The irony of ending this string of pedantry with “petty and annoying.”

A way to rephrase your comment: "I don't care about the details."

The only reason I knew the icon looked amiss was because I saw it at 32x32 on the Apple store page and it looked bad so I inspected it. Looked worse, so I posted it.

You don't have to care.

Agree to disagree on his design skills/aesthetics.

Agree to agree on his politics. I had to unfollow him on Twitter.

Sure thing, I've been obsessed with iconography since OS X Cheetah.

https://dribbble.com/sdw

https://dribbble.com/mantia

https://dribbble.com/EliSchiff

https://dribbble.com/bdc

https://dribbble.com/grafera

Say that enough and you'll become a nihilist.

You can take it in two ways: it matters a lot because new designers don't seem to be being afforded the time to hone their craft as their senior cohorts, which points to all sorts of interesting ramifications for the field

Or, it speaks to the dangers of using agency talent, whose priorities and values may not align with the brand. Apple is world-renowned for their attention to detail and this could be the work of an intern/contractor.

Or, it's a goofy mistake that somehow made it into production.

Whichever, I found it interesting enough to post.

It is a "soft skill" these days and is one of the reasons why I still appreciate Eli Schiff as a design critic – he appreciates those pixel-perfect details and calls out brands who don't bother.

When I was teaching (college web design and frontend dev), I found it hard to elucidate the how and why of pixel-perfection. Businesses these days do not value putting pride into your work over getting something done below budget and before deadline. Until those priorities start shifting, I think we'll see fewer and fewer new designers worrying about these details and more designers working across many disciplines, not afforded the time to pixel push.

No joke. The icon looked a little muddy so I looked at the raw SVG and was very surprised at the lack of attention.

Circles should be circular.

The circles in each row should be aligned vertically.

When nesting rounded rectangles, the inner radius should be ~25% smaller than the surrounding radius otherwise you get the wonky look exhibited by the handles in the Mac Pro icon. These nested rectangles aren't even aligned properly.

Pixels should be placed on whole values. There are lots of spots where pixels are falling on half-values which cause the icon to look very blurry at small sizes. "Pixel-snapping" typically solves this automatically.

In general it's just shoddy icon work from the company (or agency) who popularized gorgeous OS iconography (OS X was the first OS to have 128x128 icons). Given that their flagship model just dropped, I'd expect them to be "all hands on deck" and knock out an icon that looked amazing at any size. This is not the case.

Yep, even at the icon size, you can see it was horribly built. Looks like someone at the agency threw it together in two minutes.

Seen at the top of:

https://www.apple.com/mac/