Something jumped out at me in the macOS Tahoe segment of the WWDC keynote today: the Finder icon is reversed.
You can see that in the image below. On the left is macOS Sequoia, and on the right is macOS Tahoe:
I know I am going to sound old and fussy, but Apple needs to roll this back.
Some History
The Finder logo has changed over the years, but the dark side has been on the left forever. Here it is on the boot screen on System 7.5.3, which shipped in 1996, an early version of the logo in color:
And in the About This Computer screen in Mac OS 8:
This same basic design survived the move to Mac OS X, as can be seen here in the Public Beta from 2000. The only real change was the addition of a little sheen to make it fit in better with the Aqua user interface:
Here you can see it in Mac OS X Panther which shipped three years later:
The Finder then transitioned to the Retina era in 2012 with OS X Lion:
The logo was updated with the redesign that was ushered in with OS X Yosemite in 2014, then tweaked again for macOS Big Sur in 2020:
A Solution
The Big Sur Finder icon has been with us ever since,1 and I hope Apple reverses course here. I understand that the new icon is meant to be in sync with the new Liquid Glass user interface, but some things are just tradition.
For kicks, I ran the current Finder icon through Apple’s new Icon Composer app, and I think it looks pretty good with Liquid Glass, even in the clear and tinted modes:
This has been filed with Apple as Feedback FB17840162. Yes, seriously.
Update: Apple fixed this in Tahoe Developer Beta 2.