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Comment by letrix | Hacker News Reader

But why wouldn't pressing the Play button, when no media session is available, not open the music player?

If there’s no media session available, “play” isn’t an action that makes any sense, so it shouldn’t do anything IMO.

Yeah, right? Seems obvious to me. If I press "Backspace" and there is nothing to go back to, or to remove, I expect the key to do nothing. Same for Escape, or Volume Up, or whatever. If it can't do what's expected, it does nothing.

Feels like at one point all the people who spent decades building OSes and desktop environment left Apple and Microsoft, and the people left are brand new developers who only been using computers for the last 10 years or something. Or something something executives/management, whatever fits your worldview better.

No other key on my keyboard opens an application. I don't see why there should be one special key that operates that way.

The insufferable part is not letting you disable it.

The search key opens the Spotlight panel, and the speech key opens Dictation...

The triangle key opens a calculator and the square opens a terminal.

What do you mean not everyone has the same keyboard???

Macs generally come with the same keyboard, though.

My Mac didn't come with any keyboard at all, so I'm still using my keyboard that has Circle, Triangle, Square and Cross in the top-right for my Mac as well.

Probably gaming metrics. “87% of users used my team's program this month!” Who cares if 87% of those did it unintentionally? That's some other team's problem.

Exactly this. The telemetry stats will bubble up to some level of management and it will show, "after making the play key launch the music app more people are using it". That's it. Explanations won't fit on the slide deck. In fact it probably isn't even that much, it would just be a graph with "line goes up" after the making play launch the music app.

Dating Fireball just posted about how broken SwiftUI is for basic things AppKit was doing correctly in the late 90s (undo/redo)[0].

I think peak productivity for desktops was probably hit about 10 years ago. Most things since then are worse, and the best things from macOS (drag and drop everything nearly anywhere, consistent keyboard shortcuts and interfaces, scriptability of everything, etc.) were never copied by other systems.

Now systems are being designed to follow Node JS-style development which doesn’t work like a normal thing anywhere and native apps are just as bad as electron apps from a usability perspective…

At least they can be vibe coded since Interface Builder is no longer needed?

0 - https://daringfireball.net/2026/06/swiftui_only_makes_it_eas...

I think playing something when I hit the play button makes a lot of sense. (The headphones auto-play is a bit less obvious than the keyboard key, I would probably want that to do nothing in this case.)

The issue IMHO is that this is not configurable. Apple Music may even be a reasonable default (being the built-in music player). But it should provide options for Apple Music, whatever other apps I have installed, or nothing.

I don't use Apple Music, so opening their music player only wastes my attention and time. It happens if you accidentally press play on your headphones too. Then you need to quit Apple Music, for no good reason. And you can't uninstall it!

A similar scourge is encroaching on Google-branded android phones, as they add mandatory apps to cover stuff like supporting earbuds you don't own.

Are you talking about the pixel buds app? They ask you on setup if you want it installed, and you can uninstall it anytime. Seems pretty far from "mandatory".

Yes, that's the example I had in mind.

> you can uninstall it anytime

I'm sure it tells you that... but did you actually try?

The "uninstall" button is a lie: You cannot remove the app, you can only roll it back to some mandatory minimum version.

> Do you want to uninstall all updates to this Android System app?

If you "uninstall", the app still exists, and your only choice is to surrender and update it again. So yes, that "system app" is (as far as Google is concerned) absolutely "mandatory" on my phone.

Apps I can't uninstall on my Pixel 9 or 10 (I forget): Gemini, Google TV, My Pixel, Now Playing, Screenshots, Wallet, Weather, YT Music

Some of those might be system level stuff, but I don't know what the heck Google TV is, and I certainly am not signing up for whtever "YT Music" is. Probably some spotify subscription thing they will cancel like they did google play music and whatever came before that. But I can't uninstall any of these, or even delete the icons. They're just visual trash I can't hide from the launcher.

I don't trust the digital music stores anymore, cumulatively I have probably $100 worth of music I've bought across 3-4 music stores in the last 25 years and I can't access any of it anymore. Meanwhile my MP3 collection and WinAmp from high school continue to work without issue.

It doesn’t, it opens Apple Music. Apple has a longstanding problem with giving their own apps privileged roles that they don’t expose to competitors. What concessions exist in browsers, maps, and music player are all the result of being forced into it by various lawsuits. Let’s not play games about what’s going on here.

But why wouldn't the OS developer, when many people don't use Apple Music, not offer users the ability to pick what the key does?

Because this OS developer is also trying to sell you their Music service subscription. I'm sure having this setting would hurt some of their internal KPIs and therefore would never be implemented.

I think they’re wrong for this, though I’d read a steelman of why not

There’s a strong argument for tight integration-the argument for NOT allowing customization is much weaker.

Because it's not the music player I choose to use. I would be ok with it, if I could change the default to e.g. VLC or Spotify.

or turn it off entirely because guess what? Most people are accidently hitting this play/pause button or they hit it thinking youtube is going to respond and instead they get Apple's seriously shite music player. classic apple no respect for me and my choices.

YouTube does respond to it though?

sometimes you can have a youtube video that is paused, and you hit play/pause button thinking it will unpause it but for whatever reason that video seems to not be registering as being unpausable so OSX thinks there is nothing to unpause, so it opens itunes, it's one of the reasons apple was cited under geneva convention violations for unusual weaponry last year

Mainly want that button for pausing a video to play music or vice versa. Don’t love the logic (which will it play, or pause?) but maybe it’s about as good as it could be without more complexity like first press pauses background playback, second press begins foreground playback. (Could probably script that now that I say it, an easy Hammerspoon or something.)

> not open the music player?

I'd be fine with it doing that if it actually opened what i listen with. The OS can clearly see i spend 100% of my time in another music player (Spotify), opening Apple Music is at best a poorly designed UX.

You can't uninstall Apple Music as far as I am aware, so it is not just a "music player" but a specific app, which I personally don't use. For the play button I at least see the point, but it opens it when you insert an audio CD, for example. Even Windows asks what to do in a notification.

> You can't uninstall Apple Music

Internet Explorer bundling was an instruction manual!

One scenario:

1. You have an iPhone, a Macbook, and AirPods.

2. You are listening to a podcast or song on your iPhone using your AirPods.

3. You press your AirPods stem to pause the podcast or song on your iPhone.

4. You press your AirPods again, expecting to continue the podcast or song on your iPhone.

5. Your AirPods are now connected to your Mac, which is opening Apple Music. This takes a long time to complete.

Note that you can not remove the Music app from MacOS without serious compromises to MacOS. It is a slow, awful resource hog that I personally never want to use, and it rubs me the wrong way. My impression of Apple is much lower for it.

It cannot assume which media player I want to use, so the best course of action is to do nothing.

It's very reasonable that pressing "play" opens the default music player. They should let you choose.

There are multiple different sources that the user might want to start playing. Browser tab A/B/C (example: web radios), a music application or music service website in a tab that's not even opened yet (eg: spotify), the last video tab they opened (ex: youtube).

Whatever is the last thing that was paused should play IMHO. If nothing was paused, it should do nothing. Else, you open a pandora's box of possibly wrong choices that the user then has to close.

> Whatever is the last thing that was paused should play IMHO

That's currently how it works.

This is purely an issue and complaint for when nothing at all was playing or open, and an app hasn't currently registered a handler.

If you land on a fresh desktop from reboot and press play, what should happen?

In my experience, this is a more frequent issue. At least 1 time per day, I hit play hoping to play Spotify in a browser tab or some radio tab and for some reason it opens Apple Music instead. Sometimes it could be an issue on my side, ex: the tab is dead or not even opened.

But whatever, the experience is bad: I have to wait for the Music application startup time, then click the context menu and select "Quit Apple Music". It feels like being forced to watch a product ad. Opening Apple Music is never what I want. Imagine if pressing shift opened TextEdit by default, that would be silly. Or doing CMD-v where you can't paste would automatically pop up some random app.

I feel like no machine response is a correct UX pattern in this case. The absence of sound playback would indicate to me that I need to do something else to play sound.

The best course of action would be to let the user specify their default music app to bind the keys to.

Because this f%#n sh*t is jumping at you and is in your way promoting itself and want to configure and engage right away, or start some random item remained there when you in interim loss of your senses tried this crap, every time you press play instead of 8 or 9 by mistake, accidentally! But you don't want to start it, ever, anyway, that's why!

But why isn't there an easy option to turn the "feature" off? Why the kluges and workarounds for Apple going downhill (Microsoftean is indeed a good term here) for a while now? Same story for the nasty notifiction system, the annoying finder "spacebar may preview some random file hopefully without too many security vulns" (the low contrast design whereby you think Firefox is in foreground but it's actually the Finder is another bad design element that contributes to mixing up what the active app is), etc etc etc

Let me change the default music player

Spotify is open almost all of the time for me. If no song is playing, it's likely that it's paused. So I press play expecting it to resume, and sometimes Spotify is actually just not open.

Because i have no songs and never used apple music and every time it opens (because I pressed the key by mistake) within seconds it gets closed. Doesn't even need ai to figure this out.

Because the key press is ambiguous and probably unintentional if nothing is open. If the question is "play what?" then it shouldn't guess

This question is fascinating. The reason why pressing the Play button when no media session is available should not open the music player is because there is no media session available. Why would launching Apple Music be the desired or even expected behavior?

At least give the user the option.

I am utterly confused why pressing play would reasonably do anything other than playing something, or possibly pausing something.

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