ike17055

tekfranz said:

Another issue with Google Music is that it is not as high quality audio as iTunes and Apple Music.

If they would make some nice apps for Mac and Windows  (iOS is decent) and make their Audio Higher Quality they might get somewhere.

They stream mp3 in 320 mbps, pretty high resolution for a compressed format. Apple is standard 256 mbps, but in AAC format, which is lower rez, but AAC is more efficient than mp3. Frankly, I don’t detect a great deal of difference between my Google Play streaming and my iTunes download library on my home audio equipment. 

Interestingly enough, there seem to have been no major glitches or technical snafus for YouTube as has occurred with most of the other providers. Somebody is finally starting to make this work to its potential. 

Crazy. I love having a small ipod for working out, power walking etc. why do they keep killing off pieces of the I pod family? I have no intention of using an iphone for workouts.  

This is good news ...and more than a little surprising. Years ago, as Apple dawdled on development of a music service, I trialed Google Play Music on my iPad...and loved it. I never switched to Apple Music, because GPM was excellent, and continues to upgrade over time as well. The ipad app is very good. With all the emphasis Apple now puts on its Music service, one would not expect this to be the first Google app enabled for carPlay. But as a driver of an older vehicle, without such fancy platform interfaces, I long ago put an ipad Mini mount on my dash so as to use Google Maps, various music apps, email and text, voice dictation, Notes, and such during transit. So, in effect, my "poor man's CarPlay" put me "ahead" of the curve on having the car platform I wanted.

It's not hard to understand when you take it in the proper context:

""We don't want to become a digital colony of global internet giants," Montebourg said in May. "What's at stake is our sovereignty itself.""

Döpfner warned: "Voluntary self-subjugation cannot be the last word from the Old World. On the contrary, the desire of the European digital economy to succeed could finally become something for European policy, which the EU has so sorely missed in the past few decades: an emotional narrative."

The EU (via Juncker, Vestager and Oettinger) has declared war on US tech companies because EU tech companies are uncompetitive without an uneven playing field.  That hurts German and French sensibilities.

Yeah. Re-read those quotes. Those comments, along with euro-centric comments here really sum up the entire trajectory of Atlantic relations for decades now:  Europe's entire political narrative, is consumed by one single overarching premise: trying to disguise the fading relevance of European power on the world stage, and to do so by dismissing the true nature of the rise of American power and Asian power in supplanting Europe as the centerpiece of international relations.