Thirteen years.
Then it wasn’t there.

What it was

Launchpad was Apple’s experiment with bringing the iPhone Home Screen to the Mac. A full-screen, paginated grid of every app on the system, opened by a hot corner, a trackpad pinch, or a click in the Dock. You could type to filter, drag apps into folders, and swipe between pages.

For some people Launchpad was the back of a drawer, opened twice a year. For others it was the daily entry point to everything they had installed.

Why it mattered

The Mac had two ways to launch an app. The Dock, for things you used every day. Spotlight, for things you could name. Launchpad sat between them. It was the place where every app lived, visible at once, browseable, rearrangeable.

If you had a hundred apps installed and didn’t always remember their names, Launchpad was how you found them. If you preferred to launch by sight rather than by recall, it was your home base.

It was the place where every app lived, visible at once, browseable, rearrangeable.

What changed

macOS 26 Tahoe shipped in 2025 with a broader sweep of legacy cleanups. Launchpad went with them. Apple’s recommendation, in the support documentation that replaced the feature: use Spotlight.

Spotlight is excellent at what it does. It is also search-only. No visible grid, no pages, no muscle memory built on layout. For people who launched apps by sight rather than by name, the workflow simply ended.

No deprecation notice, no migration guide. One day it was there, the next it wasn’t.