Drag a folder of application shortcuts into the the dock and you’ll have roughly the same thing

Like this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/i3prgq/til_you_can_dra...

CMD + SPC for spotlight and then CMD + 1 gets you to the full set of apps.

I guess thats personal preference because you’re describing exactly how I use both macOS and iOS.

I can’t be bothered by app icon locations or launchpad. Just CMD+Space and boom its there.

I have to believe that Apple had anonymized telemetry that told them how many people used Launchpad and acted as justification to nix it. I remember when it came out, and I probably used it more in the first month when it was novel and new than I have since then. I'm sorry a feature that you liked is gone, but I'm sure it wasn't done blindly.

Your “Imagine…” hypothetical is literally how I run my iPhone. I don’t need piles of icons cluttering up my screen. I can pull down and type 1-2 characters and get any app on my phone, easily.

More room for glanceable, informational widgets that way.

> Imagine you no longer have pages with icons on your phone and instead only have a search bar

I haven’t had pages of icons on my phone since the App Library was added. Generally the app I want is right there and if not a couple of letters in the search bar and there it is

In a phone writing text is not as simple, but I also find looking for the right icon there tedious, so I hope there was a better solution. In contrast, imo it is easier to get muscle memory with a keyboard (cmd+space > "first 3 characters of app name") than with searching for the app icon around. I cannot imagine the case where looking around in the launchpad is better except with some app you use so rarely you do not know the name (but somehow you have muscle memory for where it is there?).

I use CMD+SPACE 95% of the times I want to open an app. The rest 4% I do it with `open -a` on a terminal with autocomplete (or `/path/to/apps/binary &` for some specific stuff), and 1% going through the `/Applications` directory. I never use launchpad.