macOS 27 deletes the menu icons macOS 26 added. Gruber calls it the best news from WWDC
A year ago macOS Tahoe sprinkled icons through every menu. John Gruber called it "the worst UI crime" of the release. macOS 27 Golden Gate quietly deletes them — and to Gruber that reversal is proof "the rot has been rooted out of Apple's software design team."
Apple's revised guidelines now say use menu icons "sparingly and with purpose," and "don't display an icon if you can't find one that clearly represents the menu item." Several users had stayed on older macOS specifically to dodge the change.
The dissent: one engineer says it's not the design team that produces this, it's a structural failure to listen to customers — and the cleaner fix was never icons-or-no-icons, but letting users choose.
A UI crime, undone
In his post, John Gruber celebrates macOS 27 Golden Gate for removing the menu-item icons that macOS 26 Tahoe introduced — a change he calls his favorite news from the entire WWDC week. His complaint about the original was concrete: different Apple apps used different icons for identical menu items, leaving them "glaringly inconsistent and often utterly inscrutable," and third-party developers had already built workarounds to disable them. Apple's updated Human Interface Guidelines now advise using menu icons "sparingly and with purpose," and to skip an icon entirely if none clearly represents the item.
Apple's willingness to say "that was dumb"
The thread's warmest read framed the reversal as a feature of Apple, not a bug. A developer who'd been holding back his own upgrade — and whose bio credits him with early anti-spam math — described the pattern:
"One of Apple's real strengths and differentiators is that it listens to customer feedback to the point that it will say: 'Hey, this was dumb… Let's just get rid of it like it never happened.'"
The speed itself was read as a signal. A startup founder in the thread saw a fingerprint: "Apple never reverses course this quickly, so this is a clear signal that Stephen Lemay is making his presence felt."
The structural dissent
Not everyone accepted "the rot has been rooted out." A commenter with long experience watching products get designed located the cause one level up:
"Goofy and offensive things happen when corporations decide not to pay attention to customers. The decision to ignore customer and focus on market wow is not the software design team. It is a systemic and structural thing."
By that reading, deleting the icons treats a symptom; the same process that shipped them is still running.
The fix that should have shipped
The most pointed critique rejected the whole binary. A commenter argued the new guidance is still wrong because it hard-codes Apple's taste over yours:
"The perfect advice would be easy and powerful user customization, so that… I could right click on the app's File>Save menu and select an option to [show or hide it]."
There were even mourners. One commenter admitted, "I may have been the only one, but I kind of liked those." And a reader spared a thought for the labor: "think about the months of work that has been wasted on creating those icon iterations."
The wider tell
The most resonant tangent connected Apple's clutter to everyone's current frustration. A commenter noted the menu icons are the same instinct as "model generated artifacts… every bullet point with an emoji," HTML "littered with chips/pill style 'informative' boxes." The win here is small and real: a vendor looked at decoration masquerading as information and chose subtraction. The open question the thread left is whether subtraction one year and addition the next is taste — or just the absence of a setting that would let the user decide once.
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