Apple isn’t killing iTunes on Monday. Tim Cook isn’t coming to your house and deleting all the music and movies you’ve bought and downloaded over the years. There will be no Thanos snap live on stage. No decimation around the world. None of that is true or real in any true or real way.
So, why are there so many headlines saying iTunes is ending and the age of digital downloads is over? Because, apparently, writers can’t read, fact checkers can’t check facts, and editors are too busy baiting clicks and not busy enough thinking about the needless stress and anxiety they’re causing the audience that relies on their reporting.
Yes, the iTunes app for Mac is likely going to be replace by new Music, TV, and Podcasts apps. Deprecated might even be a better word, at least in the macOS 10.15 beta released to developers on Monday. But that has nothing to do with the iTunes store, potential rebranding to Music Store or whatever aside, or the downloads any of us have in our existing libraries… Even if Apple announces the new apps on Monday, they won’t be released to the general public until this fall and it will likely be years until the existing version of iTunes finally stops running on future versions of macOS.
MacDailyNews Take: Yes, as we wrote after Steve Troughton-Smith leaked the news on Twitter back in April, iTunes will linger, likely for many years, it’s slow death will make life easier for users. Obviously, we’ve long believed that breaking apart iTunes into individual apps is an excellent idea:
Apple, especially under Steve Jobs, has shown a great and admirable willingness to cannibalize themselves. They obliterated their iPod business with the iPhone, for one example. But, when it comes to iTunes, they seem paralyzed by fear of change. Apple paralyzed by fear is not a pretty thing and it doesn’t yield pretty things. It yields hot messes like iTunes. iTunes screams to be broken up into separate, streamlined apps. It’s been screaming that for years. — MacDailyNews Take, July 17, 2015
I would believe Ritchie, he doesn’t sneeze without clearance from Cupertino.
Good Riddance to bad rubbish.
It was a great program at one point. I hope Apple can still provide an elegant program for media consumers.
There’s no reason to believe a development team that could not make iTunes work reasonably well will be able to make something new that does. iTunes’ sorry state is of course a predictor of the new app.
I see it as akin to re-branding ValuJet as AirTran. THAT name hasn’t been dragged through the mud yet.
Well said. Tim Cook’s Apple is abysmal at execution. It’s one botched product launch after another. Further, products that already exist are left to languish to the point of total obsolescence. Tim Cook has allowed Apple to literally rot. That will forever be his legacy. I am certain that any new software produced by Cook’s Apple will be horrible from day one.
It’s a tough job to take over from the master, who hired you for your own area of expertise.
Tim was brougt into Apple to make and deliver the products that he & Jony designed.
Now he’s being critized for not being, Steve, Jony & Tim.
With as much money as Cook has to work with, he could have the foremost living experts in all those fields working for him. Instead he blew tens of millions on empty suits like Ahrendts who did absolutely nothing but rearrange deck chairs. The same low productivity out of touch idiots who couldn’t manage their way out of a wet paper bag (Cue, Ive, etc) somehow retain their jobs. That’s pure managerial incompetence.
The one and only thing Cook ever accomplished was to transition all Apple manufacturing to contractors in China, paralleling the trend all lazy US corporations have been doing since 1972. That doesn’t qualify his Grace, the SJW Pipeline, to retain his position as CEO. Anyone with an IQ over 100 could coast just as well as Cookie has. A competent manager might even retain a higher market cap than Microsoft, and be running a coherent organization less messes up than Microsoft. Instead, Microsoft makes Apple look unfocused and disorganized.