iTunes, Apple’s Frankenstein’s monster of an MP3-player-cum-record store-cum-video-store-cum-iPhone-updater-cum-random-task-performer, a piece of software which opens on your computer whenever it wants and which seems to require you to download an updated version every eight hours, was pronounced dead on Monday. Apple CEO Tim Cook announced that in its future operating systems, iTunes will be replaced by three separate programs: One for music (Apple Music), one for podcasts (Apple Podcasts) and one for video (Apple TV). By the end iTunes wasn’t just bad, it was fascinatingly bad — a “toxic hellstew,” as programmer Marco Arment put it in 2015. Once you hitched your wagon to Apple’s music management system you didn’t really “own” your tunes at all — even the ones you bought from Apple. In the new streaming universe, Apple Music runs a distant second, with just half the market share of Spotify.

Source: National Post June 04, 2019 22:56 UTC