Apple Is Finally Killing iTunes

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iTunes currently does — such as purchasing songs and syncing phones — just with a sleeker interface that’s free of the outdated and oft-bemoaned features of the heritage product, and more closely bundled with streaming service Apple Music.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.”

I completely forgot iTunes was a thing until I saw this article, so I don't really care

 

[Pina Colada]

One one hand, it's inconvenient. On the other hand, it makes things less annoying.

 

[Very Honest Content]

Before iTunes was corporate branded for all the mac cultists, Jobs wanted to pay an amazingly staggering wasteful amount of money for Tower Records. Post-Napster, mind you.

No wonder he died of a treatable condition because he was too much of a hard headed jerk to everybody who might possibly know a little better than he did!

 

[AnOminous]

We're talking about a generation who think desktop computers are for luddites.

A generation of dumb idiot newfags who, worse, will remain newfags their entire lives and are less educable than their fucking grandparents.

 

[Alec Benson Leary]

Third, if I can't control what I can do with the files directly, then why bother?

The future of technology marketing is nothing but skeezy manipulative answers to this question. Control over your own hardware and data is the last thing Apple or any of them want you to have.

 

[Tomboy Respecter]

So, uh... How are you supposed to transfer files to your phone now? Cause I don’t see Apple including support for stuff like VLC if they can’t make money off of it.

I know it's like a day late, but VLC is on iOS. It's practically my default music and video app on my iPhone at this point. Also it supports direct file transfers to the app (at least on Linux).

 

[Guardian G.I.]

Has Winamp been updated? I traded it for AIMP a year or two ago. Winamp would take over an hour to initialize my entire library, but AIMP takes about 5 seconds.

The best thing about AIMP is not even music library organization (never used these features anywhere in my whole life) - it's the bundled audio converter. Perfect for things like converting flac files to mp3, among others. By default, it doesn't come with many converter dlls for copyright reasons, though, but on AIMP's website the Russian devs explicitly tell you where to download them.

 

[drtoboggan]

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.

And let's not forget that Winamp really whips the llama's ass.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

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.

On Mac, it's better to use QuickTime to listen to MP3 files if limited to what comes with the OS. It sucks when the default choice is iTunes.