If they really want to improve MacOS they should add synonym based search in Settings. I should not be forced to know by heart the arcane speech their marketing department chose to replace consecrated terms. Just today it took me 5 minutes to unearth the Speech Rate settings.
It feels like using Siri and not knowing the magic words. Come on Apple, synonym matching is easy. Just use a LLM to generate synonyms to all things a user might query in settings! Use a small embedding model if you feel daring, it works fast enough.
Oh, this reminds me that Azure, GCP and AWS also need AI assistants that actually know their way around instead of declining to help for anything above looking up some docs. Why can't I ask Azure in what region the still have A100 GPUs? That's what the assistant should be good at - integration with live data and ability to solve cloud problems.
Synonym search is rocket science. It will take 20 years after they figure out n-gram search (i.e. “srceen time”, “cellluar”, et al.) and keyword search (“Set charge limit”)
I filed a bug report about a specific setting, "Screen Time" that stopped showing up in Finder, and a couple-few weeks later, it returned to being findable once more.
Filing bug reports about specific instances might be a useful way to help fix this?
It wasn’t so bad when it was still control centre - I had used it for at least 15 years and knew the placement of everything. Ever since it became system settings I get lost every time I open the app.
In the age of X ditching Twitter and Tweets, I think brand continuity and identity is underrated. The friendly finder logo is such an essential part of MacOS that it's bizarre (at least to me) that they've changed the color symmetry of the face.
Why would you do that? It's as iconic as the Apple silhouette for Apple users.
If you've ever used MacOS, you've had that face stare back at you. It's a kind face. A friendly face. An old face. An old friend. Let's keep it that way.
edit - on further thought, was this change user tested? I'm fairly certain that even the most middle-of-the-road, suburban dad on his 10th layover will notice something is different when they look at it. It's a strange change.
It's not different enough to force recognition as a new symbol. It's just different enough to be weird.
The overwhelming majority of people I know in real life haven't actually been on the platform for years, if they ever were, and some of those have used X by default in the rare case in comes up. It's slowly changing, but was quickly dying before Trump and Elon got their hands on it. Mileage may vary, but I imagine there's an association between Twitter still being the old place where tired millennials shout about nothing to bots all day
TBH, it's better if this new generation of Apple's UI designers waste their energy on such trivialities instead of trying to "improve" Finder features (not that Finder is all that great to begin with though).
Let them tinker with icons, fonts, colors and "evoking emotions" all day long, at least then they don't break any actually important stuff.
> The friendly finder logo is such an essential part of MacOS that it's bizarre (at least to me) that they've changed the color symmetry of the face.
> Why would you do that? It's as iconic as the Apple silhouette for Apple users.
> If you've ever used MacOS, you've had that face stare back at you. It's a kind face. A friendly face. An old face. An old friend. Let's keep it that way.
I mean ... not all Apple users, not all MacOS users. I've been using Macs since the late 90s (daily since ~2004) and maybe I'm entirely unique in this, but if you'd asked me prior to TFA and this discussion to describe the Finder icon ... I likely wouldn't have been able to tell you anything except "it's topmost in my Dock". Seriously, I couldn't have told you the colours (nor did I notice that Tahoe has flipped them); I definitely wouldn't have said "essential", "kind" or "friendly"; and I probably wouldn't even have recalled that it's a face. It's just that icon that's always topmost in my Dock that I haven't clicked in years because, well, Spotlight.
it's creepy not friendly (especially now, as I somehow never consciously noticed that it's a dead forever smiling face), the new one simply looks amateurish and bad.
The entire UI redesign of "liquid glass" looks horrible in its current state. Right now the readability factor on iOS is at an all time low. It feels like a change just for the sake of change. How is it better?
Maybe it's a subtle way to punish non-native apps that recreate UI elements, but do not use SwiftUI. The user gets used to the native way of UI elements and everything else will look odd after a while, forcing developers to ditch everything that isn't truly native.
One doesn't need to use SwiftUI for the look. Things like the tab bar, navigation bar are available in Swift too. (for those unfamiliar, Swift is different and older than SwiftUI).
Sorry to burst your bubble but users literally do not care "how native it looks" other than the vocal minority online. Never ever heard any non-technical user complain that Spotify does not fit in.
You might be on to something about change for change's sake. I mean you have a large design team at Apple. Do you expect them to sit on their hands for years and years?
The new Finder logo has so much meaning symbolically for me.
It actually has a very ugly meaning to me.
I felt that it is the end of the road for me.
My first Mac was a Powermac 7300/200.
btw, nobody ever mentioned that the red close button is next to the minimize button. This is similar to the close button being next to the maximize button on Windows. Just reversed.
On Mac OS classic the close window button is on its own. I really miss Mac OS classic.
If you have time to tinker with it, I highly recommend you spend some time with classic Mac OS! It obviously cannot replace the modern computer, but as a sidekick for your brain it is wonderful… Mac OS 9's Acrobat Reader still supports the PDF website captures by Safari in Sonoma.
I use it as an external brain. I love that the Finder is spatial and has a one-to-one relationship between windows and documents and files and icons… and I benefit from it leaving icons where I put them
And sometimes I play great 90s/2k games on my external brain :)
The color change doesn't bother me nearly as much as the change in proportions. Insetting the face on the right and removing its curvature makes the smile look super weird and less "human" to me. I'm sure I'll get used to it, but it feels a little off.
My theory is they straightened it out so it looks almost like half of a representation of a house, i.e. Finder helps you find and organize things in your "home".
The swapping of the colors is pretty bad in and of itself, but I find the change to the right face's chin even more grating.
To the many people ITT who seem to be puzzled by this kind of complaint, the issue is that it suggests someone at some point said "what if we flipped the Finder icon?", for which no valid answer appears to exist, making it unwarranted and unsatisfying. It also suggests their priorities are off.
The fun part is that Spotlight used to do this, but they progressively made it worse year after year. It became completely unusable for me maybe a couple of years ago and switched to Raycast, which I use exactly like I used to use Spotlight in 2010 and nothing more.
Readit News
It feels like using Siri and not knowing the magic words. Come on Apple, synonym matching is easy. Just use a LLM to generate synonyms to all things a user might query in settings! Use a small embedding model if you feel daring, it works fast enough.
Oh, this reminds me that Azure, GCP and AWS also need AI assistants that actually know their way around instead of declining to help for anything above looking up some docs. Why can't I ask Azure in what region the still have A100 GPUs? That's what the assistant should be good at - integration with live data and ability to solve cloud problems.
(Because, yes, I feel your pain.)
And it applies to all apple operating systems.
Basic UX is not sexy nowadays.
Filing bug reports about specific instances might be a useful way to help fix this?
Why would you do that? It's as iconic as the Apple silhouette for Apple users.
If you've ever used MacOS, you've had that face stare back at you. It's a kind face. A friendly face. An old face. An old friend. Let's keep it that way.
edit - on further thought, was this change user tested? I'm fairly certain that even the most middle-of-the-road, suburban dad on his 10th layover will notice something is different when they look at it. It's a strange change.
It's not different enough to force recognition as a new symbol. It's just different enough to be weird.
Trying to ditch twitter and tweets. I’ve yet to hear any normal person call it X yet.
Which kind of proves your point.
TBH, it's better if this new generation of Apple's UI designers waste their energy on such trivialities instead of trying to "improve" Finder features (not that Finder is all that great to begin with though).
Let them tinker with icons, fonts, colors and "evoking emotions" all day long, at least then they don't break any actually important stuff.
> Why would you do that? It's as iconic as the Apple silhouette for Apple users.
> If you've ever used MacOS, you've had that face stare back at you. It's a kind face. A friendly face. An old face. An old friend. Let's keep it that way.
I mean ... not all Apple users, not all MacOS users. I've been using Macs since the late 90s (daily since ~2004) and maybe I'm entirely unique in this, but if you'd asked me prior to TFA and this discussion to describe the Finder icon ... I likely wouldn't have been able to tell you anything except "it's topmost in my Dock". Seriously, I couldn't have told you the colours (nor did I notice that Tahoe has flipped them); I definitely wouldn't have said "essential", "kind" or "friendly"; and I probably wouldn't even have recalled that it's a face. It's just that icon that's always topmost in my Dock that I haven't clicked in years because, well, Spotlight.
https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2025/102
Deleted Comment
The new Finder logo has so much meaning symbolically for me. It actually has a very ugly meaning to me.
I felt that it is the end of the road for me. My first Mac was a Powermac 7300/200.
btw, nobody ever mentioned that the red close button is next to the minimize button. This is similar to the close button being next to the maximize button on Windows. Just reversed.
On Mac OS classic the close window button is on its own. I really miss Mac OS classic.
I use it as an external brain. I love that the Finder is spatial and has a one-to-one relationship between windows and documents and files and icons… and I benefit from it leaving icons where I put them
And sometimes I play great 90s/2k games on my external brain :)
To the many people ITT who seem to be puzzled by this kind of complaint, the issue is that it suggests someone at some point said "what if we flipped the Finder icon?", for which no valid answer appears to exist, making it unwarranted and unsatisfying. It also suggests their priorities are off.
On the new icon, I see a "smiley face", and if I concentrate a little, there's a "guy in the background".
I like the newer icon.
And, to be fair, this is the most thought I've ever put into it. So, there's that as well to consider.
Is it 2023/accounts.xlsx or 2024/accounts.xlsx or 2025/accounts.xlsx? Who knows!
https://www.alfredapp.com/