I found a secret stash of gorgeous Apple hardware icons hidden inside my Mac

Buried inside a system bundle that almost nobody opens on purpose, I found a whole collection of high resolution icons of Apple hardware. Real ones. The polished, pixel perfect artwork Apple uses in Finder and System Settings, sitting there as loose files you can just, well, take.

Macs going back to the early 2000s, iPhones, iPads, iPods, Apple TV, the works.

The best part is you don't need to be a power user to get at them. No Terminal wizardry required, though I will show you a Terminal trick at the end for the impatient.

If you can use Go to Folder, you can do this.

Where Apple hides the icons

Just about everything lives in one long path:

To get there, open Finder, click the Go menu, and choose Go to Folder (or just press Shift Command G). Paste that path in, hit Return, and you land in a folder stuffed with hundreds of .icns files.

Switch the view to icon view and bump the icon size up so you can actually see what you are looking at. Most of what you will see first is the everyday system stuff, generic folder icons, disk icons, the alert badges, the burnable folder, and so on. Keep scrolling.

The ones worth digging for are named com.apple followed by the hardware. So com.apple.macbookpro.icns is a MacBook Pro, and the pattern holds for the iMac, Mac mini, Mac Pro, iPad, iPhone, iPod, and Apple TV. The collection goes all the way back to the Power Mac G4 tower, which means you get a little museum of Apple industrial design in a single folder.

That is the part that got me. Scrolling past the lamp neck iMac G4, the old towers, the click wheel iPods, it felt like flipping through a hardware yearbook. These are not lazy thumbnails either. They are the same source art Apple ships to represent your devices system wide, rendered at large sizes and looking crisp even when you blow them up. Somebody at Apple clearly cared about these, and most people will never know they exist.

How to actually save one

You can copy files out of this folder even though you cannot write new ones into it (more on that in a second). So grabbing an icon is easy.

The simplest move is to select an .icns file and copy it to your Desktop. Double click your copy and it opens in Preview, where you can see every size baked into the file. If you want a flat image instead of the icon file, use File, then Export, and save it as a PNG.

You now have that icon as an image at full resolution, ready to edit or reuse. This trick works on anything with a custom icon, not just the files in that hidden folder.

A heads up if you are on a newer Mac

On recent versions of macOS, Apple has been tidying up. A lot of these icons got consolidated into asset catalog files (the .car files you will spot in that same folder) and split off into sub bundles, so you may not find as many loose .icns files as Mac users did back in the day. Some hardware icons moved elsewhere entirely.

On top of that, the system volume is sealed and protected by SIP now, which means that folder is read only. You can copy icons out all day, but you cannot overwrite them in place, and honestly you should not try. If you want to get at the icons that are locked inside a .car catalog, a free tool called Asset Catalog Tinkerer opens those files and lets you export what is inside.

None of that changes the fun part. The artwork is still in there. You just occasionally have to work a little harder to reach it.

The Terminal shortcut for grabbing them all

If you would rather scoop up every hardware icon at once instead of clicking through them one by one, open Terminal and run this:

That makes a folder called AppleIcons on your Desktop and copies every matching icon into it, including any tucked away in those sub bundles. It reads only, so it cannot hurt anything. Two lines and you have the whole set.

But wait, there's more.

If your looking more for Mobile Devices such as iPhones, iPads, Apple Watches, and even some HomePods & Apple TVs. Here's where to look

if you want to grab all of these icons, copy and paste this command into Terminal

This will add all of the Mobile Devices icons to a folder on your desktop called MobileDevices

What you can actually do with them

Personally, I use them for custom folder and drive icons. Point your external SSD at the right Mac Pro icon and your desktop suddenly looks like an Apple keynote.

They are also great for labeling virtual machines, dressing up slide decks, or building a retro themed desktop.

I put the old iMac G4 icon on a folder full of scanned family photos from that era, and every time I open it I get a tiny hit of nostalgia. That is the kind of small, pointless, delightful thing your Mac can do once you know where to look.

Go dig around. Your Mac is hiding more than you think.