[rajivjain]

My biggest peeve with macOS Tahoe is the App Launcher redesign.

It seems like a clear regression in usability. By moving from a high-density, full-screen experience to a constrained, scrolling window, they’ve increased the interaction cost for launching apps via the mouse. It feels like a 'unification tax. Sacrificing desktop utility to align with non-Desktop modalilties. Does anyone see a functional upside here, or is this purely aesthetic consistency?

[VerifiedReports]

The removal of Launchpad was an inexplicable blunder. The OS now provides no way to organize your applications.

Why would I want my dev tools, audio apps, 3-D-modeling apps, and office apps all jumbled together?

It's as if Apple is trying to catch up to Microsoft in the race to regress.

[EagnaIonat]

> The removal of Launchpad was an inexplicable blunder.

It wasn't a blunder. It was absolutely intentional to force users to start using the AI component.

I suspect someone probably pointed out no one would use it because launchpad has a better UX, so they removed it and forced the three finger pinch to launch spotlight.

I'm currently using the following to fix it.

- Bug in preferences that disabling show home also disables 3 finger pinch.

- I'm using AppGrid as my new launchpad.

- Using better touch tool to activate launchpad with 3 finger pinch.

[VerifiedReports]

Yes, because of simply going to my Utils folder in Launchpad, I want to launch Spotlight (someday) and type in:

"Open the SD-card data-recovery application I installed a few years ago"

So elegant!

Oh look, right now on the HN front page is an article about why this sucks: https://tidepool.leaflet.pub/3mcbegnuf2k2i

[blell]

What AI component?

[EagnaIonat]

Spotlight is used to train ML models on Apples servers. There is no private information used and they go through a process to remove PII information.

[halapro]

They want you to search. I probably have 200 apps on my phone and their automatic categorization is good enough for me. Most common ones I just search anyway.

[VerifiedReports]

How do you search for applications you don't remember the name of?

And Apple's categorization is trash, a huge regression. There is absolutely no advantage to anything offered now over Spotlight, which not only allowed FASTER search (because it only searched applications), but allowed you to group applications as you saw fit (which didn't preclude an OPTION to have Apple do it).

It also allowed you to launch several applications faster, because it kept your last-used group open. For example, if I sat down to do some development, I opened my Dev Tools group and could launch the four applications I typically use together with only eight clicks.

[oneeyedpigeon]

That's exactly what I did with Launchpad most of the time. But Launchpad gave you the option of both. Are they also going to take away categorisation in Preferences and force you to search for everything there too?

[EagnaIonat]

It works great on phone, on the operating system there are numerous applications that you don't care about.

[VerifiedReports]

Exactly, so why would you want to make users scroll through all of them?

Mac OS comes with something like 80 apps out of the box. I have over 200 on my system, and I'm pretty stingy with space. I immediately delete stuff I try and don't like.

So the noobs who know nothing about Spotlight typically come back with some absurd suggestion like "put a shortcut to the Applications folder in your dock."

Um.. no. Not even close.

[egypturnash]

You can still make subdirectories in /Applications.

[VerifiedReports]

This is not reliable; it messes up some applications.

[VerifiedReports]

I love how someone downvoted a fact.

[dajt]

I was shocked when I first hit this. I'm also confused as to why the settings app constrains the window size but I think it did that in the previous version too - not a justification!

I complained about it to a team mate and he thought it was fine and I was weird for using the app launcher and not cmd-space. Although on Windows I always use win-r to run stuff.

Tahoe UI changes and LG are such a mistake and Apple being Apple will probably just double down on it.

[vehemenz]

This is a weird one. I think their reasoning was that most people don't use Launchpad, so they integrated it into Spotlight to eliminate redundancy.

I much prefer the new app launcher in Tahoe, but it was created at the expense of Launchpad, which some people actually relied on. I don't know why they couldn't have kept both options.

[data-ottawa]

I don't know why it's so laggy when you open it. First time you open and scroll it jitters and not all app icons are loaded, so they kind of chunk and overlap.

You get worse icon pop-in if you add your app folder with grid view to the dock. These aren't stored on the network, so it's baffling they take so long to load the icons.

[concinds]

> It feels like a 'unification tax. Sacrificing desktop utility to align with non-Desktop modalilties

No. Launchpad is just the iOS springboard brought to Mac, with big icons and folders and pages. When it was added people complained of "iOS-ification".

This time they made a proper, unique Mac equivalent, integrated in Spotlight and built around the keyboard. It's not as good, the window was too small in 26.0, doesn't support uninstallation like Launchpad, but it's definitely less iOS-like.

[rick_dalton]

I think you have it backwards. The new app launcher is unequivocally more like iOS. Like iOS' app launcher it: 1. does not support making your own folders which launchpad had 2. has groups per app type like "Creativity" or "Productivity" which are literally taken verbatim from the iOS app drawer/launcher page. Both designs are obviously inspired by iOS but I don't see it as a mac optimized version at all.

[deafpolygon]

It’s consistency with the rest of Spotlight. I imagine they want to enhance it, but getting people to use it might be the first step.

[zapzupnz]

Maybe they didn't want people seeing their awful new icons at large enough sizes that the seams would be showing...

[Ringz]

Yep. I hate it. Its easier to open the Finder and use the shortcut to open the application folder.