Farewell to a Classic: Goodbye to the Macintosh HD Hard Drive Icon, 2000–2025
Apple has rolled out a new developer beta build of macOS 26 Tahoe, featuring a notable change to a long-familiar icon. The iconic Macintosh HD hard drive icon, which for years depicted a spinning hard drive, has been replaced with a new design aimed to resemble a solid-state drive. Even though the internal SSD of your Mac is merely a set of chips soldered onto a circuit board, this artistic representation adds a fresh touch to your system.
Though the icon became less visible after macOS stopped displaying the internal disk on desktops by default, it remains an iconic symbol. Despite Apple shifting to SSDs as the primary storage medium years ago, the decision to update the icon now is curious, perhaps to preempt any 'icon failure.'
An Iconic Journey
The original hard drive icon made its debut in 2000 with Mac OS X, appearing in early developer betas. Over time, its design remained mostly untouched, except for a Retina display upgrade in 2012 and subtle design tweaks in 2014 with Mac OS X Yosemite. This change marked the Mac’s first shift away from realistic textures, in line with the new iOS 7 aesthetic.
The icon's classic look survived into the Apple Silicon-era Big Sur updates and even appeared in the initial macOS 26 Tahoe public beta. Alongside this change, icons for external drives, network shares, and removable disk images have also been revamped.
Other system icons drawn from the hard drive motif have also undergone transformations. Disk Utility’s icon now looks like a wrench tightening an Apple-branded bolt, and numerous icons in /System/Library/CoreServices have traded their old HDD designs for new SSD-like visuals.
Apple first ventured into SSD technology in 2008 with the MacBook Air. By the advent of 'Retina' Macs in the early 2010s, SSDs dominated as primary boot disks. All spinning hard drives vanished with the last Intel iMacs.
While the change is largely symbolic, as neither icon accurately mirrors a Mac’s actual SSD, the shift marks the end of an era. We bid farewell to the beloved Macintosh HD hard drive icon, nostalgic for its legacy even as we embrace the future of digital storage.
