Adam Engst joins me this month to talk about the wonderful world of macOS Tahoe’s menu icons. You may not have noticed, or you may not have upgraded to macOS 26 yet, but nearly every menu item in every dropdown menu on nearly every application now has a tiny icon next to it.
In this discussion, Adam and I go through the fabulous blog post by Nikita Prokopov entitled It’s hard to justify Tahoe icons where he shows examples of the problems they cause. From indecipherable to inconsistent, there are a lot of problems.
Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: CCATP_2026_01_21
Listening to this episode and kind of laughing. While I agree some of the icons on the menus are meaningless (and to me frustrating) many have helped me greatly since I can see the icons easier than the words – again, reading sometimes for me is very difficult due to mild dyslexia. The icons were the first thing I noticed and suddenly menu items were visible to me. I was, “Oh, that menu item is there? Excellent” and yes, I looked on my wife’s old Intel Mac still running old old system and that menu was there all along. I didn’t notice listening if you also mentioned that doing the option menu changes or eliminates the icons for the menu items that have changed. Again, I was “That is there with option?” And yes, the ctrl – menu items that change also have their icons change. Very handy for me.
Having said that, yeah, there are way too many icons that look very similar or have completely different meanings in different applications. So I understand the frustration that you and Adam have but for me, this change has been very positive.