Apple Wipes iTunes Pages on Facebook and Instagram, Begins Moving Away From iTunes Links

[Martius]

For me it's quite logical step to split Apple Music from iTunes and discontinue iTunes if they release an official "syncing" app for macOS. iTunes made sense in iPod era, but ever since there was an iOS + App Store, it didn't make sense for me to have Music library + Music store + syncing / backup for iOS in one single app.

So I think there should be standalone Music app and something like Files / Cloud sync app (on macOS) for everything you need to manage files / backups between macOS and iOS. I can't imagine the real implementation of it, but I hope Apple will make it really straightforward. And of course they should provide you free iCloud Drive space in size of the device you are using, not those ridiculous 5gb.

 

[SeaFox]

As far as we can tell, it looks like Apple has migrated its iTunes page to its Apple TV page on Facebook, including not only all of the content but nearly 30 million likes and its original April 29, 2009 creation date.

Wow, that seems -- very dishonest, by both Apple and Facebook. Imagine if someone took a "like" you made on one topic and were able to move it over to a different topic without your approval. Politicians would love it. They're essentially being allowed free license to your endorsement.

 

[Karllake]

Interesting to do it today. Because iOS, macOS etc are not due out for a few months. So if they are deleting today are we due for an early release of these products? iTunes typically updated out of cycle?

Won’t the developer beta versions of those software be released at WWDC, meaning those apps and links all need to be working to test?

 

[Tech198]

Wow, that seems -- very dishonest, by both Apple and Facebook. Imagine if someone took a "like" you made on one topic and were able to move it over to a different topic without your approval. Politicians would love it. They're essentially being allowed free license to your endorsement.

You really except Apple to get every single approval based on IP address from Facebook ? "someone" liked you.. there is no relationship from an individual.

 

[ThunderSkunk]

I’ve decided to be ok with whatever they do moving forward. But I’m actually hoping they just build whatever these breakout apps are as finder extensions, & contextual finder views with dock shortcuts to them. Just forget apps, and build the functionality you want right into the OS. That way whatever you want done, you just tell the OS to do it, and its intelligent enough to do manage it, rather than relying on every app to have its own Ai running on a dumb OS.

In the nineties, I thought this would be what we’re all using by now. Then I thought it was a stupid idea, but sort of liked it anyway, and now after seeing the extended markup and image controls being added into Finder, I’m starting to wonder if that isn’t on Apples mind as well.

 

[the_marcinm]

At this stage of music listening experience, I need CD quality tracks more than ever. Streamed music is too coarse for in-depth listening.

Me too. What I meant was, if you use the Apple services to listen to your music on the go, then it’s fine. And the truth is, I have quite a different equipment for home listening. It would be nice to have a single source of audio files for both, but I guess, we’re too far away from that yet. Besides, with all that loudness war and stuff, even some of today’s classical music CD are so terribly mastered that it’s impossible to enjoy them anymore. I’m so glad to have some old CDs from the 1980s and early 1990s as well as the old vinyls, so I can still please my ears (and soul ).

 

[justperry]

iTunes was always one of the worst, slowest, and most bloated programs ever created. On par with the original Realplayer if anyone is old enough to know that program.

That is nonsense, iTunes was just a music player in the beginning, the best music player available, even compared to players on other platforms/OS's.

Now when it first launched. It was smooth, fast and very responsive for it's first few years. It only became the bloated pile of poop after a few versions as they added more and more things without ever making sure it was efficient and optimised.

Agreed, although it was quite a few versions, I have iTunes 6 running on Mojave, runs like a charm, was still just a music player.

 

[mixel]

Hmm.. let’s hope the iTunes replacement is ok, and not like Rev.A Photos, with too many missing features.

I wonder about the implications for older devices too. Interesting times.

iTunes was a bit janky but generally I liked it just fine. Only post-Winamp player I’ve liked as much is Roon, and that’s crazy expensive.

 

[Tom_Aatje]

If they don't add drag and drop functionality after removing iTunes I may switch to Android. Some of us willingly don't live in the cloud and still prefer local backups and file transfer.

 

[Superhai]

How did you do this? I never tell iTunes on my Mac to search for album art and I always provide it manually when ripping CDs, but somewhere along the way iTunes decided to check anyway.

I am not home or with the mac now so I don’t remember the exact options but it is in Preferences and under Store I think. There is one for the artwork and one about sharing with Apple, uncheck both. I think that is all, but I will take a look when I am back.

 

[partsofspeech]

Me too. What I meant was, if you use the Apple services to listen to your music on the go, then it’s fine. And the truth is, I have quite a different equipment for home listening. It would be nice to have a single source of audio files for both, but I guess, we’re too far away from that yet. Besides, with all that loudness war and stuff, even some of today’s classical music CD are so terribly mastered that it’s impossible to enjoy them anymore. I’m so glad to have some old CDs from the 1980s and early 1990s as well as the old vinyls, so I can still please my ears (and soul ).

I would even go as far as scavenging vinyls. Those sold at physical stores are still quite expensive. Congrats on your nice collection!!

 

[rols]

ARM’s 2020 chip designs are about multi core and usage in automotive driving systems. Apple disparage intel on their earnings calls. We’ll see ARM MacBooks and iMacs at 2020 WWDC. I expect a near mirror image of the PPC to intel transition - but much faster than the apple of 2006 was able to accomplish, with these machines being on sale in September.
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So we're not a million miles apart, I think 2021, you think 2020, it's coming for sure, you'll know it when the mac updates totally dry up for a year. I was responding to a poster who said they thought it would be this year, I don't think it'll be this year, Apple's ARM chips are good, but they're not yet good enough. I expect Apple this year to start laying down developer technology which will ease the transition in 2, or possibly 1 year(s).
Intel has, I think it's fair to say, really eaten their own foot in the last few years. They've failed on the process scaling, their pipelining and speculative execution hacks have been attacked and shown to leak information with several attacks, the fix for each one of which has crippled performance. They pretty much failed in mobile, ARM won that battle, they are late with every generation of chips.
I look forward to it as ARM assembler is a lot easier to read

 

[TonnyM]

It't high time, iTunes can't be fixed.

 

[alexhardaker]

So we're not a million miles apart, I think 2021, you think 2020, it's coming for sure, you'll know it when the mac updates totally dry up for a year. I was responding to a poster who said they thought it would be this year, I don't think it'll be this year, Apple's ARM chips are good, but they're not yet good enough. I expect Apple this year to start laying down developer technology which will ease the transition in 2, or possibly 1 year(s).
Intel has, I think it's fair to say, really eaten their own foot in the last few years. They've failed on the process scaling, their pipelining and speculative execution hacks have been attacked and shown to leak information with several attacks, the fix for each one of which has crippled performance. They pretty much failed in mobile, ARM won that battle, they are late with every generation of chips.
I look forward to it as ARM assembler is a lot easier to read

Aren’t you nervous the Mac will become a niche again, and have hardly any apps made for it?

 

[chatin]

A long time coming but very necessary. As someone who changes devices frequently, I couldn't use it because of the limitations of authorizations. A message would come up saying that I needed to wait until November to reset authorized devices.

 

[Proji]

iTunes was always one of the worst, slowest, and most bloated programs ever created. On par with the original Realplayer if anyone is old enough to know that program.

Nothing can rival realplayer for excess bloat

 

[Kobayagi]

I tried VLC on macos 10.14 and it was messy to interface the software and transfer music files into the vlc library and then onto an ios device. Do you use it for a local music library and to choose certain songs/albums to sync with certain ios devices? Because I can’t find anything that works half as well as itunes...

Ah, I never use VLC for those needs. I do use iTunes to listen and sync music, which is stored locally. I use VLC only to watch movies and videos.

You might not have noticed it, but you actually provided a good case for killing the current iteration of iTunes.

You use iTunes to play music, which it in fact does pretty well, and to manage you iPods.

But you do not use it to download and listen to podcasts. You do not use it to download and listen to audio books. You do not use it to download and watch TV shows and movies. Presumably, you did not use it buy and download iOS apps before Apple removed this feature. You did not use it to buy and manage ebooks in the past. You did not use it to access Apple's two failed attempts of music related social networks.

All these features that have nothing to do with listening to music, and yet Apple crammed them all into a single application.

That's why iTunes is bloated and that's why splitting into a number of smaller dedicated apps is (in general) a good idea.*

(* Which Apple will most likely c*ck up, given their recent track record.)

Good points.

- I don't do podcasts nor audiobooks.
- No tv shows or movies through iTunes either
- But your comment reminded me of using iTunes to download apps for my iPad 1st gen haha. But that was mainly because iOS 5 (i think) crippled the iPad causing the App Store to crash while browsing, so I wasn't able to download apps on it and had to use iTunes instead.
- I think I did try the ebook thing in the past, but it shortly after that got replaced by Apple's own Apple Books app.
- "Apple's two failed attempts of music related social networks." Glad I never heard of those.

So yeah, I get it. Would be nice for people who actually use all these features to have their own dedicated app which 'just works'.

 

[Guda.FL]

This a step for new file system?

Its been years since i have opened itunes, never mind use it. Then itunes was somewhat frustrating to use at times.

 

[DEMinSoCAL]

iTunes was always one of the worst, slowest, and most bloated programs ever created. On par with the original Realplayer if anyone is old enough to know that program.

That is nonsense, iTunes was just a music player in the beginning, the best music player available, even compared to players on other platforms/OS's.

I guess you don't remember Zune and it's software? By far, superior in every way to iTunes. Rich, graphical, functional and intuitive while iTunes looked like, well, an Excel spreadsheet for your music.

 

[WRChris]

I’m not sure multiple apps on the same hardware is simpler then 1 app on the hardware. I will miss iTunes for being a 1 stop for everything.

 

[masterbaron]

Focus .. has always caused blur for some of us - Apple has always teased capability and not exploited it fully which is why the places the MAC could slay the market have been forsaken (i.e. music production , games) - the ability to cobble together solutions that manage and slow disruptive practices is what we're left with.

We could of course just step away ... leave our phones and just go outside and live!


... and ... when a company tries to be everything to everyone while trying to control everyone while being profitable you can begin to see the problem ... if the Apple premise was just to make a good desktop and just that ... they would probably be excellent but no ... they want a device and business to control everything - failure is inevitable.

The sheer amount of functionality held in a phone is frightening and the amount of emphasis we place on one device is simply terrifying ... we now invoke limitation instead of empowerment.

 

[avanpelt]

Updated FAQ incoming:
Where is my music? In Music. That's where you can play music from Apple Music, which you may subscribe to. But your music that isn't in Apple Music can be played in Music, so you can still access your music in Music without subscribing to Apple Music.

It’s almost like someone took the bet “I bet you can’t use the word ‘music’ 10 times in a single FAQ item.” And they won the bet.

 

[OllieC]

They actually moved the IG account to AppleTV months ago. An old colleague of mine (we both used to create content for Apple's social feeds) spotted it and showed me on April 2nd:

 

[MacHiavelli]

The end of iTunes has nothing whatsoever to do with ARM macs and the latest hardware releases were two new MacBook Pros with the latest Intel chips inside. People have been confidently predicting an ARM mac for what the last 5 years, it'll come, but not this year. This year's WWDC is going to be all about Marzipan which is one of the technologies which will eventually lead Apple to ARM, in about 2 years time.

That is what I said. Dumping iTunes is about the move to Marzipan which in turn will lead to ARM. I didn’t say ARM this year. I said this year is about preparing for ARM...

 

[jgbr]

So Jobs really will be dead...