Summary

Gruber argues that Apple's mandate forcing all Mac app icons into squircle shapes is a serious design mistake that strips away shape as a visual differentiator, making icons harder to identify at a glance. He aligns with Paul Kafasis and John Siracusa's critiques, noting that while Apple imposing squircles on its own icons would be bad enough, enforcing it platform-wide on third-party developers is 'spiteful.' He draws on the traffic sign analogy — no engineer would make stop and yield signs the same shape in the name of consistency — to illustrate how the human visual system depends on shape for quick identification. He extends the critique to Apple's tinted and clear icon options, which similarly eliminate color as a distinguishing factor. He calls for Apple to reverse both decisions and restore distinctiveness to the Mac icon ecosystem.

Key Insight

By mandating the squircle shape and enabling color-stripping icon modes, Apple has systematically eliminated the two most powerful visual differentiators — shape and color — from app icons, making them harder to identify and less expressive, a developer-hostile mistake it should reverse.

Spicy Quotes (click to share)

• 7

  It's just downright spiteful to enforce it platform-wide.

• 8

  The mandatory squircle makes identifying apps at a glance harder in the same way that it's difficult to identify individual people if they're all wearing same-shaped helmets.

• 7

  The purpose of icons is right there in their name: to be iconic. Shape was often the most iconic thing about an icon. Now it's no part at all.

• 6

  No civil engineer would ever suggest changing yield and stop signs from their iconic triangles and octagons to identical squircles.

• 7

  It makes no more sense than removing color. But Apple did that too!

• 7

  Just the mere silhouette of the old Keynote icon is more recognizable, and thus more iconic, than any icon on any platform from Apple today.

• 9

  App icons used to be exuberantly fun and so beautiful that they were the subject of two splendid coffee table books. This squircle shit is no fun at all, and ugly as sin.

• 9

  Squircle Jail is the worst design-related thing Apple has ever done to Mac developers, and probably the worst icon-related thing it has ever done, period. Incredibly developer-hostile.

Tone

critical, opinionated