macOS 26 Tahoe's Dead Canary Utility App Icons

Summary

MacOS 26 Tahoe’s Dead Canary Utility App Icons Monday, 25 August 2025 MacOS has shipped with a collection of “utility” apps since the prehistoric era of classic Mac OS. A good rule of thumb what makes an app a “utility” is that it’s a tool for doing something about your computer. Ever since Mac OS X 10.0, most of these apps have been neatly filed away in /Applications/Utilities/. Others — some because they’re obscure (e.g. Ticket Viewer), some because they’re effectively deprecated (e.g. DVD Player, whose copyright date in MacOS 15 Sequoia is 2019), and some because they present themselves, when launched, not as apps but as system-level features (e.g. About This Mac) — are tucked away in /System/Library/CoreServices/ or /System/Library/CoreServices/Applications/. Basic Apple Guy posted a screenshot to Mastodon comparing the current MacOS 15 icons for four of these utilities (Disk Utility, Expansion Slot Utility, Wireless Diagnostics, and AppleScript Utility) to their new icons in MacOS 26 Tahoe, beta 7 (click to enlarge for detail): I don’t think the old icons for these apps from MacOS 15 were particularly good — Apple has mostly lost its “icons look cool” game. But the new ones in MacOS 26 Tahoe are objectively terrible. The only one of this bunch that’s maybe sort of OK is Wireless Diagnostics. They all look like placeholder icons made by a developer who would be the first to admit that they’re not an artist. Disk Utility, which is an important app, doesn’t even look like it involves a disk. That icon just says “Fix something Apple related.” On an Apple computer, that could mean anything. These new icons all use the same “wrench” motif, which is a lazy, limiting concept to start with. Tahoe, at the system level, enforces a squircle shape on all application icons. Apps that haven’t been updated with Tahoe-compliant everything-fits-in-a-squircle icons are put in “squircle jail” — their non-Tahoe-compliant icons are shrunk and placed atop a drab gray Tahoe squircle b...