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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.
but no sillier than mislabelling all ssd as hard drives
 
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I’d be 99% of users had no idea what the old icon was.
It doesn't really matter as long as it is distinctive. Phones icons don't look like modern phones, Gen-Z-ers might not recognise a floppy disc icon - and the winner mght be the UK |speed camera" sign that looks like an early 20th century bellows camera. However, they're still recognised as abstract symbols for what they represent.

Trying to make icons realistic in terms of "modern" hardware just ends up with a parade of anonymous boxes and black slabs.

It's not like you look at the new icon and think "Hey, that's a disk drive" (looks like a dialup modem ro me!).
 
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Amazing how they used to understand "perspective".
The "design" at Apple continues to be so disappointingly bad.

Good
Screenshot 2025-08-05 at 15.38.03.png
Screenshot 2025-08-05 at 15.39.53.png


Bad
Screenshot 2025-08-05 at 15.38.07.png
Screenshot 2025-08-05 at 15.39.56.png
 
Yes, the perspective doesn’t make sense.

For comparison, why are we now looking at the Trash icon from a more side-on perspective (as you would, with it on the ground), yet the Drive icon is ‘stood up’ vertically rather than being a ‘sat down’ perspective, as per OS 9?

View attachment 2534791

Too many Chiefs and not enough Indians at the Loop

Oh imagine actual 3D icons so they have a unified perspective on screen.

Privacy nightmare - but any Mac with a webcam could track the users position and set the one-point perspective relative to their eye line 😎
 
Long overdue. They stopped optimizing OS releases for spinning platter HDs around 2010, despite being officially “supported.”
 
I agree, but they had to do something.
Why, exactly, did they have to do something other than "because old hard drive is old"?

If this were a change being proposed for Mac OS X 10.3 or earlier, then I might agree with you because the anatomically-correct internal hard-drive icon was always a terrible design (at least compared to common alternatives, including the icon used in Mac OS 9 or earlier). But now that icon has 20+ years of being ingrained as the standard internal hard-drive icon for Mac OS. Changing it now does nothing to help with making the OS more intuitive.

Would you have preferred a PCB with a chip on it? (I think that'd be cool)
No, a PCB would definitely be worse from a user-friendliness perspective, but I do agree it would look pretty cool.
 
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