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> 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 ap

• basisword 1y ago
  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?
  • sgerenser 1y ago
    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.
    • okhobb 1y ago
      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 https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/Launcher Launching seems easy enough from Finder but you never know about innovation.
  • bombcar 1y ago
    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).
    • caycep 1y ago
      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.
      • derefr 1y ago
        It was called At Ease (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/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.
      • dsego 1y ago
        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.
    • oneeyedpigeon 1y ago
      Or, equally, they might never discover the advantages of Launchpad and always use inferior alternatives :)
    • mathfailure 1y ago
      > 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)
      • bombcar 1y ago
        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
  • viraptor 1y ago
    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.
    • etempleton 1y ago
      Exactly this. Most of the time I use spotlight like everyone else.
    • derefr 1y ago
      > 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.)
      • oneeyedpigeon 1y ago
        That only really works if you have a totally flat Applications hierarchy. Even by default, macOS creates a "Utilities" subfolder.
      • viraptor 1y ago
        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.
  • gedy 1y ago
    Shocking as it is, search based UIs are really despised by some people (me). I greatly prefer visual/spatial browsing
    • brandall10 1y ago
      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.
      • TomaszZielinski 1y ago
        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 :))
      • pdntspa 1y ago
        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
        • flakes 1y ago
          > 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.
  • wyclif 1y ago
    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.
    • mvdtnz 1y ago
      Then why are they removing it?
  • gcanyon 1y ago
    > 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.
    • Telemakhos 1y ago
      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.
      • oneeyedpigeon 1y ago
        That's not Launchpad; it's inferior in many ways.
        • Telemakhos 1y ago
          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.
        • gcanyon 1y ago
          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.
  • dkga 1y ago
    My sentiments exactly
  • rectang 1y ago
    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.
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    • data-ottawa 1y ago
      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.
    • lwkl 1y ago
      I just tried it. The gesture you mentioned now opens the spotlight application search and there is no delay.
  • KPGv2 1y ago
    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.
  • throwaway290 1y ago
    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
  • pdntspa 1y ago
    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"
  • socalgal2 1y ago
    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.
    • robmsmt 1y ago
      This is a bug. The applications need to be reindexed. Happened to me on my work laptop and personal one
      • oneeyedpigeon 1y ago
        Schrödinger's Spotlight: always indexing and hogging your CPU, never quite indexing everything properly.
    • krackers 1y ago
      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).
  • physicsguy 1y ago
    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.
  • oneeyedpigeon 1y ago
    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.
    • basisword 1y ago
      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.
      • oneeyedpigeon 1y ago
        > 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!
        • dwaite 1y ago
  • kbolino 1y ago
    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.
• redwall_hp 1y ago
  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.