macOS Golden Gate menus revert to having no icons

macOS Tahoe threw an icon on every menu item, making them impossible to distinguish at a glance. macOS Golden Gate has rectified that design taboo with blessedly iconless menus.

In Disney’s 2004 animated film The Incredibles, a very basic concept of “when everyone is special, no one is” is explored. Alan Dye must not have seen that movie or the many like it.

Well, now that he’s gone, so is his team’s decision to frustratingly place icons next to every menu item. Apple announced macOS Golden Gate on Monday, and it has fixed this problem.

macOS Tahoe introduced the controversial Liquid Glass design, but that may not have been the most hated change to the platform. Oh, the weird Finder icon was a problem Apple fixed immediately, but I’m talking about menu icons.

For some reason, Apple went against its own age-old design guidelines to add special little SF symbols to every menu item. Every single item in the menu got these little pictures of cogs, squares, and pencils.

The problem is, when every menu item has a little picture next to it, your brain stops distinguishing between them. They’re treated as another letter in a line of text and may as well not exist.

Well, someone got the memo because macOS Golden Gate ditches the icons again. Here’s a side-by-side of the new menu next to the previous one.

The left menu shows a lack of icons in macOS Golden Gate and the right menu shows the icons in macOS Tahoe

Advertisement

Apple spent a lot of its keynote addressing user complaints. Even the corner radii being mismatched was addressed directly.

WWDC 2026 is underway and AppleInsider is digging through all of the betas for every small change. Even though Apple spent most of its keynote address talking about Apple Intelligence, there are many new features and updates across every operating system.