“Apple rolled out iTunes 12.7 on Tuesday with support for iOS 11 — the new version of the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch operating system that will be publicly available on September 19th,” Jeff Gamet reports for The Mac Observer. “The update also makes some interface changes and does away with saving backups of the apps installed on your devices.”
“The iTunes update moves Internet Radio to the Music sidebar, moves iTunes U content to the Podcasts section, and removes Ringtones,” Gamet reports. “Apple added the ability to create Apple Music profiles for sharing playlists and following friend’s playlists.”
Read more in the full article here.
“While many people have argued iTunes’ feature creep over the years had made it an increasingly odd sack of unrelated items, this shift doesn’t come with commensurate improvements or additions elsewhere in macOS, and may cause some difficulties for people with modest Internet throughput or low bandwidth caps, which can affect people across both the developed world (more the U.S. than elsewhere) and the developing one,” Glenn Fleishman writes for Macworld.
“The biggest hit is to the iOS App Store in iTunes, which was always a strange fit. iOS apps were in iTunes, because iTunes was once the only way to manage content,” Fleishman writes. “But you’ll have to adjust your behavior and find new places to carry out activities you might have before. Let’s go through the changes.”
Read more in the full article here.
“Since there is no more App Store, there is also no more Apps library, and you can no longer sync apps to an iOS device,” Kirk McElhearn writes for Kirkville. “You can, however, manually add apps that are already on your computer to your iOS device.”
“The iTunes sidebar has been changed a bit. Internet Radio has been moved from the Media Picker – the menu above the sidebar – to the sidebar itself,” McElhearn writes. “You can display this item by hovering your cursor over the section of the sidebar that says Library, then clicking Edit.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: iTunes backups are still there for iOs devices, but performing a restore won’t transfer your apps from your Mac, but will instead download them over the Internet from Apple, which is, of course, likely to be slower. Still, anything that removes years-old, anachronistic cruft from iTunes is a Good Thing™.