Lil Finder Guy

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...

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.

>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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Blank Check, what a wonderful premise.

> 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Fingers crossed this is right!

At least they remembered where the dark and light colors go this time around[1].

[1]: https://512pixels.net/2025/06/wwdc25-macos-tahoe-breaks-deca...

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

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...

Still much better than Amazon's Peccy. Even the name is suspect.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90329525/amazon-peccy

If you see penis everywhere that's on you, unfortunately.

The Phinder Phallus if you will.

Fitting as Apple have been a complete bell end lately.

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?

Blank Check, what a wonderful premise.

> 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.

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.

Fingers crossed this is right!

At least they remembered where the dark and light colors go this time around[1].

[1]: https://512pixels.net/2025/06/wwdc25-macos-tahoe-breaks-deca...

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.

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.

Still much better than Amazon's Peccy. Even the name is suspect.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90329525/amazon-peccy

The Phinder Phallus if you will.

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

> 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.

If you see penis everywhere that's on you, unfortunately.

Fitting as Apple have been a complete bell end lately.

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?

> 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.

Who is it? What is it? Is it friend or foe? Has it arrived in peace, or is it plotting to corrupt our SSDs and fray our USB-C cables?

Little is known about Lil Finder Guy, which is not its official name (I think), that first appeared the same day Apple debuted the MacBook Neo. It has appeared in the corner of one TikTok post by Apple (oh yeah, Apple started posting on TikTok and it’s unhinged) and in screenshot apparently captured during a “Matcha Break with MacBook Neo” livestream on TikTok on Wednesday afternoon, but I haven’t been able to track down any other shots of the stream itself.

Screengrab from the “Matcha Break with MacBook Neo” livestream posted by m2macmini on X.

All I know about Lil Finder Guy is that it’s freakin’ adorable, assuming it means me no harm. And instead of doing literally anything productive or tending to my adult responsibilities like bills, taxes, or work, I have spent my weekend tumbling down the rabbit hole trying to build a life for this mysterious little creature despite knowing next to nothing about it.

Lil Finder Guy appearing in the top corner of a post by Apple on TikTok about the new MacBook Neo.

Google Gemini (aka the next Siri) has been helpful in modelling out the rest of its body from the single TikTok post. From there, I started generating what Lil Finder Guy might look like working, angry, running, jumping, laughing, and more. Of course, this is all abstraction stacked on abstraction at this point. I do not know if Lil Finder Guy can laugh, what it finds funny, or whether its short, knee-less legs are even capable of jumping.

But it went further, again I’m really avoiding a lot of adult responsibilities and putting all my hope and dreams into this Lil Finder, because I even found a way to generate a 3D model of Lil Finder Guy.

“The Findies” posted by Andreas Storm on Twitter

Where I and the rest of the internet take this from here remains to be seen. All I know is that Apple should definitely keep this Lil Finder around.

But no, I do not think this is the last we’ve seen of Lil Finder Guy…

Hacker Times

Hacker Times

Discussion

Discussion