This is a cop-out, a sell out, an admission that Apple can't do great software anymore.
I remember when everything was in the same app. iTunes was great. It did 'all' media, ebooks, music, podcasts, apps, TV episodes, it did it all. It handled it all pretty well too. Yeah, there were hiccups, but things worked.
After they started breaking up iTunes for the first time, it started falling apart. The iBooks app is almost unusable. I have issues on a weekly basis getting ebooks to update, and some 'books' just disappear, only to reappear just as mysteriously. Podcasts are a hot mess too. I have duplicates of podcast 'threads' on some computers. Some totally deleted podcast subscriptions still live on other computers and devices. I've had whole podcast subscriptions disappear too.
Music. I LOATH the track titles that CDDB pulls out of its bowels sometimes. In the glorious past, I could go in to iTunes and edit the track names, and rearrange things like multi-disc CD's, and change sorting and just about everything. Then an update for iTunes totally killed most (all) of my edits, and after that, I attempted to fix a bunch of tracks that were driving my crazy, only to have them disappear. I've had Apple support 'engineers' tell me that 'iTunes gets moody now', and have had to completely rerip all of my CD's at least TWICE because the damned iTunes database gets 'flaky'.
My thoughts are that iTunes signals the ineptitude of the Apple contract programmer base. They have patched and cobbled it so much over the years, that it really does need to die, but should be re-birthed into a new and more robust iTunes, the elegant app that it was, that treated all content equally, and allowed users flexibility and security. Pumping out separate apps now is just admitting defeat. Admitting they can't do 'innovation' anymore, which seems to be true ever more so.
My impression of the mess is that there are too many fingers in the iTunes database, and THAT is what they should be working on fixing. Reinventing the wheel for every media type is ridiculous, but so is using three, four, five apps written by different groups of people, combing through a single database. So is creating several separate databases cost effective?
There seems no way back to the future of what could have been.
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No, if you have have a DRM-free file you own it. Saying you're paying the hardware to access it is like saying you pay a CD player to play a CD or you pay a record player to play vinyl.
I remember one DRM protection scheme was that the device that played a CD (in that case) could 'watermark' that CD so that it would only play in that device. Would industries love to go to that for the future of digital media? Stay tuned...
(To support that watermarking idea, the industry was willing to invalidate every CD player on the planet by making the new discs unable to play on existing devices, just to make their bottom lines fatter)