Monday started normal enough - coffee, inbox, the usual - and then by lunchtime my browser had grown to something like fourteen tabs, all of them refreshing on a loop, and I hadn't gotten a single thing done since about 10am.
WWDC kicked off first, of course, Apple's own turf, Moscone West, the keynote everybody in tech circles had been guessing about for weeks. iOS 7 is the one that's going to have people arguing in comment sections for months. Jony Ive apparently took the whole interface, stripped out every drop shadow and bit of skeuomorphic leather stitching, and handed back something that looks like it's made of translucent candy. I've seen a few screenshots going around already and honestly I don't know how I feel about it yet. Some of the icons look great. Some of them look like a middle schooler discovered gradients for the first time. Ask me again in a month.
The bigger surprise, at least for me, was the new Mac Pro. It's round. It's black. It's about the size of a small trash can, and Apple is apparently proud enough of the shape that they built the whole announcement video around a shot of it just sitting there, spinning slowly, like a Bond villain's coffee thermos. Phil Schiller stood up during the intro and said, more or less word for word, "can't innovate anymore, my ass," and I actually laughed out loud at my desk, alone, which got me a look from the guy two cubicles over. That line is going to outlive the actual computer, I'd bet money on it.
They also renamed the next version of OS X. No more cats. After Lion and Mountain Lion they've apparently run out of appetite for the big-cat thing, so 10.9 is called Mavericks, after the surf break up the coast. Someone in the livestream chat immediately asked if 10.10 is going to be called Rincon. Probably not, but I'd take it.
And that was only the morning. It was also E3 week, so Microsoft ran their Xbox One press conference at 9:30 that same morning, Pacific time, which meant I was toggling between two livestreams at once on a monitor that is not built for that kind of multitasking. Four ninety-nine for the console, a pile of new exclusives, a lot of stage time spent on a football game nobody in my apartment cares about. Then Sony went in the evening, and this is the one I actually stayed up for, phone charger and all, because word had already gotten around that they were going to take a shot at Microsoft's used-games policy. They did. There's a clip going around now of a Sony exec handing a physical disc to another guy, totally deadpan, captioned "this is how you share games on PlayStation 4," and the crowd in the room lost it. Three ninety-nine for the PS4, no less. My roommate, who has strong console-war opinions I mostly tune out, felt extremely vindicated and has not stopped talking about it since.
Somewhere in the middle of all this my laptop battery gave out. I'd had three tabs on live-blog auto-refresh for something like six hours straight and the fan had been running the entire time. I finished the Sony stream on my phone, standing in the kitchen, which is not how anyone should watch a press conference but is apparently how I watch press conferences now.
It's a strange week to be paying this much attention to gadget news generally, with the NSA story still unfolding in the background. That one isn't going anywhere and I'm not going to try to do it justice in the same post as trash-can jokes, but I'll admit it made today feel a little unreal, hopping between console reveals and headlines about phone records, like the internet couldn't decide what kind of day it wanted to have.
Anyway. I've got a Mac Pro that looks like a bin and a PS4 I can't afford, and I still haven't answered a single work email. Worth it, probably. Ask me again in a month.