Apple's making a lot of design tweaks for OS X Yosemite — its desktop operating system's next big release — and one of the biggest is the system font, which it'll change for the first time since OS X was released. Yosemite changes the font from Lucida Grande to something from the famous Helvetica Neue family, which lends to the thin and clean design style that Apple's been favoring lately. When Yosemite is released next fall, you'll start seeing it pretty much everywhere across the OS, from the menu bar to app windows.





Helvetica Neue also debuted as the iPhone and iPad's system font in iOS 7 last year. With Apple placing a big focus on consistency between platforms today, it makes plenty of sense to see it cross over to the desktop. Perhaps more importantly though, Apple's touting the change as a boon for legibility. It says that the new font looks great on high-definition displays — and with Retina screens making their way from iOS devices to the Mac, Apple will soon need a font that looks its best even on close examination.

Aaron Souppouris contributed to this report.