The iTunes app for Mac and Windows seems to be on the chopping block.
According to a report Friday from Bloomberg‘s Mark Gurman detailing expectations ahead of WWDC 2019, which kicks off with a keynote on Monday, June 3, the iTunes app will be retired this year following its public debut eighteen years ago at the Macworld expo on January 9, 2001.
Apple will be replacing iTunes with standalone Music, TV, and Podcasts apps in the next major version of macOS, expected to be unveiled at WWDC 2019 next week, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman.
iTunes has been the way Apple users listen to music, watch movies and TV shows, hear podcasts, and manage their devices for almost two decades. This year, Apple is finally ready to move into a new era. The company is launching a trio of new apps for the Mac – Music, TV, and Podcasts – to replace iTunes. That matches Apple’s media app strategy on iPhones and iPads. Without iTunes, customers can manage their Apple gadgets through the Music app.
So, if iTunes is going away, what are people going to be using for syncing their iOS devices? Or to put it differently – in this day and age, do we really need an app to sync our iOS devices? It’s been quite some time since I last connected my iPhone to a computer via USB and I don’t recall syncing it with iTunes for several years.
Instead, I’ve been using iCloud Backup and couldn’t be happier with it.
In the video above filmed at the 2008 All Things D conference, Steve Jobs likens iTunes to ice water. When asked to sum up what using the then new iTunes for Windows app, he responded by quipping, “It’s like giving a glass of ice water to somebody in hell.”
Recent reports suggested that Apple would keep the iTunes app around even after splitting out functionalities like Movies and TV Shows, Apple Music, Podcasts and more into standalone apps. The idea was, iTunes would become a thin syncing client for iOS device.
The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that iTunes as we know it must be killed off. Don’t get me wrong — iTunes has played its part as the engine for iPod growth back in the day. iTunes is what you exclusively used to sync music with your iPod. And with a built-in music store, it was the key app that helped popularize 99-cent song downloads.
But as Apple continued to cram additional functionalities like the video store, ringtones, books, podcasts and so forth., something had to give. Nowadays, iTunes is a bloated mess of gross UI inconsistencies, a bloated app that is no longer snappy, requiring several hundreds of megabytes of storage space to install.
What’s your take on this rumor? Is it time for iTunes to be retired, do you think?
Leave your comment down below.
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