macOS 26 Tahoe's Dead Canary Utility App Icons

OK, a couple bad icons here. But am I the only one who thinks the wrench metaphor actually looks good?

Also forms a U for utility.

Well, I’ve been stethoscoped more than I’ve fixed any computer with a wrench of all tools, so not really.

The metaphor is fine for me, but the arbitrary inversions of lightness are not acceptable. They make the icons look like the same icon that have been inverted for light/dark mode.

Yeah they look fine to me. They're not icons you're going to put on your dock and look at every day.

I actually agree with all of the comments. I strongly disliked those new icons. In a way, to my sense of aesthetics, they are worse then when I saw the icons in Windows XP compared to previous Windows versions.

Yeah I liked it overall. Guess you can't please everyone :)

I'd call them "non-icons": they don't communicate in any way, they don't add significance or separate one application from the other at first glance, they don't really mean anything without the file name, they are really not much better than default icons. And this is probably what they are: default icons for a group of applications with a bit of variation sprinkled on top.

At this point, does it need that residual variation or is this just adding noise? Also, a shape inside a shape inside a shape inside a shape isn't anything anyone is likely to parse – how many bits of information is this? So maybe just go with a simple default wrench icon for all of them?

I like the wrench and the only icon that feels particularly unclear to me is the one for Disk Utility. Expansion Slot Utility is also a bit non-obvious, but the old one was even worse since there was just a small image of a Mac Pro slapped in the middle. That could mean it's for just about anything related to the system.

I think they're okay, except for Disk Utility. The old icon had an out of date image of an HDD, but why would you associate an Apple logo with disks? It's not like it only works on drives sold by Apple. The wrench part is fine, but the nut is all wrong.

PS, Another way to put this: are these still icons, as in "indicative of something", or are they merely ornamental, particularly in their individuality? And, if the latter, how good are they as ornaments? Is there even a need or a place for ornaments in an interactive environment that is meant to be tuned for efficiency?

(In my experience, if an interface elements raises questions, even more so, if these are fundamental questions, you do have a problem. If not for other reasons, just for the few more bits of awareness spent on these questions, every time you see them.)

Indeed, all you can do is learn and memorise what they represent. But a square filled with a solid color can do the same ("yellow is the hard disk thingy"), and that would actually be more glanceable and quicker to distinguish.

If your icon loses to a yellow cube, it is not a good icon.

I find amusing that they used this wrench and bolt symbols for their utility applications while making it harder for years to actually physically fix their devices.

And for the overall style, these kinda look like taken from pling.com where people share their packages of customized icons that try to mimic MacOS "squircle" style on Linux

I have Disk Utility in my dock, and I hate the icon (the old one with the tiny stethoscope and spinning HDD.)

Back in the day, when you could still have custom icons in the sidebar of the Finder and file dialogs (well, Snow Leopard…), I used colored spheres as identifiers for project folders, for minimal 1-bit attention. Which may be a proper use case for such a thing. (There's a clear relationship, but this is also subject to change.)