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Thomas Walichiewicz

I found myself agreeing with much of Nikita Prokopov’s post on Tahoe icons; macOS simply hasn’t kept up with the design strides made by the hardware team.

However, we need to stop treating the 1992 Macintosh HIG as the ultimate authority on interface design. It is merely a snapshot—albeit a brilliant one—of personal computing in a specific era. Dogmatic adherence to 30-year-old rules suggests two things:

  1. A lack of originality: You are relying on a safety blanket rather than generating new ideas.
  2. Stagnation: Like any form of fundamentalism, it stifles innovation and ignores the context of the modern world.
Hard to justify Tahoe icons