An Open Letter To Apple And The Catalina OS Update

Dear Apple,

I've been a loyal consumer for a number of years now. Granted, I moved away from the iPhone, but that's a discussion for another time. I still use a MacBook because the MacOS system has always been more intuitive and streamlined than any Windows competitor, in my opinion. That all went away with the operating system update Catalina.

I updated my computer earlier this month thinking it was just a usual system update that wouldn't get rid of any core features of my MacBook. But boy was I wrong.

Not only am I disappointed, but this is the last straw for my use of the MacBook and Apple products in general.

I've known for a long time that once this very computer that I'm writing this open letter from no longer holds a charge for longer than an hour or two, I will be making the switch to a computer that runs on Windows.

Now that Dashboard is gone, I see no reason to stick around and maintain my loyalty to Apple. You see, Dashboard was my life, and no, I'm not being dramatic. I changed my settings so it would appear as a layover on my screen. This meant I could access it with one swipe of my mouse.

There was a dictionary and thesaurus, my number one companion when writing just about anything. Then there was a calendar widget I could easily access, a clock widget to tell me international times, and a converter widget that let me convert anything from currency, to weight, to length, to time.

All of these convenient widgets were suddenly ripped away from me in one simple software update.

If I could build a time machine and go back to the day that I decided to update my computer, I would warn myself and stop myself from going through with it.

Yes, I can still access the aforementioned widgets but to use the dictionary I have to run an additional app, and to convert any piece of information I have to conduct a Google search. Just because some of the widgets are now available within the Today view of the Notification Center, it's just not as intuitive, and not all the same functions exist.

So, Apple, what I'm trying to say is this: bring back Dashboard because I'm not the only one who loved it, and then maybe we can talk about me upgrading to a new MacBook when the time comes.