More evidence has emerged to suggest that Apple is beginning to move away from its iTunes brand after over 18 years of use.
As noted on Reddit, Apple has abruptly removed all social media content from its iTunes page on Facebook, including posts, photos, and videos. This appears to have happened within the past 24 hours, as a cached version of the iTunes page on Facebook still had content available as of May 31.
The blank pages likely foreshadow bigger moves to come, as Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman and 9to5Mac’s Guilherme Rambo have both reported that iTunes will be replaced by standalone Music, TV, and Podcasts apps in the next major version of macOS, which Apple is expected to unveil at WWDC 2019 on Monday.
MacDailyNews Take: Bye, iTunes. You served us well for many years, but like an old quarterback who stay in the game too long, it’s time to head off into retirement! Thank you for a job well done!
Yes, the QB is old, but can the wet-behind-the-ears rookie replacements stand up to the rigors of the pro game?
I’m old, too. I only stream occasionally, and only while on my home internet connection to avoid cell phone data charges. So the new music app still needs to handle my 16,000+ songs and the TV app needs to handle the 2,000+ movies that I store on hard drives and play throughout my house via AirPlay.
I hope the new app allows managing our existing music, playlists, and smart playlists. I lived through the Pages “upgrade” and don’t want to do it again.
There’s another worry. I keep my library and sync it to my iDevices, including an iPod Classic, from an older Mac that can’t be upgraded to the current MacOS because the GPU can’t handle Metal. Obviously, I won’t be able to upgrade from iTunes to Music, Etc. Given the tight integration between the iTunes App and the iTunes Store, will I even have the option of continuing to use iTunes on my older computer? If so, for how long before I have to either buy a new Mac or lose access to my multi-thousand dollar investment in music?
Similarly, my wife has an iPhone 5s, which won’t run the next version of iOS. Will she still have access to the iTunes Store and Apple Music. Can she sync it to a new Mac running the new apps? What about my three old-style iPods?
Though we don’t know the details we have seen the trend with other apps. Pages is a good example as you noted of an app that became much worse after being “upgraded”. I have studiously avoided iTunes Match/iCloud Music Library because of the almost certain headaches it would have introduced.
Apple wants you to use the new software and will thus push you to buy new hardware, they’ll do their best to steer you in that direction by making it increasingly hard to maintain the setup you have. Have your music backed up and assume you’ll have to move it to a newer Mac eventually, with a strong possibility that such a migration will screw some things up.
Just hope it won’t be as painful as the migration to Photos from iPhoto – fingers crossed!!
The sentiment here is correct — Apple has badly managed migrations from old to new in the past. I assume they will do so again here, but then again it’s possible that management for the past migrations cited here didn’t give a damn about backward compatibility and preferred painfully forcing Apple users to start over in the new mold to painstakingly crafting a clean migration path.
The current administration seems much more concerned with fan service, so maybe it will be cleaner.
iTunes has to go. It can be a wholly pleasant change or a mixed bag of tears and shit.