RIP Mickey Mouse glove: macOS Tahoe has a new set of cursors

There were some big new features for Mac owners to get excited about when Apple announced macOS Tahoe at the start of this week. But the little details of the company’s OS updates are sometimes even more impactful, and there’s one change that will be visible almost all the time you’re using your Mac: Apple has redesigned the cursors.

As beta testers on social media have spotted, the cutesy white gloved hand, complete with a visible cuff and vents on the back, has been replaced by a more generic white hand which could be gloved or bare; the arrow pointer has been replaced by a slightly more rounded arrow that’s otherwise the same; and the window width adjuster icon, which was previously a double-headed horizontal arrow, has been replaced by a pair of triangles with a little gap between them.

These changes weren’t mentioned during the keynote, and aren’t obvious from a glance at the preview page on Apple’s website. All the static screenshots have been captured without cursors (as is standard), and cursors are difficult to spot in the videos too: there are a few appearances of the text cursor, which is now blue in Spotlight but otherwise is unchanged, two of the arrow pointer (but not zoomed in enough to see the change), and none at all of the hand pointer.

Perhaps Apple kept quiet about the redesign because it doesn’t want to bring unnecessary attention. As much as these seem like small changes, the hand pointer in particular will be missed: it was a characterful piece of screen furniture that set the Mac apart from Windows and other systems. With the new designs, the Mac may start to feel more generic and more corporate.

But it’s worth remembering that macOS Tahoe is still at the beta stage, and a very early part of it at that: there’s plenty of time of things to change ahead of the public launch in the fall. If enough beta testers give negative feedback about the removal of the Mickey Mouse hand pointer, perhaps Apple will relent and bring it back.