On Monday, Apple released macOS 26, also known as macOS Tahoe, to the world. The new operating system is available to anyone with an Apple Silicon Mac and also runs on some older Intel Macs, too. Apple’s most heavily marketed feature of the new Mac operating system is its Liquid Glass redesign. Just like iOS 26 on the iPhone, macOS 26 brings translucent UI elements to the Mac that mimic the way light refracts through glass. It’s fun eye candy, to be sure.
However, the company is also introducing another significant change to the Mac’s operating system—and this one is causing quite a bit of consternation among longtime Mac users. With macOS 26, Apple has eliminated Launchpad, the primary point-and-click visual interface users previously used to launch apps, and replaced it with an overhauled Spotlight search tool that is built for power users—those who like to type instead of click to get things done. After using macOS 26 for more than a month now in beta, I feel like this is a big mistake on Apple’s part.
Launchpad made the Mac as easy to use as the iPhone
Launchpad was first introduced in OS X Lion, the Mac operating system Apple debuted in 2011. It sought to make launching apps on the Mac as easy as launching them on the iPhone—and it succeeded. Before Launchpad, Mac users were forced to keep apps in the Mac’s Dock, which could quickly become crowded depending on how many apps they had installed, or by navigating to the Applications folder in the Mac’s Finder and scrolling through their list of apps there, which was cumbersome and took too many clicks.
Launchpad brought an iPhone home screen-style design to your Mac that made it easy for even the most novice user to find and launch apps. [Photo: Apple]
With Launchpad, Apple essentially brought the iPhone’s home screen to the Mac. With a click of an icon in the Dock or a simple finger gesture on a MacBook’s trackpad, a user could bring up Launchpad, which would display an iPhone-inspired home screen on their Mac, showcasing all their apps neatly arranged in a grid of large, beautiful icons. A single click on any icon would launch the app, and users could organize the icons into any order they wanted and even sort them into folders to group apps together.
Launchpad also let users easily uninstall apps with a few clicks, and see when an app was being updated, or has been updated, thanks to indicators that showed below the app’s icon. Icons also displayed notification badges, so, just like on the iPhone, you could see when you had new content available in the app—such as an email in the Outlook app or a message in WhatsApp.
Launchpad was an intuitive and straightforward way to quickly access your apps. But in macOS 26, Launchpad is gone. Instead, Apple offers a redesigned Spotlight search tool, which is now intended to be the primary way users launch apps on their Macs.
The new Spotlight is built for power users, not everyday users
As an application launcher, the new Spotlight in macOS 26 is frustrating—especially if you were used to Launchpad for the last 14 years. When unsuspecting macOS 26 users first activate Launchpad on their Macs, they’ll now be greeted by the new Spotlight application launcher instead. It is noticeably different. Gone is the easily navigable “home screen” of apps spread across your Mac’s brilliant display; instead, you’ll be greeted with smaller icons inside a window that takes up less than a fifth of the available screen real estate.
In Spotlight, app icons are displayed in an alphabetical order grid, with five ever-changing icons on top of this grid. These are apps that Spotlight thinks you want access to right away—but its ability to predict this has been hit-or-miss in my experience. Because the new Spotlight app launcher doesn’t take up your Mac’s entire screen like Launchpad did, nor allow you to arrange apps to your liking, if you have lots of apps, users who prefer to point and click on an icon to open an app will have to scroll through icons alphabetically for some time to find the actual one they’re looking for.
While the new Spotlight does offer predefined categories that act as filters by only displaying the apps that fit that category, the categories themselves and the apps inside them are dictated by Apple. The user cannot sort their apps into their own categories (as a user could do with Launchpad by placing apps into folders of their choosing on the Launchpad interface).
And, bafflingly, Spotlight’s app categories combine what should be multiple individual categories into one (“Productivity & Finance”, for example). At the same time, they often exclude essential apps from a category. For example, you would think the business communications app Microsoft Teams would be sorted into either the “Productivity & Finance” category or the “Social” category. Instead, Spotlight buries it in the “Other” category.
As an app launcher, the new Spotlight is a step backwards in ease of use and customizability compared to Launchpad. [Photo: Apple]
Icons in Spotlight also lack the helpful information that they provided in Launchpad. App icons in Spotlight’s launcher no longer show red notification badges on their corners when you have an alert from the app. This is a pain. The other day, I had four unread messages waiting for me in the Messages app. In Launchpad, the Messages icon would have displayed a red notification badge with the number “4” in the icon’s corner so I could see I had four messages waiting. But in Spotlight, notification badges no longer appear.
Spotlight also ceases to show you the progress bar beneath an icon when the app is being updated, and it has removed the indicator dot below the icon signifying an app has been updated since you last launched it. Additionally, the ability to delete an app from your Mac by simply clicking and holding it to bring up an uninstaller button is now gone.
Apple says that one of Spotlight’s big draws as an application launcher is that users can open apps without taking their fingers off the keyboard. Once Spotlight is onscreen, the user can simply type the name of the app they want to open, and then press the Enter key to launch it. But this isn’t an improvement over Launchpad, because Launchpad also had this functionality built in—in addition to having all the other above-mentioned features Spotlight lacks.
It is an example, however, of how Apple built the new Spotlight to cater to tech-savvy “pro” users, who prefer to interact with their computers via keyboard shortcuts, to the exclusion of ordinary, everyday point-and-click users. The overhauled macOS search tool also allows users to carry out other tasks, such as sending an email or a message, just by typing commands in Spotlight. I have no doubt that power users will appreciate these new features, but they may be of limited appeal to nontechnical users.
If you love Launchpad, should you upgrade to macOS 26?
I am far from alone in pointing out all the drawbacks of the new Spotlight as an app launcher compared to Launchpad. The change has been widely discussed on social media and online forums for months by users who have been running the macOS 26 beta on their machines.
Some enterprising Mac developers have even created solutions that attempt to mimic or restore the functionality of Apple’s now-discontinued app launcher. When people try to start building their own replacements to add a feature back to an operating system, it usually signifies that the company made the wrong call in removing it.
For what it’s worth, when I spoke recently with Stephen Tonna, an executive on Apple’s product marketing team, about all the new features of macOS 26 (and there are many good ones), I asked about Apple’s decision to eliminate Launchpad. Tonna reiterated that Apple sees lots of benefits in the new Spotlight, including enhanced file browsing capabilities and the ability for Spotlight to display and launch apps from your iPhone on your Mac’s desktop. But he did state that Apple was “always listening to feedback from our users and always looking for ways that we can improve” the Mac’s new app launcher.
Whether Apple will actually make any changes to the new Spotlight, including bringing back many of the former Launchpad features, likely depends on how millions of Mac users react now that macOS 26 is available.
What I can say with certainty, however, is that as an app launcher, the new Spotlight in macOS 26 is vastly inferior to the way macOS allowed users to launch, organize, and manage their apps for the last 14 years.
And that’s a shame because macOS 26 features some otherwise stellar changes, including a highly customizable Finder, a new Phone app, and that gorgeous new Liquid Design interface.
There are many things to love in the new macOS. But the removal of Launchpad isn’t one of them
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