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

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!

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 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

At least give the user the option.

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

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!

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

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?

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.