Apple Is Finally Killing iTunes

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Apple Is Finally Killing iTunes

Farewell to a clunky but world-shattering icon
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It’s the end of a music era. Nearly two decades after launching iTunes and ripping up the retail-store model of album purchases, Apple is ready to retire the iconic product, according to Bloomberg. During the software keynote at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference in San Jose, California next Monday, the tech giant is set to replace iTunes with standalone music, television and podcast apps.

The move, which has been rumored for years now, will align Apple’s media strategy across the board: iPhones and iPads already offer separate Music, TV and Podcast apps in lieu of the centralized iTunes app that lives on Macs and Macbooks. Users can expect the new Music app to offer some of the same functionalities that iTunes currently does — such as purchasing songs and syncing phones — just with a sleeker interface that’s free of the outdated and oft-bemoaned features of the heritage product, and more closely bundled with streaming service Apple Music.

But the scrapping of iTunes’ brand symbolizes a lot, too. By portioning out its music, television and podcast offerings into three separate platforms, Apple will pointedly draw attention to itself as a multifaceted entertainment services provider, no longer as a hardware company that happens to sell entertainment through one of its many apps. That’s crucial for Apple’s future, as the company combats sluggish phone sales with aggressive growth in its services division. At WWDC this year, according to various reports, Apple is planning to buff up other apps including Books, Messages and Mail; it also announced ambitious plans for original video programming featuring the likes of Reese Witherspoon and Steve Carell just a few months ago, in another bid to grow its content presence in entertainment industries.

Welcome as the death of iTunes may be to frustrated users, the software will forever deserve credit for the revolution it engineered in the early 2000s. Before iTunes debuted, the music industry was tearing its hair out trying to combat illegal file-sharing on Napster; Jobs’ new product presented the digital era’s first sustainable, user-friendly way to listen to music. Other firms like Sony and Microsoft had toyed with the idea of digital record stores, yet they “were technology companies that knew how to build disc players and hardware, but they weren’t companies that had demonstrated Apple’s sophistication with regard to software,” Warner Music’s vice president Paul Vidich recalled toRolling Stone in 2013, on the iTunes Store’s 10th anniversary. “It really took a company that was able to bridge those two things and come up with an attractive consumer product.”
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I completely forgot iTunes was a thing until I saw this article, so I don't really care
 
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I'm surprised it wasn't dead already. It's just being split into the three apps that are already there, so it's a nothingburger too.

Archive that shit though, Rolling Stone is cancer.
 
I can't trust streaming shit for the life of me.

First off, I live in an area of piss poor coverage so my phone sometimes goes out, so I can't even stream all the time.
Second, there's dozens upon dozens of songs that aren't available on streaming shit that I love.
Third, if I can't control what I can do with the files directly, then why bother?
 
FatFuckFrank said:
I can't trust streaming shit for the life of me.

First off, I live in an area of piss poor coverage so my phone sometimes goes out, so I can't even stream all the time.
Second, there's dozens upon dozens of songs that aren't available on streaming shit that I love.
Third, if I can't control what I can do with the files directly, then why bother?
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This pretty much. I have spotify on my desktop for background noise but I have ripped and dowloaded mp3s on my phone.
 
I made the mistake of installing iTunes on a PC 10+ years ago. It never recovered from that cancerous shit.

I still buy and rip CD's from time to time, but only older stuff that deserves to be payed for.
 
Ipad and ipod were convenient to use but it was such a pain in the ass to transfer the data from Itunes because it was such a finnicky bloated piece of shit program with the constant update not to mention memory hog. About long time due they just stop with Itunes.
 
I love my old ass iPod Classic but every single music managing program for it was a piece of shit, iTunes included, but iTunes was the easiest to use. So this doesn't mean anything, I'll use some old ass version of iTunes to update my old ass iPod until I need to build my own MP3 player because 160 gigs of music in my hand is not enough, the damn thing's been full for years.
 
Welcome as the death of iTunes may be to frustrated users, the software will forever deserve credit for the revolution it engineered in the early 2000s.
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Revolution? Jailing users' purchases to mandatory software sounds like the exact opposite of a revolution.

I had to abandon buying an album because it was exclusively on iTunes. I'm still pissed about it. It was even available in other places but I didn't happen to fork up the cash before it became an exclusive.
 
Ambidextype said:
it was such a finnicky bloated piece of shit program
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Just checked: iTunes is an over-250-megabyte fucking MP3 player app! Only a company that sells phones and computers for 20x their fair price can make a fucking MP3 player so bloated that it's 20x bigger than it has any right to be.

Seriously, Winamp is being developed for 22 years and it's 8MB to download.
 
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