alt.hn

3/8/2026 at 8:43:19 PM

Lil Finder Guy

 https://basicappleguy.com/basicappleblog/lil-finder-guy

by frizlab

3/8/2026 at 9:53:56 PM

It's saddening to me how the all the Mac OS X icons have slowly lost their definition and uniqueness over the years - this twee figurine is just the cherry on the excrement sundae. It doesn't even have the smile crossing both sides.

by GaryBluto

3/9/2026 at 4:57:44 PM

It also seems to forget that the Finder icon is supposed to be a person looking at a screen, the face being a combination of the two. This is more like a simplified Picasso.

by al_borland

3/8/2026 at 11:21:50 PM

I can understand your general point, but how can you argue that this in particular isn't unique/cute whatever?

by achierius

3/8/2026 at 11:38:26 PM

> but how can you argue that this in particular isn't unique/cute whatever?

The perceived cuteness was partially what I was complaining about. It's just a bad approximation of the finder icon on a generic "chibi" body.

by GaryBluto

3/8/2026 at 9:20:17 PM

>I do not think this is the last we’ve seen of Lil Finder Guy…

https://www.macrumors.com/guide/siri-chatbot/

> Apple is planning to make visual design changes. It's not quite clear what that will entail, but for the upcoming table-top robot that's in the works, Apple has tested an animated version of Siri that looks similar to the Mac's Finder logo.

by krackers

3/8/2026 at 11:11:44 PM

Fingers crossed this is right!

by SpyCoder77

3/8/2026 at 9:37:15 PM

I learned about apples tiktok via this post and I must confess as an old person, in terms of brands reaching young people, I find the content pretty cool (usually I either don't understand it or think it's lame): https://www.tiktok.com/@apple

by neom

3/8/2026 at 9:45:22 PM

I think what makes them work (for me too!) is that they're not simply random for the sake of being random. They're a oddball but there's clearly a shared theme/style and they're well-executed.

I'm not sure I'm interested in anything they're selling, but after what felt like 15 years of "young California hipster", I think this style catches my attention at least somewhat.

by Waterluvian

3/9/2026 at 5:08:43 AM

I remember reading somewhere that to target gen-z/alpha advertising shouldn't be direct or in your face but instead present things in an "organic" way that makes it seem cool, without the appearance of trying too hard to sell you something.

I guess the target audience they're going for is people who already have iPhones/iPads but would have bought a chromebook for school instead. This seems to be a reversal from their previous "what's a computer"-style ads that tried to sell iPads as the replacement for personal computing.

by krackers

3/9/2026 at 7:34:00 AM

> I remember reading somewhere that to target gen-z/alpha advertising shouldn't be direct or in your face but instead present things in an "organic" way that makes it seem cool, without the appearance of trying too hard to sell you something.

On one hand, wasn't that the premise of the "iPod people" ads?

On the other thand... you're right to say that this is _very_ indirect. In an internet saturated with advertising, I guess there's nothing like just making entiretainment.

by nxobject

3/9/2026 at 1:53:25 AM

To me this looks 100% like what you used to see on Tumblr. Just pure random art with a theme. The difference is that back then it used to be gifs.

by halapro

3/9/2026 at 12:55:09 AM

Looks like Apple decided they need their own version of the Android mascot. Theirs is definitely a little more unsettling than the little droid guy though.

by gumby271

3/9/2026 at 3:02:29 AM

My first thought: a rather strange copy of the en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pillsbury_Doughboy

Google's Android robot has a much better design, IMHO. And I remember the Amazon box version of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danbo_(character) and Arielle Nadel's photo stories "365 Days of Danbo" with it. Can't imagine that with the Apple Dough boy..

by jcynix

3/9/2026 at 5:04:03 AM

Android mascot is known as bugdroid - see https://www.androidpolice.com/every-android-bugdroid-ever/

The shape of the bugdroid changed a couple of years ago - arms became asymmetric - narrow near the shoulder, widening at the hand, among other changes.

by canucker2016

3/8/2026 at 10:19:16 PM

Give the response this has had in the Mac community I really hope they’re smart enough to release a little playset.

It would be great merch. I know that’s not really an Apple thing but make an exception.

Tim Cook loves grubbing money.

by MBCook

3/9/2026 at 1:35:30 PM

> oh yeah, Apple started posting on TikTok and it’s unhinged

I had to see for myself and... yeah. 12 videos so far and only 1-2 make any sense at all.

by joshstrange

3/9/2026 at 5:01:32 PM

It's like they told some interns to make a TikTok account that was the end of the direction or oversight.

by al_borland

3/8/2026 at 10:48:43 PM

Mr.Macintosh?

by paradox460

3/9/2026 at 12:10:38 AM

Blank Check, what a wonderful premise.

by NetOpWibby

3/9/2026 at 12:08:28 AM

Finder guy doesn’t technically make sense without the mouth reaching the side profile face.

I.e., only one of the two faces has a mouth.

by dangus

3/8/2026 at 10:42:10 PM

Clicked the link hoping for something that might improve Spotlight :/

by hrdwdmrbl

3/9/2026 at 5:06:50 AM

Have you tried raycast? I haven't looked back in years.

by steve_adams_86

3/9/2026 at 1:19:09 PM

IIRC it still uses Spotlight indexing under the hood

by hrdwdmrbl

3/8/2026 at 9:38:38 PM

Honestly, who cares about anything AI-related that Apple does? Their head of MLX team just quit after months of threatening to leave due to MLX not being Apple's priority. Their Siri is a joke even Samsung Bixby works better than that. They switch between AI providers (OpenAI → Google) like you can "just change the LLM bro", and their M-series hardware is held back by lack of quality software and compute despite people literally begging them to improve it.

I was looking forward to upgrade my M1 Pro to M5 Max (128GB) until Awni (MLX head) quit. The new team isn't that responsive on X, and bugs keep getting piled up like they don't care if MLX is actually used in practice. After 3 years they still don't have a decent MLX server. Wanna try Qwen3.5? You can't use mlx_server because Qwen is a VLM. For that you must use MLX-VLM but that is not official and has tons of bugs. Apple refuses to open-source ANE source code even to their own MLX team.

by behnamoh

3/8/2026 at 9:53:07 PM

> They switch between AI providers (OpenAI → Google) like you can "just change the LLM bro"

You can. They’re not the same, but you can absolutely “just switch the LLM, bro,” and most consumers would never notice a difference.

As for the rest: this is about the future, not the present. All of your comments about the present are thus not particularly relevant, imho.

by borski

3/8/2026 at 10:25:04 PM

[flagged]

by behnamoh

3/8/2026 at 10:26:52 PM

I have built plenty. Some of them even make me money.

I never said LLMs didn’t have their own quirks. You can mitigate for those quirks.

You can just switch the models.

It’s just not as simple as a one-line change. But that isn’t what we were talking about.

by borski

3/8/2026 at 11:15:00 PM

Agreed. I have also built many LLM apps, and they aren't one line changes, but it is relatively simple to switch the model.

by SpyCoder77

3/8/2026 at 11:33:36 PM

2026: Apple chose the tip of a penis as a mascot.

Say hello to your new companion!

https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5e949a92e17d55...

by rvnx

3/8/2026 at 11:45:18 PM

The Phinder Phallus if you will.

by GaryBluto

3/9/2026 at 1:15:36 AM

Fitting as Apple have been a complete bell end lately.

by bitwize

3/9/2026 at 1:34:56 AM

Not the first time something Apple did was slightly phallic --- OS X El Capitan (now 10 years ago!) had a slightly unfortunate slogan:

https://techcrunch.com/2016/02/25/more-to-love-with-every-di...

As an aside, your link leads to an image/webp served with a .jpeg extension. WTF?

by userbinator