Apple finally kills vestigial Dashboard in macOS Catalina

After digging around in the first macOS 10.15 Catalina beta, one thing has become abundantly clear — Dashboard is officially getting phased out in favor of Notification Center.

Dashboard was first introduced in OS X 10.4 Tiger and acted as a dedicated hub for widgets, such as weather, calculator, timer and third-party software.

As user interest waned, however, Dashboard was disabled by default in OS X 10.10 Yosemite, to be replaced by Notification Center. It continues to be disabled in macOS 10.14 Mojave, requiring users to enable the feature manually if they wish to use it.

In macOS Catalina, Dashboard is entirely absent. It cannot be enabled via Mission Control and code for the feature appears to be scrubbed from the operating system betas released to developers on Monday. In Launchpad, Dashboard's icon is literally a large question mark, similar to iTunes which will soon be replaced by standalone Apple Music, Apple Podcasts and Apple TV apps.

Appleosophy attempted to use Terminal to force Dashboard to disable and enable. Typically, this action would bring back an inactive dashboard, but it did not. Dashboard was still missing regardless of the forced reboot.

With Dashboard not long for this world, users relying on the hub for bite-sized applets will need to accustom themselves with Mac's Notification Center. The feature's Today view assimilated most of Dashboard's functionality, including the ability to install third-party widgets.

53 Comments

bonobob 394 comments · 13 Years

About 5 years ago

I'll miss my iStat Pro and Show/Hide Hidden Files widgets. But that's all I use Dashboard for, so I can see why it's going away.

coolfactor 2332 comments · 20 Years

I'm not sure why you felt the need to put "finally" into the title.

Dashboard is still used by many people, including me. Yes, it was severely neglected by Apple, which was its only flaw.

fastasleep 6450 comments · 14 Years

Please tell me Stickies.app is still alive?

sflocal 6133 comments · 16 Years

coolfactor said:

I'm not sure why you felt the need to put "finally" into the title.

Dashboard is still used by many people, including me. Yes, it was severely neglected by Apple, which was its only flaw.

I used it years ago for iStat Pro. To my knowledge, I was the only one in my circle of Mac users that did anything with Dashboard - ever. We do not represent the majority of users so whether you use it or not, it was time to jettison it, and the code that went along with it.

It will be missed, mostly for its nostalgic meaning.

StrangeDays 12959 comments · 8 Years

Yeah I always found it useful - iStat, Calendar, Weather, Stickies... I had other third-party ones but I guess the app-era kinda rendered them moot for the most part.