I had a professor in college explain to us that we shouldn't even be colouring buttons, as it always ends poorly. That being said:
> In so many of these cases, I honestly can’t intuit why some menus have icons and others do not.
I understood this the first time I had to explain to a non-technical user how to get to a certain menu item. Fortunately whoever made the Wordpress admin dashboard nailed the design so icons are sufficiently visually distinct.
You can only have so many of them though, so you use icons to draw attention to the most important features from a non-power user's perspective.
Of course not everyone places them with sufficient care and I think that's what's lacking at Apple, but it's not like they're there purely for decoration.
> In so many of these cases, I honestly can’t intuit why some menus have icons and others do not.
I understood this the first time I had to explain to a non-technical user how to get to a certain menu item. Fortunately whoever made the Wordpress admin dashboard nailed the design so icons are sufficiently visually distinct.
You can only have so many of them though, so you use icons to draw attention to the most important features from a non-power user's perspective.
Of course not everyone places them with sufficient care and I think that's what's lacking at Apple, but it's not like they're there purely for decoration.