Daring Fireball: Thoughts and Observations Regarding Apple Creator Studio
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Thoughts and Observations Regarding Apple Creator Studio
Saturday, 17 January 2026
Let’s Just Get It Out of the Way and Talk About the New Icons First, but Let’s Also Use the Icons as a Proxy for Talking About the Broader Software Design Problems at Apple
There’s a lot of hate for the new app icons of the entire Creator Studio suite, but while I think the icons are tragically simplistic, I think the hate is misplaced.
The problem isn’t with these icons in and of themselves. The problem is with the rules Apple has imposed for Liquid Glass app icons, along with their own style guidelines for how to comply with those rules. Given Apple’s own self-imposed constraints for how icons must look (with the mandatory squircle) and how Apple has decided its own app icons should look (a look which can best be described as crude), I actually think the icons in the Creator Studio are pretty good, relatively speaking. But that’s like saying one group of kids has pretty good haircuts, relatively speaking, at a summer camp where the rule is that the kids all cut each others’ hair using only fingernail clippers.
The best take on these icons is this zinger from Héliographe:
If you put the Apple icons in reverse it looks like the portfolio<br>of someone getting really really good at icon design.
Devastating. Whatever you think of this new 2026 icon for Pages, you can’t seriously argue that it’s much worse — or really all that different — from the previous one. But go back in time and each previous Pages icon had more detail and looked cooler. And then you get back to the original Pages icon and that one clearly belongs in the App Icon Hall of Fame.
At some point in the previous decade, I had a product briefing with Jony Ive where we were discussing some just-announced new device that largely looked like the previous generation of the same device. I honestly don’t remember if it was an iPhone, an Apple Watch, or a MacBook. It doesn’t matter. What Ive told me is that Apple didn’t change things just for the sake of changing them. That Apple was insistent on only changing things if the change made things better. And that this was difficult, at times, because the urge to do something that looks new and different is strong, especially in tech. “New” shows that you’re doing something. “The same” is boring. What’s difficult is embracing the fact that boring can be good, especially if the alternative is different-but-worse, or even just different-but-not-better. You need confidence to ship something new that looks like the old version, because you know it’s still the best design. You need confidence to trust yourself to know the difference between familiarity (which is comforting) and complacency (which is how winners become losers).
Apple’s hardware designs remain incredibly confident. An M5 MacBook Pro looks like an M1 MacBook Pro, and really hasn’t changed much in the last decade other than getting thinner. An iPhone 17 Pro looks a lot like an iPhone 12 Pro and has only evolved in small ways since the iPhone X in 2017. A brand-new Series 11 Apple Watch is very hard to distinguish at a glance from a Series 0 Apple Watch from 2015. This is not a complaint, this is a compliment. These hardware designs do not need to change because they’re excellent. Iconic, dare I say.
This is why Apple’s software UI designs are the target of so much scorn and criticism right now, and Apple’s hardware designs are not.1 Yes, it’s human nature that people love to complain. But Apple’s current work isn’t receiving criticism in anything close to equal measures. Apple’s hardware is hardly the subject of any criticism at all. Not the way it looks, not the way it performs. Apple’s software design, on the other hand, is the subject of withering criticism. It’s not (just) about new features having bad designs. It’s about existing, decades-old features being made so obviously worse. I know a lot of talented UI designers and a lot of insightful UI critics. All of them agree that MacOS’s UI has gotten drastically worse over the last 10 years, in ways that seem so obviously worse that it boggles the mind how it happened.
Take a few minutes and go peruse Stephen Hackett’s extensive MacOS Screenshot Library at 512 Pixels, where he’s assembled copious screenshots from every version of MacOS going back to the Mac OS X Public Beta from October 2000.2 Take a look in particular at MacOS 10.11 El Capitan from 2015, exactly a decade ago. It doesn’t look old compared to MacOS 26 Tahoe. It just looks better, in every single way. I can’t think of one single thing about MacOS 26 that looks better than MacOS 10.11 from 2015, and I can quickly...