That version of the icon persisted through the Apple Silicon-era Big Sur redesign and was still with us in the first public beta build for macOS 26 Tahoe that Apple released last week. The new beta also updates the icons for external drives (orange, with a USB-C connector on top), network shares (blue, with a globe on top), and removable disk images (white, with an arrow on top).
All of the system’s disk icons get an update in the latest macOS 26 Tahoe developer beta.
Credit:
Apple/Andrew Cunningham
Other icons that reused or riffed on the old hard drive icon have also been changed. Disk Utility now looks like a wrench tightening an Apple-branded white bolt, for some reason, and drive icons within Disk Utility also have the new SSD-esque icon. Installer apps use the new icon instead of the old one. Navigate to the /System/Library/CoreServices folder where many of the built-in operating system icons live, and you can see a bunch of others that exchange the old HDD icon for the new SSD.
Apple first offered a Mac with an SSD in 2008, when the original MacBook Air came out. By the time “Retina” Macs began arriving in the early 2010s, SSDs had become the primary boot disk for most of them; laptops tended to be all-SSD, while desktops could be configured with an SSD or a hybrid Fusion Drive that used an SSD as boot media and an HDD for mass storage. Apple stopped shipping spinning hard drives entirely when the last of the Intel iMacs went away.
This doesn’t actually matter much. The old icon didn’t look much like the SSD in your Mac, and the new one doesn’t really look like the SSD in your Mac either. But we didn’t want to let the old icon’s passing go unremarked. So, thanks for the memories, Macintosh HD hard drive icon! Keep on spinning, wherever you are.
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