So Apple killed iTunes last week. Not killed exactly, more like they took it out back, split it into three separate animals (Music, Podcasts, TV), and left the syncing duties to Finder like nothing happened. This came out of WWDC, which wrapped up on Friday, and I've had a few days to sit with it now instead of just reacting.
I want to talk about the syncing thing specifically, because that's the part nobody's really making noise about. Everyone's excited about SwiftUI and dark mode and whatever Sign In with Apple ends up meaning for privacy (we'll see, honestly — "sign in with the company that also runs the App Store" is its own can of worms). But for me, a person who has plugged an iPod into a laptop more times than I can count, the actual practical change is that iTunes as the syncing hub is going away. Your phone backup and media transfer job goes to Finder on the Mac side. On Windows you're apparently stuck with iTunes a while longer, which feels about right somehow.
I've been using iTunes since (and I had to actually think about this) 2004 or so. My first real "digital library" was a few hundred ripped CDs sitting in a folder called My Music, synced onto a 4GB iPod mini that I bought used off a guy on a message board for like $80. That thing lasted three years and about two battery replacements before I gave up on it. iTunes was bloated and slow for basically its entire adult life, everyone agrees on this, it took forever to open on my old white MacBook, and the Ping social network thing (remember Ping?) was one of the worst ideas Apple ever shipped. But it was also just... there. The one place everything lived. Now it's not one place, it's three, and I have genuinely mixed feelings about that. Splitting it up is probably the right technical call. It doesn't make me less nostalgic about the giant unified mess it used to be.
Anyway, that's the actual news of the week if you ask me, more than the visual redesign stuff or the new Mac Pro (which, yes, looks like a cheese grater, we've all made the joke already, I don't need to make it again).
The other thing from this week
Buried a little under all the WWDC coverage: Google had its Stadia event and actually put numbers on the thing. Free tier gets you 1080p streaming if you buy games individually, and Stadia Pro is $9.99 a month for 4K and a couple of included games to start. Launch is supposed to be this November, US and a chunk of Europe first.
I'm skeptical of cloud gaming in a "I've been burned by streaming latency before" kind of way, but I'll admit the pricing isn't the scam I was bracing for. $9.99 a month is Netflix money, not some enterprise SaaS number. Whether my home internet can actually keep up without turning every game into a slideshow is a separate question I'm not going to pretend I know the answer to. E3 is next week and I assume we'll hear a lot more about what's actually launching on it, so I'm holding off on a real opinion until then.
One small complaint while I'm here: can we stop calling every redesigned settings menu "all-new"? Half the WWDC keynote slides used that phrase for stuff that was clearly just retextured. iPadOS getting an actual home screen with widgets and real multitasking, sure, that's a genuine change, I'll give them that one. But "all-new Reminders app" for what is functionally the same checklist with slightly nicer icons is doing a lot of work.
I've got an old iPod touch in a drawer somewhere that I should probably dig out and see if it still charges. Feels like the right week for it.