So tomorrow morning Tim Cook walks out on stage at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium and WWDC 2015 kicks off, and I am sitting here on a Sunday night with a cup of coffee that's gone cold because I got distracted writing this instead of drinking it. Every tech blog on earth has already published its predictions post, complete with mockup renders and "sources familiar with the matter" quotes, so I wasn't going to bother. But then I realized I don't actually care about most of what they're guessing at, and that itself felt worth typing out.
Here's what everyone's talking about: the streaming music thing. Apple bought Beats for three billion dollars over a year ago now and the rumor mill says tomorrow is finally when we see what that money bought: some kind of Beats Music relaunch under the Apple name, Jimmy Iovine doing his Jimmy Iovine thing on stage, all of it. I'll believe it when I see it, but even if it happens I'm not sure I care. I quit Tidal back in April after the big Kanye press conference launch fizzled into "wait, why am I paying $19.99 a month for lossless audio on earbuds that cost $30." Spotify's $9.99 does everything I need. Adding a fourth streaming service to the pile isn't going to change my life, it's just going to be one more app icon and one more monthly charge I forget about until my card statement shows up.
What I actually want, and what nobody seems to be writing thinkpieces about, is boring: I want iOS 9 to just work. iOS 8 has been rough on my 5s since day one — Wi-Fi dropping randomly, the keyboard occasionally deciding it doesn't want to be a keyboard anymore, apps taking a full three or four seconds to relaunch from the background when they used to be instant. There's a rumor going around (I think it started with 9to5Mac, could be wrong) that this year Apple is doing a "Snow Leopard for iOS" release, meaning fewer flashy new features and more just fixing what's already there. If that's true I will be thrilled. I don't need my phone to do more things. I need it to do the things it already does without me having to restart it twice a day.
The split-screen multitasking rumors for iPad are the one thing I'm genuinely excited about, mostly because I use an iPad Air 2 for actual work sometimes and right now "multitasking" on it means switching apps and hoping whatever I was doing is still there when I get back. If they ship real side-by-side apps tomorrow that would be the first iPad software update in years that changes how I use the thing day to day, not just how it looks.
Watch stuff I'm mostly indifferent to, which feels like a strange thing to say about a product that came out ten weeks ago, but here we are. WatchOS 2 with native apps instead of everything routing through the phone would obviously be an improvement, and from what's been reported that's basically a given tomorrow. I just don't have strong feelings about it because I still take my Apple Watch off by like 4pm most days. The battery anxiety got to me faster than I expected, and I say that as someone who charges his phone at his desk without a second thought.
None of this is a real prediction post, I guess, more just me getting my expectations in order before I spend all day tomorrow refreshing a liveblog like everyone else on the internet. I'll probably write something tomorrow night once the keynote's actually happened and I've had time to be annoyed or pleasantly surprised. For now I'm going to finish this cold coffee, close about fourteen browser tabs of other people's speculation, and go to bed at a reasonable hour for once. Big day tomorrow, apparently — we'll see.