comparisons, all of which again feature the older Sequoia icon on the left and the new Tahoe icon on the right.

Trends come and go. Some are to one’s liking, and some are not. But this year’s app icons from Apple are just plain objectively bad. They’re ugly, they’re dumb (like the new Apple Calendar icon, showing a month that somehow has only 24 days), and many of them — regardless of whether they’re aesthetically pleasing or not — are inscrutable. The fundamental purpose of an icon is to have meaning. And some of these are meaningless.

Even good styles fall out of fashion as trends change. But good styles come back into style eventually. A few decades from now, no one is going to say “Hey, let’s bring back 2020s-style icons.” They’re like 1970s leisure suits.

For a remarkably long stretch, Apple’s in-house icons represented the pinnacle of an art form worth celebrating. They were exquisitely crafted, and quite obviously the work of the most talented artists in the field. Apple’s application icons in the OS 26 releases — MacOS Tahoe especially, because MacOS has the most first-party apps — look like they’re the work of people who have zero artistic ability whatsoever. They probably are the work of people with no artistic ability whatsoever, because I can’t imagine how a talented artist could bring themselves to create such things. And whoever at Apple approved them obviously has no taste. “Fuck it, who cares” is replacing “Insanely great” as the company’s design mantra for software.

Show me the person who thinks the new MacOS 26 Tahoe Automator icon is better than the MacOS 15 Sequoia one — or even just believes that the Tahoe icon is acceptable — and I’ll show you a hack who never should have even gotten a job working at Apple. This regression is nothing short of criminal.

Tyler Hayes, writing for This Week The Trend:

The Razr+ 2024 model measures 3.46 inches tall, but still has a 4-inch diagonal screen size. For comparison, the smallest modern (2021) iPhone is the 13 mini, and that one is 5.18 inches tall. The Razr foldable is a legitimately small phone that can easily be held in one hand. It slips into a front pocket. It’s 0.60 inches thick. That might sound bulky, but in practice, it isn’t any bigger than using an iPhone with a case on it.

For anyone unfamiliar with this style of folding phone, the front screen isn’t just a novelty. It’s completely usable in the same way the larger internal screen is. By the way, the full-sized screen opens up to 6.9 inches.

I remain completely dubious of this form factor. Hayes compares the naked folded Razr+ to an iPhone in case, thickness-wise, but one of the problems inherent to this form factor is that most people adhere to a religious belief that they somehow need to put their phone in a case. They sell cases for these flip-style foldables but that just makes them even thicker. Comparing an un-cased foldable to an encased regular phone is bogus.

Worse, I dispute the notion that these phones are “completely usable” from the front screen alone. Reviews of these phones, including Hayes’s, tend to avoid including photographs of what they look like when the on-screen keyboard is showing. The keyboard basically takes up the entire screen (source), and it’s awkwardly positioned an inch from the bottom, to sit above the camera lenses. Technically usable, but no one is going to type more than a few words like this. If you have to unfold the phone just to text or email, why not buy a phone that doesn’t fold at all?

Book-style foldables seem like a maybe to me. Flip-style foldables just seem dumb. And the only “perfect solution” for anyone who wants a smaller phone would be for Apple to bring back the Mini size.

“Here you go, you’re OK. I’m right here.”

An even better, more iconic, metaphor for this administration than the images of the East Wing being razed. When you watch the video, take note of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. performing his family’s signature dance move, “The Chappaquiddick”.

Before all the excitement, Trump fell asleep, right in front of the press.

Tim Hardwick: Normally, when an iPhone connects to a new Wi-Fi network, it automatically shares the network credentials with the paired Apple Watch. This allows the watch to connect to the same network independently – for example, when the iPhone isn’t nearby – without the user needing to enter the password manually.The feature’s removal appears […]