This story is part of our complete Apple WWDC coverage At its Worldwide Developers Conference earlier this year, Apple revealed that interactive widgets would be coming to macOS Sonoma. That probably sounds like a tiny new feature, and sure, it’s not as earth-shattering as the Vision Pro announcement. But it could turn out to be one of the most divisive new features in the Mac operating system.
Related You probably won’t be surprised to hear that I’ve never really used macOS widgets — whether in Dashboard or the Notification Center — simply because they’ve never felt all that useful. I don’t use the Notification Center much anyway, so most of the time I just forget the widgets are even there.
Yet here, too, is a potential stumbling block. Right now, you can run iPad apps on your Mac, and there are some beautifully thought-out iPadOS ports that work flawlessly in their new home. But just as often I’ve come across lazy box-ticking exercises that feel absolutely jarring and out of place on a Mac, complete with oversized text and weird resizing glitches. When that happens, it’s an unpleasant experience.