Dashboard is dumped from macOS Catalina – and some folks aren’t happy

macOS Catalina
Image credit: Apple (Image credit: Apple)

Some major changes are being ushered in for macOS Catalina, with iTunes being killed and split into three separate apps for one thing, and it seems another long-standing feature has been given the boot in the form of Dashboard.

If you’re not familiar with it – and you may not be, since Apple hid and turned it off by default in OS X Yosemite, some five years ago – Dashboard is a convenient collection of widgets allowing quick access to the usual sort stuff (weather, checking sports scores, TV listings, and so on, with many third-party widgets).

Fans of Dashboard could always turn it back on previously, but with macOS Catalina, however, the option to do so has reportedly been stripped away completely.

In fact, as Appleosophy reports, in the Applications View, the Dashboard app isn’t present now, being replaced with a question mark, just like iTunes. Moreover, they used Terminal to try and force Dashboard to be enabled, but with no success.

Dashed unfortunate

So it seems that unless Apple is planning on somehow re-enabling the functionality during the testing of Catalina, which seems unlikely, Dashboard looks to be gone for good.

The theory, doubtless, is that most people don’t use it anymore, and that the Notification Center is where you should be going for your widget goodies, anyway.

However, there are a number of Mac users out there who are still using Dashboard, perhaps with some niche widgets that they found very handy, and those offerings aren’t necessarily going to be present via the Notification Center.

Those people will just have to make do as best they can, and perhaps try to find some kind of workaround or similar widget.

Via 9to5 Mac

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).