CoverFlow’s Dead

CoverFlow is finally dead and I’m genuinely happy about it. Apple ditched it in iTunes 11 along with Ping and Party Shuffle—basically every feature I’d been disabling the second I upgraded. So opening iTunes 11, I wasn’t expecting much, but something felt different. Maybe this one would actually work.

The first hour was panic. Where’s the sidebar? What happened to the interface? Everything was wrong and shiny in that specific Apple way that makes you want to immediately downgrade. But I let it sit for a few days instead of reacting, and by day three it made sense. You stop expecting the old layout to come back and you realize it’s just clean and fast.

Everyone’s on Spotify now, which is fine, but I can’t do that. My taste is too weird for their algorithms—not in a precious way, just literally, most of what I listen to doesn’t exist on Spotify. And beyond that I need to own it. I know that sounds insane in a subscription era, like some aging music collector, but it’s how I feel. I’ve got thousands of songs on this computer and I want them offline, actually mine, not hostage to whatever subscription model they switch to next. iTunes is where they live. So when Apple finally cleared out all the garbage—no more Party Shuffle, no more Ping, no more CoverFlow—and left something that actually works, fast and simple and clean, it felt like they were paying attention for once.

I’m not going anywhere now.