RIP To the Macintosh HD Hard Drive Icon, 2000-2025 (arstechnica.com) 93
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Apple released a new developer beta build of macOS 26 Tahoe today, and it came with another big update for a familiar icon. The old Macintosh HD hard drive icon, for years represented by a facsimile of an old spinning hard drive, has been replaced with something clearly intended to resemble a solid-state drive (the SSD in your Mac actually looks like a handful of chips soldered to a circuit board, but we'll forgive the creative license).
The Macintosh HD icon became less visible a few years back, when new macOS installs stopped showing your internal disk on the desktop by default. It has also been many years since Apple shifted to SSDs as the primary boot media for new Macs. It's not clear why the icon is being replaced now, instead of years ago -- maybe the icon had started clicking, and Apple just wanted to replace it before it suffered from catastrophic icon failure -- but regardless, the switch is logical (this is a computer storage pun). Apple's iconic Macintosh HD hard drive icon was first introduced in a 2000 Mac OS X beta and remained largely unchanged for over two decades, with only subtle updates in 2012 and 2014.
The first SSD-equipped Mac was in 2008, "when the original MacBook Air came out," notes Ars. "By the time 'Retina' Macs began arriving in the early 2010s, SSDs had become the primary boot disk for most of them; laptops tended to be all-SSD, while desktops could be configured with an SSD or a hybrid Fusion Drive that used an SSD as boot media and an HDD for mass storage. Apple stopped shipping spinning hard drives entirely when the last of the Intel iMacs went away."
The Macintosh HD icon became less visible a few years back, when new macOS installs stopped showing your internal disk on the desktop by default. It has also been many years since Apple shifted to SSDs as the primary boot media for new Macs. It's not clear why the icon is being replaced now, instead of years ago -- maybe the icon had started clicking, and Apple just wanted to replace it before it suffered from catastrophic icon failure -- but regardless, the switch is logical (this is a computer storage pun). Apple's iconic Macintosh HD hard drive icon was first introduced in a 2000 Mac OS X beta and remained largely unchanged for over two decades, with only subtle updates in 2012 and 2014.
The first SSD-equipped Mac was in 2008, "when the original MacBook Air came out," notes Ars. "By the time 'Retina' Macs began arriving in the early 2010s, SSDs had become the primary boot disk for most of them; laptops tended to be all-SSD, while desktops could be configured with an SSD or a hybrid Fusion Drive that used an SSD as boot media and an HDD for mass storage. Apple stopped shipping spinning hard drives entirely when the last of the Intel iMacs went away."
Bye... I guess. (Score:1)
Farewell, icon. I never saw ye.
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Only Apple fans could get this whipped up into a frenzy about an icon. They seem to be very focused on aesthetics while caring very little about functionality.
I'm not certain they are getting "whipped up" about anything. Icons in MacOS are trivial to change, so the new icon can be changed back, and the new one just looks like external drives with a few more "holes".
Aesthetics? Yes, many of us are concerned about them.
Functionality? I installed Parallels and W11 on my new Mac Mini. There are a couple programs I need that my Mac doesn't have, and a Uber of programs Windows doesn't have. Now I seamlessly go back and forth. Seems quite functional to me.
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If you were concerned about functionality you would just buy a system that runs an OS that does everything you need without needing virtualization.
Pray tell, which operating system does everything? I need some programs that are on Mac, some that are on Windows.
To name just two of them, since you're going to ask, SmartSDR for MacOS. It does come in a Windows flavor, but that's not reliable, because Windows 10 and 11 do not play nice with audio drivers, and the Windows version is chip Architecture limited. On the Windows side, I use Intermodulation analysis software that does not run on MacOS.
You do exhibit a deep seated need to contradict me, B
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Re: Bye... I guess. (Score:1)
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So what? Why doesn't matter to you?
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Why do you care? What business is it of yours how someone else, especially total strangers, spend their money?
What if instead of buying overpriced Apple gear, they spend it on, say, a BMW? Or a $500K house when they could have bought a $250 house? Or they bought the Dewalt drill instead of the cheaper Craftsman drill? Or they went to the full priced evening showing of a movie instead of the cheaper matinee price? Or even that they went to the movies at all, since they could have waited and rented it for $
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Fluffernutter is an iOS Developer by Trade that lives to Hate on All Things Apple.
Is it really? (Score:5, Informative)
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I dunno what the new ones look like, but certain not an SSD.
The first one kind looks like a little USB-C adapter.
They all look stupid.
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I dunno what the new ones look like, but certain not an SSD.
The first one kind looks like a little USB-C adapter.
They all look stupid.
I do have an SSD that looks similar to the new icon. Fortunately my rogue spell checker didn't change It to STD!
Anyhow, I'm not a super fan of the new icon, it looks too much like the External drive icons, so I'll just change it. Pretty easy to do.
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It looks like a USB C SSD enclosure with some lights on it.
Re:Is it really? (Score:5, Interesting)
It is very bad for an SSD icon. Perspective is wrong. The three dots on the right have no purpose. The void on the left is supposed to be a USB connector but could be anything. A "flash drive" (type A plug) icon would be so much more intuitive. Of course, why should I care, I'm not among their customer base.
LibreOffice has an interesting solution. The "save icon" is similar to "download" but gets a red dot (the one for "Recording") when the document has been modified. It gets visible when it suggests you should press it, then becomes very discrete again when it is not needed.
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It is very bad for an SSD icon. Perspective is wrong.
That's what gets me. First thing I saw was the lack of perspective. It hurt my brain. Just no.
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It is very bad for an SSD icon. Perspective is wrong.
That's what gets me. First thing I saw was the lack of perspective. It hurt my brain. Just no.
And the Perspective on the old Icon was perfect?
Having said that, it does seem a little Forced. . .
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Perspective is wrong
Seriously...WHY would you do this, Apple? Everyone, everywhere along the review chain MUST have pointed this out. This has to be the result of someone at the design phase having some sort of misguided vision of the future of UI design or something along those lines. Someone had to PUSH for this to happen but I cannot possibly imagine why.
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Yeah, it's just bad "UX" on top - the "internal" drive icon looks more like an external drive than the "external" drive does.
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It is very bad for an SSD icon.
What's an SSD look like? Please pick the "standard" image from the point of view of a consumer who has never seen into a computer.
LibreOffice has an interesting solution. The "save icon" is similar to "download" but gets a red dot
Solving the wrong problem. There's an entire generation of computer users who have never seen a floppy disk and have no idea why that icon represents "save"
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Replying to self on Libre Office: No I have an outdated version here. The new icon is as you say a "download" icon. Disregard that part of the post.
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What's an SSD look like? Please pick the "standard" image from the point of view of a consumer who has never seen into a computer.
I open the package of my new external SSD as we speak (a WD My Passport) and thankfully it came with the correct perspective (/s). Also it did not include three useless dots/LEDs and the front opening had the right proportions to fit a type C connector.
Apple was not very far, they're in the uncanny valley. They're subtly wrong in every dimension so their drawing looks like anything but an SSD.
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It's a full frontal axonometric except without foreshortening, so doubly bizarre.
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I'm running LibreOffice 25.2.5 on Fedora 42 under XFCE and the LibreOffice Writer save icon is still a 3.5" floppy disk for me.
ElementaryOS not LibreOffice (Score:2)
My mistake is that the *credit is to be given to ElementaryOS* not LibreOffice. LibreOffice makes available an Elementary icon theme in the options (it happened to be the one I'm using). The other icon themes present by default indeed use a floppy disk for the save icon.
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Is it really an icon when it is that detailed? Also it is so generic it could be anything, even a vape.
Score 5: Informative??? C'mon, Mods!
What should have Apple made it look like? A BGA Chip? An M.2 Module? Some Branded External (Apple doesn't have any Branded Storage)?
They picked a shape and Color that looks basically like an biggified AirPods Charging Case, with three Ports/Lights.
What's the Big Deal?
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To be fair to your point what photo would be best for a SSD is ques
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Big deal, no. Most replies seem to have taken issue with the choice of image. My point was icon were 16 x 16 pixels 8 colours, well 32 x 32 with 256 colours on those fancy high res systems. When working with that number of pixels you have to get creative to make it meaningful to users. However now they are basic photographic quality I would question why have a representative simplification when you can have an image of the real thing?
To be fair to your point what photo would be best for a SSD is questionable. For me an internal SSD it is a NVMe stick but I agree that would mean nothing to the average user.
Regardless I'm keeping my mod point as I got people thinking about what is an icon anyway.
I'd as soon go back to the Commodore 64 days and make it a Filing Cabinet. Take the imagery completely out of the Computer Realm. I'm only slightly kidding. . .
Surprised it lasted this long (Score:4, Insightful)
I remember reading a review back in the day about either the public beta or one of the first releases wondering why it was a picture of a hard drive in the first place. They mentioned that the average user has no idea what a hard drive is or what it looks like, compared to classic Mac OS's icon that resembled an external hard drive which made some sense given the SCSI legacy of it, so wondered why they chose that when everything else was so skeuomorphic.
I'm even more surprised they still stick with "Macintosh HD" as the title even when they've pivoted away from "Macintosh" as a brand (and even "Mac" for awhile) and it hasn't been an HD in forever. That even predates Mac OS X.
Re: Surprised it lasted this long (Score:4, Insightful)
But why replace it with an icon that ALSO is unrecognizable?
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What would you replace it with? That new one isn't really as unrecognisable. The number of consumers who have come across say something like a Samsung T7 (which looks exactly like the picture) external SSD would be higher than those who have seen in detail an internal spinning rust HDD. Now as to whether it is internal or external, the iconography doesn't really matter for the consumer as it really is a distinction without difference. Look to the windows icon, it most closely resembles an external SCSI driv
Re: Surprised it lasted this long (Score:4, Interesting)
It is the fate of all icons to end up as arrows or three horizontal lines.
I see they've added an arrow to the removable drive icon, they'll probably just add other arrows to the rest later on.
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spinning rust HDD
You probably mean "spinning mirror HDD". Nickel oxide, used on hard disk drive platters [wikipedia.org] isn't what we usually call rust.
Or maybe you mean in comparison to "sitting rust" for SSDs, which use metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistors [wikipedia.org].
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Maybe I thought I was talking to people here who understood that spinning rust has nothing to do with with the material it's made from but rather is a reflection of outdated ancient relics that are left to oxidise away. Precisely no one here other than you thought I was referencing the materials on the disk. Spinning rust is a common phrase used here for a reason.
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There's no need to be passive-aggressive.
Anyway, that's an interesting definition, though not what's commonly meant by that expression in reference to HDDs. But do you mean that Slashdot has its own definition for it?
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Old hard drives, which a lot of old timers like myself would remember, were indeed made with Iron Oxide. It wasn't quite rust but close enough to earn the moniker.
Granted they haven't been made with that in ages but the name hangs on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: Surprised it lasted this long (Score:2)
Well, given the design precedent and Mac printer icons actually looking specifically like the model, they could have put an NVME chip or whatever is actually in the machine.
Even if there are devices that look like the icon the devices are so generic as to be unidentifiable in icon form. Completely defeats the purpose of the change.
Or they could - you know - leave it as something everyone already recognizes as the hard drive icon.
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Well, given the design precedent and Mac printer icons actually looking specifically like the model, they could have put an NVME chip or whatever is actually in the machine.
Which perfectly emphasises my point. Consumers know what a printer looks like. It's external to the machine. But most consumers have never seen an NVME chip and can form zero association with the iconography.
The floppy disk as a save icon faces a similar problem among the younger generation.
Or they could - you know - leave it as something everyone already recognizes as the hard drive icon.
Everyone? Did you ask everyone? I mean you recognise it. I recognise it, but our biases are shaped based on the world we grew up in. On the flip side I know plenty of people who think "the hard drive" is actually the nam
Re: Surprised it lasted this long (Score:2)
But at least an NVME chip is accurate.
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The goal of user facing iconography is not to be accurate. It's to convey information to the user.
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The goal of user facing iconography is not to be accurate. It's to convey information to the user.
Mods: Mod this Informative!
Re: Surprised it lasted this long (Score:2)
Everyone who uses a Mac recognizes it. Because it's what it's been for like a decade or so.
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If the only Mac users are existing Mac users then the platform is a dead end. UI changes and simplifications are for the benefit of *new* users. If they weren't we'd all still be typing text in a terminal.
Re: Surprised it lasted this long (Score:2)
But it doesn't benefit them because the icon is generic to the point of being useless.
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It's not. The icon actually looks exactly like one of the most popular external SSDs on the market. The internal / external differentiation is notwithstanding, - the consumer would be clueless as to why one has an apple symbol and the other a USB, but at least it looks like an SSD a consumer is likely to physically see.
There's no perfect answer here, but this iconography is probably the best of a lot of bad options.
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It looks like the Apple remote that comes with Mac Books.
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Well, given the design precedent and Mac printer icons actually looking specifically like the model, they could have put an NVME chip or whatever is actually in the machine.
Which perfectly emphasises my point. Consumers know what a printer looks like. It's external to the machine. But most consumers have never seen an NVME chip and can form zero association with the iconography.
The floppy disk as a save icon faces a similar problem among the younger generation.
Or they could - you know - leave it as something everyone already recognizes as the hard drive icon.
Everyone? Did you ask everyone? I mean you recognise it. I recognise it, but our biases are shaped based on the world we grew up in. On the flip side I know plenty of people who think "the hard drive" is actually the name of the computer case itself. It's not a given that people recognise these icons at all. For all intents and purposes the old icon was more unidentifiable than the new one for many.
I was going to mention that many people thought the whole computer was "the Hard Drive".
I also agree with you that the old icon was still more identifiable as "INTERNAL Mass Storage" than the new, Breath Mints Case. . .
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What would you replace it with? That new one isn't really as unrecognisable. The number of consumers who have come across say something like a Samsung T7 (which looks exactly like the picture) external SSD would be higher than those who have seen in detail an internal spinning rust HDD. Now as to whether it is internal or external, the iconography doesn't really matter for the consumer as it really is a distinction without difference. Look to the windows icon, it most closely resembles an external SCSI drive chassis that even fewer people have seen.
What would you suggest to be the most recognisable icon, also try and put your self in the minds of a dumb consumer? This is not an easy question to answer.
Exactly.
Unlike a Hard Drive Mechanism, which at least used to be a reliable "picture" meaning "Mass Storage", there is literally no possible Skeuomorphic Image that would instantly scream "SSD" to any two random people in the room.
That's why "Save" still looks like a 3.5" Floppy in most places, FFS! Because, curiously enough, nothing else is as universally recognizable, even to Gen Z'ers.
But Users will pay attention to that Icon (and mismatched "HD" Name) exactly ONCE; then after that, the Icon could be a s
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I remember reading a review back in the day about either the public beta or one of the first releases wondering why it was a picture of a hard drive in the first place. They mentioned that the average user has no idea what a hard drive is or what it looks like, compared to classic Mac OS's icon that resembled an external hard drive which made some sense given the SCSI legacy of it, so wondered why they chose that when everything else was so skeuomorphic.
I'm even more surprised they still stick with "Macintosh HD" as the title even when they've pivoted away from "Macintosh" as a brand (and even "Mac" for awhile) and it hasn't been an HD in forever. That even predates Mac OS X.
Why was the Hard Drive in Windows Drive C:\ long after systems included Floppy Drives?
There are still likely software packages that might get pissy after an OS Upgrade suddenly changed the Boot Volume's Name. IMHO, that may be a reason why Apple has stuck with "Macintosh HD".
And yet iOS still has... (Score:3)
...a phone receiver as an icon.
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For the most part they don't have save buttons, things automatically save as you edit them.
Generally, you can click "Share" followed by "Save to files", and "Save to files" has a folder icon.
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Is there a way to turn this nightmare off? No way I want what I do automatically saved until I'm sure it's where I want it. I keep multiple copies of work because they have different edits and sometimes I refer back to something I did previously.
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Exactly. Auto save is the dumbest fucking thing ever.
I definitely don't want shit saved until I decide to save it, for a variety of reasons.
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For the most part they don't have save buttons, things automatically save as you edit them.
Is there a way to turn this nightmare off? No way I want what I do automatically saved until I'm sure it's where I want it. I keep multiple copies of work because they have different edits and sometimes I refer back to something I did previously.
That's why it's a Journaled Filesystem. Revisioning is Automagic.
And it doesn't even require Time Machine!
https://support.apple.com/guid... [apple.com]
BTW, you can still "Save As. . ." to create your "My Great Document - FINAL45" "Versioning" scheme. You just don't have to!
That's pretty dumb (Score:5, Funny)
They should draw a silicon crystal with PN junctions, anyone will know that's a SSD
MOSFET (Score:2)
PN junction?
Forget it, he's rolling.
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I can't believe i never friended you on here.
Well, that sucks! (Score:1)
The current ones look much better than the old trash.
Who asked for this? Nobody.
Fuckheads.
A truly beautiful operating system (Score:4, Funny)
Every icon should be abstract in concept but evoke the emotion of the intended operation or function. So rather than having a literal image of a hard drive or a USB-C stick, the OS should simply have abstracts in the vein of Jackson Pollock. Users can learn the artists intent and meaning by directly interacting with them to discover interpretations that suit the function.
Re: A truly beautiful operating system (Score:2)
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Well, you're wrong.
Anymore questions?
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Would Apple users even know what a USB stick looks like? I didn't think Apple let users transfer files between devices, and the concept of expandable storage was taboo.
Fuck off, Hater.
Re:A truly beautiful operating system (Score:5, Funny)
Every icon should be abstract in concept but evoke the emotion of the intended operation or function
That's why I replace the trashcan icon with a US flag.
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the OS should simply have abstracts in the vein of Jackson Pollock.
Nah - Salvador Dali.
Why not Chinese-language characters? (Score:2)
I know it is a little bit more complicated than that as is the case with every natural language, but I thought the characters in written Chinese are highly stylized drawings of physical objects.
Why don't we standardize on the Chinese character for these different functions and operations instead of inventing a writing system and then changing it with every hardware release?
Re: Why not Chinese-language characters? (Score:2)
Mostly no. There are a relatively small number of simple symbols that you could argue are pictures, such as "person", "fire", "field", "water". But almost all symbols are compounds: you scale/squash multiple simpler symbols then combine to form a new one.
Sometimes the compound pieces contribute just the pronunciation with nothing about meaning. So for example "mother" is "woman" + "horse" because "horse" has the desired pronunciation "ma", not for the meaning or to make a picture.
But why not both? (Score:3)
I have an HDD I use for for backups - Time Machine. Speed is not of the essence there, cheapness and large'ish capacity is. They're still in use then - until 4Tb SSDs are as cheap as 4Tb HDs they're fine for backup.
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If so, why not both images?
Why confuse the user with two icons for what is to them the same thing: a storage device? The bigger problem is that most users have never seen a hard disk before. The iconography is meaningless to them. In fact for the end user the only drives they may be physically familiar with are external drives, and the difference between an external HDD and an external SSD is entirely size with no consistency in style between models or brands.
You can change the icon to anything you want... (Score:2)
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A couple of simple steps and replace it with new .tiff file.
Yup Slash dotter Windows fanboys all atwitter about something that is simpler than logging in. Oh noes, a different icon, What the fsck is wrong with Apple. They still only have single button mice, those dopes. Too expensive, and only stupid people use them! This will finally kill Apple!, and good, no software works on them.
I miss anything?
Looks like an iPod nano (Score:2)
It looks almost exactly like my old grey iPod nano. I don't think it's a good choice of icon, but frankly Apple have been making a lot of 'not a good choice' decisions these days.
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It looks almost exactly like my old grey iPod nano. I don't think it's a good choice of icon, but frankly Apple have been making a lot of 'not a good choice' decisions these days.
Tell me you have no idea how to change an icon without telling me you have no idea to change an icon. If you use Macs, and the old hard drive icon is important to you, then just maybe take a few seconds to change it back, and restore the world to the way you want it.
Oh my (Score:2)
It is so trivially easy to change the icons in MacOS that this is a real non-starter. Like the old Hard Drive icon? You can still use it. Want Homer Simpson as your HD Icon? There ya go.
It's fine and consistent now with removable disks (Score:2)
The new design is fine, although I prefer the perspective projection of the older icons to the isometric projection of the new icons.
The use of a representation of a bare IDE hard drive was always a bit of a weird choice for an icon, especially for MacOS, but also for Gnome and other Linux DEs which copied it. It made perfect sense to me but your average Mac user has never seen a bare drive, just like how most people today have never seen a floppy disk.
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just like how most people today have never seen a floppy disk.
As a LibreOffice user I regularly see a floppy disk when I want to save using the icon.
Perspective is all wrong (Score:2)
Someone got paid to come-up with that, even if all they did was a half-assed prompt to generate it.
And a few people saw that at a meeting and concluded it was good enough.
Sad times, that monstrosity is all distorted and looks horrible.
Geez (Score:4, Insightful)
Everything is already evolving into boxes and bubbles, so how are you going to differentiate?
original "Hard Disk 20" icon for Mac 512K (Score:1)
See page 41 of Apple's Hard Disk 20 manual [oldcrap.org].
For Apple's add-on software that made it work on the original Macintosh 512K, go here [macintoshrepository.org].
System 7 (Score:2)
It's more like the System 7 icon, but still unnecessarily skeumorphic.
Who is going to buy a Macbook and think that's what their internal storage looks like?
Make Icons Icons Again
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]
Save the icon (Score:2)
I mostly use custom icons for hard drives anyway.
I guess what I will do is copy/paste the existing hard drive icon to a folder's icon, then I will at least have a copy of the icon I can paste back to a hard drive if I want to.
Removable vs external (Score:2)
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What is a difference between removable and external?
Somebody above said Removables now have an Arrow (like "Ejectable") on them.