CoverFlow Is Dead and I Couldn’t Be Happier

You open iTunes 11 for the first time and something in your brain short-circuits. The sidebar is gone. The green button does something different now. Everything is flat and weirdly shiny in a new way, and your first instinct is to google how to roll back to the previous version. That was me, for about ten minutes. And then I actually used it.

Writing about a software update is almost as uncool as anything gets. But I spend what amounts to an embarrassing fraction of my waking life inside iTunes—more than any browser, more than any other application on my machine—so when Apple decides to overhaul the whole thing, I have opinions.

Every version of this conversation ends the same way: someone brings up Spotify. And they’re not wrong. Spotify is good. For music that lives in streaming catalogues, for discovering new things, it works fine. But my taste has enough gaps and obscurities that whole swaths of what I actually listen to don’t exist on any platform. And there’s the other thing, the harder-to-defend thing: I want to own it. I want the files to exist on a hard drive, tagged and organized, mine. I know how that sounds. I’ve known for years. I don’t care.

So: iTunes 11. What Apple actually did was quietly remove everything I’d been manually switching off since the day each feature launched. Ping is gone—the social layer nobody wanted and Apple kept insisting would eventually catch on. Party Shuffle is gone. And CoverFlow, that hideous spinning cover-art display that survived a decade of interface redesigns through what I can only assume was executive inertia, is finally, permanently dead. The whole thing runs faster. The layout, once you stop panicking at the absence of familiar chrome, is clean and logical. Three days in and it already feels obvious.

The people currently posting tutorials on how to downgrade will feel differently in a month. Or they won’t, and they’ll find something else to be furious about. Either way: if you still collect music offline and your computer has been nagging you to update since November, just do it. CoverFlow isn’t coming back. That’s the best news iTunes has had in years.