> 4. The app launcher is gone, and replaced by Spotlight, which is worse.

Do you mean the Launchpad? (I've never used it; but always use Spotlight to launch apps.)

The biggest surprise to me from this whole beta period is that a significant number of people used Launchpad. I have absolutely zero idea why when Spotlight has existed for more than 20 years. Why would you ever want to click and page through a giant iPhone screen on a desktop/laptop computer?

If you have multiple ways to do something on a computer/phone, some relatively large percentage of people will fumble around until they figure out a way to do it - and then do it that way forever.

So if someone accidentally triggered Launchpad and realized they could see their apps, they might use that forever (not knowing you can put your Applications folder in your Dock and use it as a start menu lol).

they've had a launch-pad-ey thing forever, I remember when our school lab had Mac IIs and Performas, and there was some simplified UI on top of finder which basically was all your apps in giant rectangular icons. I forget what it was called though.

It was called At Ease (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_Ease).

I’m surprised to find out it was itself an Apple product; I had always assumed it was a third-party shell, akin to Norton Desktop for Windows 3.1.

I remember seeing my work colleague drag the applications folder to the dock for quick access, this was before the modern launchpad, and before I even started using macs.

Or, equally, they might never discover the advantages of Launchpad and always use inferior alternatives :)

> not knowing you can put your Applications folder in your Dock and use it as a start menu

Doesn't work for me (Sequoia 15.4)

I have it on the side of the bar near the trashcan, and set it to open - has worked for ages and works in Sequoia 15.6.1

Because I vaguely remember that one icon I use every other month, but can't recall the name. The icons are also ordered by installation time, so it's easy to jump to the most recent ones.

I use it rarely, but sometimes I'm happy it's there.

Exactly this. Most of the time I use spotlight like everyone else.

> The icons are also ordered by installation time, so it's easy to jump to the most recent ones.

If I had this need, it wouldn’t even occur to me to solve it with Launchpad; I would just go to /Applications in Finder and sort by “Date Added”. (Which is a non-default column, but a very helpful one, so the series of gestures to enable it for a given folder is almost reflexive to me now.)

That only really works if you have a totally flat Applications hierarchy. Even by default, macOS creates a "Utilities" subfolder.

That's: 1 get the menu, 2 Finder, 3 go to applications, 4 View > Show View Options, 5 sort by popup, 6 choose date added, 7 actually look for the app.

Compared to: 1 - 4-finger pinch, 2 look for the app.

I always forget that Launchpad even exists. I guess it doesn't now. I suppose it might be helpful if you just know "I need that app that looks like X" and don't actually recall the first two letters of the app's name.

Lol same. Wasn't there something like it in System 7 that also got deprecated. I think back then it was called "Launcher" ... https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/Launcher

Launching seems easy enough from Finder but you never know about innovation.

Shocking as it is, search based UIs are really despised by some people (me).

I greatly prefer visual/spatial browsing

It's not the mode so much as the comparative efficiency. In a handful of keystrokes you can launch a commonly used app in under a second. Any type of visual browsing mode is going to take an order of magnitude more time/effort.

For people who never work with things like terminals, sure. For fellow devs, it's an unusual choice unless they routinely cycle through irregularly used apps w/ hard to remember names.

I click one icon, then another. It takes say 2s. Typing two letters and pressing enter would take 10x faster, so 0.2s. Given that I delegated work to AI agents, that’s 1.8s less of waiting :))

As a fellow dev, command line shit is a pain in the ass sometimes. I grew up as a Windows kid, visual browsing for stuff is sometimes the only way to fly. I absolutely loathe the amount of brute-force memorization that is required to operate a command-line efficiently. It took YEARS to memorize simple linux shit

Everyone talks about how CLI is supposedly way more efficient. It is way more efficient to THEM. And now we are stuck in a hell where a good deal of functionality is only accessible if you want and are able to memorize the arcane nonsense that are command names, or the design-by-committee naming choices of moronic PMs who can't stop lapping up whatever bullshit marketing tells them to

> I absolutely loathe the amount of brute-force memorization that is required to operate a command-line efficiently. It took YEARS to memorize simple linux shit

Not to invalidate your experience, but you shouldn’t need to memorize too much to use the common command line tools (although it does always help to have more experience using them).

I recommend always keeping a second terminal session open, purely for referencing man pages. You should be able to see most options easily, or be able to grep for the instructions you need.

The tight integration between documentation within the CLI, coupled to the exact software version you have installed, helps immensely when invoking CLI tools.

For the common linux tooling, found in most distros (e.g. coreutils or common busybox ops) the documentation in man pages is quite excellent.

While I think man pages are perfectly fine as documentation, the terminal interface for accessing them is awful (more mysterious keypresses or incantations to memorize if you want to do anything more than scroll), and visually I have always found them very difficult to scan visually, particularly if I wasn't sure of the exact wording for the task I needed, or if I am thinking in a different vocabulary. Plus theres the whole wall-of-text thing that makes me kind of instinctively bounce out.

A lot of them also lack sufficient (or any) examples, which are the things I need to see to learn. Making sense of the their sometimes (and seemingly intentionally) obtuse wording when I'm trying to do something I'm not already familiar with makes them a lot harder to parse than they need to be.

And many of the commands are extremely arbitrary. `cd` (change directory) very well could have been `mf` (move folder). `del` in DOS is `rm` in Linux. `move` vs `mv`, `copy` vs `cp`, etc etc. There's no common orthodoxy. If you are not well versed in the history of this stuff its all gobbledygook.

LLMs have been great in this regard, as they can supply those missing examples and then explain to me exactly what it is doing, oftentimes worded more clearly than the original documentation. And they can help me string together whole sequences.

So a TL;DR of your comment is that you just have to learn / memorize to use things. That applies to everything, not just what you are discussing here.

If you only use 'cd', 'mv', 'rm', and 'ln', then really, there is not much to learn. Perhaps the '-rf' option to 'rm', which is how you delete directories (that are not empty). You complained about the naming, but 'mv' requires fewer keystrokes than 'move', and once you know that 'mv' = move, 'rm' = remove, and so on, then what is the issue? It makes sense. DOS had just as "arbitrary" names: 'del' instead of 'rm', for example. The UNIX versions are deliberately short for efficiency, and once you learn them, they are universal.

Man pages are fine. Just press '/' to search by string or regex, and 'n' for next match. They are also consistent: if you want a particular section, you search for it. But it is important to remember that man pages are reference material, not tutorials. If you want quick examples, try https://tldr.sh, https://cheat.sh, or another alternative.

If this is difficult, or you simply do not want to learn it, that is fine: use what works for you. But if you are a programmer, you are going to be learning tools constantly, and the core UNIX utilities are among the simplest. Once learned, they do not change. Personally, I have not had to learn anything new about them since I was 13. I am 31 now. You learn once, and you use forever.

That said, there are real examples of arcane tools. 'ffmpeg' and 'rsync' have some of the most obscure command-line options I have ever seen, which is why I keep bash aliases and functions for the things I do often. That is how you make your life easier as a programmer: learn the fundamentals, then abstract the complexity where it makes sense.

TL;DR: Learning is not optional. Whether it is GNU/POSIX utilities, GUIs, wizards, or even LLMs, you still have to learn them. Man pages are reference material, not tutorials. Learn the basics once, and you are set for life.

> ffmpeg' and 'rsync' have some of the most obscure command-line options I have ever seen,

These are power tools, meanings they set out to solve one problem quite extensively. They’re not really meant to use as is (just like git), best is to write some alias or functions as a wrapper (or memorize the set of flags you use most).

And that is what I said I did. :P

Incidentally, there's a TL;DR app as an alternative to man [0] that just gives you the most common examples/use cases for any command. Quite useful.

[0] `brew install tealdeer`, then invoke with e.g. `tldr chown`.

I don't think you fully understood my comment.

  > Man pages are fine. Just press '/' to search by string or regex, and 'n' for next match. They are also consistent: if you want a particular section, you search for it. But it is important to remember that man pages are reference material, not tutorials.

You need to step outside your own shoes and approach these from the perspective of someone who is new. Yes you have to learn things, that is obvious.

But not everyone gets the chance to do that before they are dropped in a situation where the knowledge is needed. Up until a few years ago (before LLMs) if that was your case and you didnt know how to articulate what you wanted to google (or a teammate), you were fucked.

Like with VI or with emacs. It's sooooooo easy to screw things up in a big way. Better hope you remembered to type shift-colon-Q-exclamation instead of shift-colon-W-Q!

Please, tell me how that makes any sense to anyone without a background in *nix stuff.

I did not grow up in the environment where the above incantations had any context. It was literally a bunch of gobbledygook that made no sense. Why "write" instead of "save"? Why 'quit' instead of 'exit'? In fact I had VI dropped on me quite suddenly for a job, that was a real trial by fire, and I remember this well. (And yes I can operate VI quite fine now, thank you)

Yeah but for example if you are new to yet(tm) another JavaScript framework, you will have the same issues at any workplace. I mention this because these days there are millions of new ones.

I have not worked with many things they require of me either. Before I apply, I either have to learn the very basics, or I will have a hard time, unless they do not mind me not knowing but learning fast.

It isn't always a job. Sometimes it's just tinkering. Sometimes it's grandma trying to make sense of the Ubuntu linux install her grandson just replaced an old virus-laden version of windows with. Or the unfortunate retail worker on the phone with support staff because her POS terminal can only boot into single-user mode. Or (and I have experience with this one) an account manager at a customer install site trying to fix a bad update.

You wouldn't if you are a software engineer or some other power user. The sad fact is Apple knows that the majority of macOS users are accustomed to an iPhone-like workflow, which is swipe-centric, not keyboard-centric.

Then why are they removing it?

> click and page through a giant iPhone screen

1. Launchpad filters based on what you type. You don't have to page through things 2. As soon as you type anything, the first hit is selected and the return key launches it 3. Launchpad shows nothing but apps. As an app launcher, it's fantastic.

If Launchpad is gone I'm going to be sad.

Launchpad is not actually gone: it's now a sub-unit of Spotlight.

I still have an M1 Macbook Pro with touch strip, and my Launchpad touch strip button still works, bringing up Spotlight but with a predicate that makes it search only ./Applications and ~/Applications.

That's not Launchpad; it's inferior in many ways.

Could you elaborate on the ways in which it is inferior? I haven't found any yet, and I'd like to get the most out of my Mac.

I upgraded a couple days ago, and so far so good. It seems to work fine for my purposes at least. My assigned keyboard shortcut continues to work, even.

My sentiments exactly

Launchpad is an easy gesture with the trackpad (pinch with thumb and three fingers), then type to filter and return to launch. I got used to it for stuff I don't keep in the dock (which is a lot, since I have the dock on the side and only a few things in it).

I suppose Spotlight is OK as a substitute: COMMAND-SPACE, then type to filter and return to launch. It's a little more clunky (as the search results take a few milliseconds to be assembled) but it'll work.

What feels breaking there is when you pinch to open launchpad you are not on home row, so typing to filter is inferior to swiping and clicking large targets.

Cmd+space to open spotlight already worked and typing was the best option for that use case.

I do like the new spotlight experience but this feels like losing a gesture, and it does not spark joy scrolling through the app list.

I just tried it. The gesture you mentioned now opens the spotlight application search and there is no delay.

I use it when I can't remember the name of an app, or when I've first installed an app and it's not indexed yet.

the app doesn't appear in spotlight until it's indexed.

also spotlight hogs resources indexing stuff all the time, completely pointless when you just want a list of apps

What if you forgot the name of the app?

What if you rely on groupings to remember what you have installed for a given activity?

What if you want a quick visual overview of what is available to you?

What if you like or even prefer launchpad?

What if you install tons of tiny little apps that have a specific, if infrequently used, purpose?

What if you enjoy a little app gardening?

What if you don't like command-prompt style interactions?

What if you see value in having more than one way to do something?

What if you have 20+ years of muscle memory established?

What if the only thing you know prior is how to use your iphone?

And on another note, what is it with tech people lacking the ability to see how other types of people may want to use the hardware they paid for with their hard earned dollars? I am so sick of this awful perspective of, "everybody in the world must be exactly like me"

I don't use Launchpad but I can say, for me, Spotlight sucks! It decides at random times not to complete. I have it set to show apps only. I don't want it to find other things. But quite often I'll press Cmd-Space and type something and it won't find it. For example I just tried "pho" and it did not show Photoshop (which is on my system) but did show stuff completely unrelated to apps and I double checked, I only have apps selected in the Spotlight Search Results section in settings.

This is a uniquely new-macOS issue. Spotlight has never worked well since the big redesign in 10.10. In the snow leopard days it was predictable and seemed to be ordered by frequency of use. (There were occasional issues where the entire launchservices DB got messed up, but this can be fixed with an lsregister reset without reindexing all of the files).

This is a bug. The applications need to be reindexed. Happened to me on my work laptop and personal one

Schrödinger's Spotlight: always indexing and hogging your CPU, never quite indexing everything properly.

Because Spotlight seems to fall over regularly and not find files. Earlier this year it stopped finding applications and I had to run some shell command to delete it's cache and recreate it.

You don't have to click: Launchpad is available via an unmodified F4, so it's a single button press to bring up instantly, no matter what you're doing.

You don't have to "page through a giant iPhone screen", you can type and select. I used to use it all the time, without ever reaching for the mouse to do so.

Launchpad also let you change the order of app icons and group them into pages and folders; I don't think the new system lets you do any of these things.

Launchpad was focussed on a single task: launching an app. If I need to launch an app, I know I need to 99.9% of the time (I'm hedging; it's probably 100%), so there's no benefit showing me documents, web pages, and god-knows-what-else at the same time.

I nearly forgot: while I was testing Tahoe, I had a situation in which some apps just did not show up when I typed. They were in the list, they just got filtered out incorrectly. I've no idea if this was a bug or not; I'll see when I upgrade to the final release.

> so there's no benefit showing me documents, web pages, and god-knows-what-else at the same time.

I always just disabled these from Spotlight. If I want to search for files I use the search bar in Finder.

Interesting. I've never had any issues using Spotlight to search/open apps. For your use case unmodified F4 will bring up Spotlight now where you can type. If you want more precision unmodified F4 followed by CMD+1 will allow you to search only apps.

> For your use case unmodified F4 will bring up Spotlight now where you can type.

Yes, this is what I've been doing during the beta, and it's far less useful than Launchpad IME so far.

> If you want more precision unmodified F4 followed by CMD+1 will allow you to search only apps.

It looks like I had previously done so, and now the setting is 'stuck'. I.e. it's the default view — I can still go 'up' to search across stuff, but F4 takes me to an app launcher by default, so that's one drawback eliminated (thanks).

As an aside, I've learnt just now while testing this that F4 has an awkward asymmetrical input buffer. You can open+close instantly with two quick presses, but the same does not work to close+open. I'm not really complaining so much about this, just mentioning it!

I'm not sure what you mean by an unmodified F4, as I have a spotlight key that turns into F4 with a modifier.

The spotlight apps view is available for binding a keyboard shortcut directly. Maybe yours became bound to the spotlight shortcut?

F4 on my Macbook Pro brings up Spotlight, not Launchpad.

But, bringing up Spotlight, clicking backspace, then clicking on the Applications icon brings you basically Launchpad.

They've mushed them together, but there seem to be three states: Spotlight with typing pre-filled, Spotlight bare with some additional icon options, and then Launchpad, which is more Spotlight than I remember it being.

> F4 on my Macbook Pro brings up Spotlight, not Launchpad.

Unless there's some weird setting, that's only in Tahoe. At the very least, it's only enforced in Tahoe; I was using F4 to bring up Launchpad in Sequoia, as I have in every version of MacOS for a long time.

Spotlight indexing (mediaanalysisd, mds_stores) has a bad habit of running so aggressively when I'm not using the computer (I have an M1 mini and an M4 MBP) that it noticeably heats up the case. I've had to shut it off out of concern for wasted power and SSD life. Naturally, Apple has no response to this problem, and you can't really diagnose or fix anything on your own without turning off SIP, so I've had to disable Spotlight. Launchpad isn't as convenient, but it doesn't require indexing.

I've been using Macs since before Launchpad and have not used it once. Spotlight predates it, and I switched to Alfred fairly early on.

Looking at the Slack icon right now, and it just looks blurry and low resolution, same for Calendar and some others, it's awful.

The maps icon is the most egregious. It makes my head hurt.

So people do use Apple maps and that too on a mac.

The original, updated version of the Finder icon alone should have been enough of a warning that the UX designers at Apple have lost their minds and any aesthetic sense, let alone an ability to design interfaces that are functional, efficient, and well thought-out.

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

Apple changed this in Tahoe Beta 2

https://512pixels.net/2025/06/finder-icon-fixed/

They know that. They’re saying the fact that it ever shipped in the first place should’ve been a warning sign.

Exactly.

I don't get it either. I open the Finder app, and the sidebar is randomly turquoise, over a white background.

It looks ugly, and I have no reason why that sidebar (unlike all other sidebars) is that specific colour. It just makes no sense.

Edit: Oh My God. I just tested installing my own app on Tahoe, and the DMG looks absolutely broken with what used to be solid edges confined inside a window, now being stretched to the window-edges, blurred by the glass-effect making the header on top unreadable.

THANKS APPLE. Jeez.

Usually I just go with the flow, because what else I could do :)?

But somehow the missing App Laucher made me bit sad (well, to the extent software can make one sad :)) - even though I can always switch to Finder to browse apps, App Launcher has some nice visual quality to it that makes it more pleasant to use for me..

I agree with a lot of what you said but the app launcher was dumb. It was just the iPhone’s Home Screen ported to Mac.

Spotlight is way faster than that when you’re at a keyboard. I barely even use the dock, just command space and type in the first few letters of the program I want. Clicking is for people with too much time on their hands.

It is for finding a program or quickly browsing what apps are installed when I don’t know the name. I find it useful in an unfamiliar machine. Yes, like most people, I launch apps primarily with Spotlight.

I could never understand why anyone would use it instead of just Finder > Applications, especially since Finder an give you a nice alphabetical list

My big issue with the icons-in-menus is that they don't align properly. Each 'row' in a menu is an optional icon with some text to the right of it. But when an icon isn't displayed, the text shifts left into its position, meaning that menu text no longer aligns nicely on the left.

I cannot believe the current state of affairs where me doing a Spotlight search for "drivers license" when I'm looking for a photograph of my drivers license to upload, that instead of finding it I'm now presented with a list of links to listen to, watch, or find out about the song Drivers License by Olivia Rodrigo. Why? Why!? Who is this helping? I'm fine with telling my computer that I am 42 years old and male and curmudgeonly and have been using a Mac for a good 25 years now and know how to find songs by Olivia Rodrigo online if I really need them.

And okay spotlight can help fill in the blanks on dictionary searches and wikipedia info I GET IT... but my time and my mind are precious to me – if you're forcing me to use Spotlight or making it the way of searching my computer, please PLEASE do not fill my eyes and head with this time-wasting garbage.

And I have a MacBook Pro M3 – it has a camera notch hidden in the black menu bar, the text of which now disappears if my mouse isn't up there, thus giving the appearance that my screen shrinks rather than giving me extra viewing real estate. The text is not some kind of distraction when it's above a tab bar filled with a multitude of jumbled icons and an address bar with text on it. But OH! sweeping left now reveals the camera notch in the middle of a WHITE menu bar.

Just... Apple... for f*cks sake. I'm paying you. Please employ some people with aesthetic taste and judgement rather than the current cohort of yes-people and logistics wizards. Time for Tim Cook to go. The problem is at the top.

You just spent far more time ranting about what Spotlight can index, than it would have taken to open the configuration and turn off the sources you do not want.

Cue "discovery" rant.

Defaults are chosen carefully, but they cannot meet every user's preferences. So, periodically spend a few minutes exploring the enormous software package that is your OS, and be happier for it.

I find this vastly more rewarding than complaining on the Interwebs. YMMV.

On occasion…

In the actual world.

I try to hit command-space on reality in order to find my keys.

I realize I'm working too many hours when I reflexively twitch for Cmd-Z after making a mistake in the physical world.

Oh very cool! If you hit CMD+, with Spotlight open it even opens you right to the checklist of sources. Thanks for the tip.

> The side bar, such as on Finder, just kind of floats there. That is fine and looks kind of neat on the Maps app as you can see some of the maps behind it, but on the Finder it is just a white bubble over top of a white background, which... is a choice.

Agreed. All of the transparency and liquid glass effects look terrible when they're displayed over a solid color, especially white. That said, they look good over top of something colorful and really AMAZING when displayed over something that's moving (video, whatever).

I imagine that the effect REALLY takes off on a display where EVERYTHING is moving, like on top of the real world on a VisionOS display. It's just out of place on MacOS when uses as a dev workstation.