Macintosh HD Gets a New Look in Latest macOS Tahoe Beta

[MacRumors]

Apple has been updating some classic Mac icons during the macOS Tahoe beta, upsetting some longtime Mac users who prefer the original look. In beta 5, Apple changed the design of the built-in Mac storage icon, which you'll notice if you have it on your desktop.

The existing icon still resembled a hard disk drive, but the new icon looks like a modern solid state drive. Apple's Macs stopped using hard disk drives starting more than a decade ago. The low-cost 21.5-inch iMac was the last Mac that had a hard drive component, as it used Apple's SSD + HDD Fusion Drive. All current Macs use SSDs.

If you don't want to see the new icon, you can hide Macintosh HD from view entirely. To do so, open up the Finder app's settings and click the check mark next to "Hard disks."

Apple also updated Disk Utility and the Finder icon in earlier betas. With the Finder icon, Apple initially reversed the color scheme with the light shade on the left and the dark on the right, but the uproar was so significant that Apple had to return it to the classic color arrangement.

Article Link: Macintosh HD Gets a New Look in Latest macOS Tahoe Beta

 

[swixo]

Worth the update just for that.

 

[Yamcha]

Looks really nice

 

[Apple Knowledge Navigator]

So they make a soggy 'glass' envelope for the Mail.app, but the disk icon is aluminium? Makes sense.

 

[nickbatz]

You can open Get Info and paste in your own icons for anything. That may even have been in System 7, but it's been in OS X and now macOS all along.

 

[zakarhino]

I hate it

 

[Zorn]

They wisely made it an external SSD, perhaps a Freudian slip at how no one can afford their internal storage upgrade pricing

 

[Billy_Bob]

Does the new icon just appear on SSDs, or will my 20TB external NAS backup drive, a HDD, now incorrectly show up as if it were an SSD? If they're now accurately distinguishing between SSDs and HDDs, that's great, but if they've just decided to mislabel HDDs instead of SSDs, that's just silly.

 

[frou]

What are the 3 holes? Triple headphone jack?

 

[AusMness]

I quite like this, was wondering how much longer the startup disk would appear visually similar to an old HDD

 

[Apple Knowledge Navigator]

What are the 3 holes? Triple headphone jack?

They're a reminder that your OS now has round buttons where there were no round buttons before!

 

[jmckenzie]

What’s up with that perspective, is it…. isometric? Looks weird.

 

[sos47]

And?
(Why does the article didn‘t tell more)

 

[jayducharme]

What are the 3 holes? Triple headphone jack?

Speaker holes. It's actually an early iPod nano design.

Actually, I like the new icon and was wondering why Apple had been clinging to the old design for so long.

 

[Jumpthesnark]

No complaints from me. But this is MR and I'm sure I'll be in the minority in this thread.

 

[anthony131]

JFC. They can’t even get icons right anymore.
Maybe they should farm the work out to iconfactory.

 

[anthony131]

What’s up with that perspective, is it…. isometric? Looks weird.

The top, front, and logo are all different perspectives. It’s glaringly obvious and they don’t even have enough QC to fix this simple flaw.

This might actually be Ai generated.

 

[daedbird]

Having changed out several traditional and fusion drives in 2017 iMacs, I can tell you has been less than a decade since they completely switched to solid state storage......
Laptops lost the platter drives when the 'unibody' MacBook pros were retired in after 2013
Mac Minis kept them through to the 2018 space grey models
iMacs came with SSD in the 2019 model year
Mac Pros switched to SSD for the Vader 2013 models

 

[iZac]

Long live System 7!

More honestly, I never really liked the OSX HD icon, was always too fiddly and never matched the Aqua aesthetic.

So I much prefer the new icon, but I'm not sure about it having no perspective though.

 

[n-evo]

What’s up with that perspective, is it…. isometric? Looks weird.

I like the update but agreed the perspective looks off.

 

[kagharaht]

I haven't used the default HD since the ability to paste your own version. Way back then I pasted a Toilet. Then a Macintosh Bomb Crash and people thinking the Mac crashed. LOL... These days I just paste a custom logo I created years ago.

 

[mxrider88]

There’s something weird with the perspective. It feels wrong. And the huge apple logo is a sore eye, maybe they are trying to compensate the fact that they forgot to put it on the front of the iMac…

 

[GrassShark]

I get that Macs don’t ship with spinning drives anymore, but at least that icon was somewhat explanatory of what it was. This new generic Apple block means nothing.

I’m genuinely concerned for Apple’s design abilities. They keep making unforced errors.

 

[jakey rolling]

I get that an update is probably long overdue, but the original HD icon's whole purpose was to make it glaringly obvious to the user that they are interacting with the local "internal" drive, rather than a network share or an external drive. Changing the icon to what looks like an external SSD kind of defeats that purpose.

There's a reason why the save button in so many applications is still a 3.5" floppy disk.

 

[Donkey Man]

Fugly and nondescript new icon - not to mention that anyone could already change it for anything else.