RIP Dashboard, the MacOS Feature I Don’t Want to Live Without

I knew the end was coming when the Weather widget on Apple’s Dashboard stopped showing daily temperature lows over the last year or so. Soon enough, there were no forecasts at all—the Weather widget became a blank blue box, at least for me. You don’t just let one of your marquee widgets deteriorate into a buggy blob. Dashboard was doomed. And now, as of macOS Catalina’s launch last week, it’s officially gone.

Apple had telegraphed earlier this summer that Dashboard was about to meet its end, but that didn’t make the news any easier for me—the only person I know who was using the feature every day.

Dashboard Confessional

Apple introduced Dashboard back in 2005, with OS X Tiger. Two years before the original iPhone launched, Cupertino clearly had apps on the brain. Dashboard was a sort of second desktop that you could populate and customize with simple programs, called widgets. It launched with 14 basic options developed by Apple, including Weather, Dictionary, World Clock, Calendar, and Calculator widgets. One of my favorites was Stickies—floating yellow boxes that you could type notes into and “stick” onto your desktop.

Another joy of widgets: Outside developers could make them, too. An entire ecosystem cropped up, although I only ever really used two third-party widgets. Widgetop’s aptly named Countdown Dashboard generated customizable countdown clocks, while iStat Nano, by Islaye, displayed system status information about your Mac (like internal temperature, CPU and RAM usage, fan rotations per minute, and uptime).

It wasn’t anything flashy, but I found it useful to have all of these tools in one place just a keyboard shortcut away. I could type little notes on my Stickies, glance at the Calendar or Weather widget, use the Calculator, or find out why my laptop fan was going crazy. And when I wanted to set a watch or an appliance’s clock, I often used the Dashboard clock as a guide, because it had an easy-to-read second hand.

Photograph: Apple

In its first iteration, Dashboard appeared as a desktop overlay. A year later in OS X Leopard, when Apple introduced the visual organization and virtual desktop features Exposé and Spaces (now collectively known as Mission Control), Apple added the option for Dashboard to inhabit a “Space.” It was all part of a push to create more depth, physicality, and flow in how users could interact with and customize the operating system. For me, at least, it resonated. Everything was just … there, you know? I could be messy and scatterbrained in Dashboard, but still lay everything out in what felt like a physical space. It would all be right where I left it when I came back. And Stickies, like real sticky notes, had space constraints that I found helpful. The more text you put, the smaller the font would get. So I kept things brief.

These limitations and physical references clearly didn’t appeal to most people. Some cursory Googling shows that there other Dashboard devotees exist, but for the most part Dashboard seems to have become increasingly unpopular. Four years ago, Apple began disabling Dashboard by default in its operating system; you had to enable it manually in System Preferences to access it. Rumors sprang up that the feature was about to be killed, and they never really went away. I was trapped in an annual cycle of uncertainty and then relief as Dashboard mercifully, inexplicably survived each OS update.

All that time, I continued to use Dashboard every day, a lot. I switched to it frequently to see the time on a clock face, look at dates on the calendar, or just to have something to do. Sometimes I mindlessly toggled back and forth between the desktop and Dashboard a few times while I was thinking.

Now I realize signs of Dashboard’s decline were right in front of me, even before the Weather widget started failing. About two years ago, the Dictionary widget started acting up. Every time I submitted a word for a definition—or for a synonym, in the thesaurus—the widget would freeze up. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling it again and again, but it didn’t help. Eventually I gave up, deleted the Dictionary widget one final time, and was forced to start admitting my shameful spelling incompetence to Google. This whole drama portended a fate for Dashboard that I didn’t want to acknowledge.

Over and Out

I’m not trying to convince you that my constant Dashboarding was particularly smart or efficient. All of the tools were readily available to me in a number of other equally convenient or perhaps superior formats. (There’s a perfectly good macOS Dictionary app, for example.) But sometimes routines become part of your interior life. And the tools you use to get through the day, however flawed or idiosyncratic they may be, take on a pleasant intimacy as tangible extensions of your mind.

I guess I see why Dashboard had to go, alas. A few years ago, Apple began transitioning away from 32-bit applications in favor of 64-bit software that takes better advantage of modern, high-performance processors. But this grace period is over. MacOS Catalina took the final step, dropping support for 32-bit applications. Once you upgrade, any program that hasn’t made the jump will break for good and refuse to launch. Apple helpfully points out those programs for you in its System Information menu. In addition to my stalwart Microsoft Office 2011—installed with a license of, ahem, questionable origin—my list of 32-bit programs also includes a line item for “Dashboard Widgets.” No one, including Apple, wanted to gut and renovate their widgets for the 64-bit future.

I’m sure I’ll find something to fill the void that Dashboard leaves behind in my life. Apple’s Notification Center has a “Today” tab offering a similar setup, complete with applets for things like weather, stocks, and a calendar. And it can integrate with third-party applications. There are also independent options, like Widgets by Photics, which is $5 in the App Store. But nothing I’ve seen can fully replace the layout and combination of widgets I relied on.

There are much more pressing problems in the world than the death of Dashboard, and I’m sure some Evernote-obsessed friend is already plotting my conversion. But it’ll be a long time before I stop habitually pressing Fn-F12 to check the weather.

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