The debut of a new developer beta for macOS 26 Tahoe happens today at Apple, along with a giant makeover of a well-known icon. Thus, the old classic Macintosh HD hard drive icon, which for years was an image of an old spinning hard drive, has now been updated to present something which clearly tries to resemble a solid-state drive. Although an actual SSD in your Mac is far from looking like a few chips soldered on a circuit board, that can be overlooked.
With the new installations of macOS ceasing to show the internal disk on the desktop by default, a few years ago, the old Macintosh HD icon began to disappear from sight entirely. Furthermore, it has indeed been some time since Apple switched to SSDs for booting new Macs. The original hard drive icon was introduced in 2000, coinciding with Apple’s launch of the new look and feel of Mac OS Sequoia during the third of four public developer betas.
This classic Macintosh HD icon was mainly unchanged for well over a decade, although it was retina-upgraded along with the rest of the OS in 2012 and got a slight modification in Mac OS X Yosemite (10.10) in 2014. This design worked on the principle set out in the original design, but went for that rather softer tone and brushstrokes toward a less metallic finish. Those with a memory may recall that this was the very first redesign on the Mac in the iOS 7 era, when shedding any sort of pseudo-realistic textures became the mantra.
That icon version extended from the Big Sur Apple Silicon era redesign and, as recently as in the first public beta build of macOS 26 Tahoe, released by Apple last week. The new beta also refreshes the external drives icon, which is now coloured orange with a USB-C connector on top. The network share icon is blue with a globe on top, and the removable disk image comes in white color with an arrow on top.
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