Theme 1 – Uniform squircle icons hurt visual distinctiveness
"Hard agree! Not only is it less fun and less visually appealing to me, I think forcing the uniform squircle everywhere makes it harder (than it used to be) to distinguish one app from another by icon alone." — hoistbypetard
"In fact the HIG used to explicitly say so with clear examples proving it." — boxed
"and which was backed by scientific evidence from controlled trials and human factors and psychology." — 1over137
Theme 2 – Apple’s top‑down design enforcement & leadership shift
"Tahoe was such a huge mess, but I'm hopeful that the new CEO will turn things around and bring things back to normal." — altern8
"Alan Dye was brought in during the Jony Ive era when they were launching the first Apple Watch... Then a few months after Dye himself announced Liquid Glass at WWDC last year, he blindsided Apple by accepting a poaching offer from Meta, seemingly because Zuck isn't aware of how untalented the guy is. Now Stephen Lemay is in charge, who's been at Apple for many years and actually knows stuff about software design." — hbn
Theme 3 – Accessibility / UX concerns around icon shapes (Vision OS)
"They found having round icons made people look at the center, rather than the edges and corners. Since the UX relies entirely on where the user is looking, this made it more reliable." — al_borland
"The thing which kills me, is that with entirety of the State of California's Gazetteer to pull from, Apple didn't pull a page from Android and use an alphabetically ordered naming scheme so that folks could determine ordering of versions." — WillAdams
Theme 4 – Nostalgia for diverse, expressive icons & desire for customization
"These are very nice (especially the Betelgeuse set), but -- unless this is just chance from the ones displayed -- don't they mostly all have the same silhouette, a rounded rectangle? While the Betelgeuse ones have more flair and are more differentiable from each other, an excellent thing, locking them in a box is the same kind of jail that this article is about." — vintagedave
"People started hating when their computers made sound around the time smartphones became big. This is because companies can not be trusted with the ability to make attention grabbing sounds." — al_borland