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Apple's Upcoming Music and TV Apps on Mac Revealed in Leaked Screenshots
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I have said it many times. The main purpose of Apple apps is to sell more streaming subscriptions, not on your desktop or mobile to support your productivity and organization. There is a $-motivation for putting Apple Music on top of Your Library on the sidebar.
True, if you're not using it, it should "disappear" like all the other distractions Jony used to love getting rid of in the hardware. My wife's considerable collection of classical music would easily keep her happy for life and take up less 1s and 0s than it does in phyical form on casettes, CDs and LPs. I can see where Apple Music wouldn't make much sense for her, either.
Not so difficult: Music is a Marzipan app, based off the iOS version, the other is an native app, based off iTunes. Get used to this since the coming few years is going to be a transition for macOS from Intel to ARM and from native Mac to iOS apps. Given that everything Apple does is on ARM now, except the Mac, and Intel is not delivering them what they want, this is inevitable (and probably the death of the concept called 'computer' for Mac users).
I hate it when people say this, but it has to be said: Steve would have never signed off on this crap including the Butterfly keyboard, bad thermals and many other things... of course you can have a bad model or choice here or there, but iterating on those bad design choices... never.
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
For years, I have bristled every time someone said "they should just break iTunes up," because while, yes, iTunes is bloated and a bit slow and maybe somewhat buggy (and there's a case to be made that it doesn't make sense to have all media in one app), it is also POWERFUL, and I don't think there's anything quite like it (that balances 1) robust local library management with 2) matching/syncing music you've added from any source and 3) a streaming music service like Apple Music). My iTunes library (music, podcasts, TV, and movies) is almost 2 TB and almost 10 years old. I use it for hours every day while I work. And the likelihood that these new apps will be SIGNIFICANTLY stripped of its power features and flexibility terrifies me.
Robust smart playlists; granular ratings (5 star system, and even half-stars if you turn those on like me, lol); lots of editable metadata (including weird but useful stuff like custom sort fields) and track-specific options like start time, stop time, remember playback position (all of which syncs across devices); the ability to change said metadata (plus stuff like album art) even on Apple Music (don't believe you can do that on Spotify, and a surprising amount of my music is incorrectly named or has crappy scans of the art in Spotify); editable lyrics (which sync across all your devices); various highly customizable views (and the ability to import/export playlists, copy/paste list views into spreadsheet apps, etc.); and I could literally go on and on...
Like I said, it's a little clunky (though not nearly as hard to use or navigate as people make it seem), and by now we should have handoff between this and the iOS Music app, etc. and lots of other minor features would be nice, but man, people really don't give iTunes credit for the power user features it has maintained over the years. If the new Music app is a repeat of the Final Cut Pro debacle from years back, I really don't know what I'm going to do...
For years, I have bristled every time someone said "they should just break iTunes up," because while, yes, iTunes is bloated and a bit slow and maybe somewhat buggy (and there's a case to be made that it doesn't make sense to have all media in one app), it is also POWERFUL, and I don't think there's anything quite like it (that balances 1) robust local library management with 2) matching/syncing music you've added from any source and 3) a streaming music service like Apple Music). My iTunes library (music, podcasts, TV, and movies) is almost 2 TB and almost 10 years old. I use it for hours every day while I work. And the likelihood that these new apps will be SIGNIFICANTLY stripped of its power features and flexibility terrifies me.
Robust smart playlists; granular ratings (5 star system, and even half-stars if you turn those on like me, lol); lots of editable metadata (including weird but useful stuff like custom sort fields) and track-specific options like start time, stop time, remember playback position (all of which syncs across devices); the ability to change said metadata (plus stuff like album art) even on Apple Music (don't believe you can do that on Spotify, and a surprising amount of my music is incorrectly named or has crappy scans of the art in Spotify); editable lyrics (which sync across all your devices); various highly customizable views (and the ability to import/export playlists, copy/paste list views into spreadsheet apps, etc.); and I could literally go on and on...
Like I said, it's a little clunky (though not nearly as hard to use or navigate as people make it seem), and by now we should have handoff between this and the iOS Music app, etc. and lots of other minor features would be nice, but man, people really don't give iTunes credit for the power user features it has maintained over the years. If the new Music app is a repeat of the Final Cut Pro debacle from years back, I really don't know what I'm going to do...
For the most part I completely agree with your assessment. The only thing I think is a good idea though is the stripping out of the TV portion. I use AppleTV on all my TV's and have from the beginning. I think that portion of iTunes has been very neglected, especially if you use it for your own Movie/TV files. I would love to see the separate TV app have power features of it's own but I know it's probably unlikely.
Right lol. Aside from removing anything non-music related, they're essentially the same thing when you remove any content.
I don't know how this went from overloaded to empty, unless they were talking about functionality.
funny, to me they took itunes and made it into the TV app, but the music app does look different. for example - look at the sidebar stretching to the top[ in the new one, the search bar in the sidebar etc.
My guess is that the tv we're seeing here is an alpha and music is further along.
Finally! After all these years Apple Music in iTunes messed up my years of music library (250GB+) so bad that I think it's beyond repair even if they release a seperate app... you are like 3 years late Apple, shame on you...
Don't want it, hope not to be forced into using it. With luck, it'll only be a 10.15 thing, and the earliest I'd be installing 10.15 would be September 2020.
The TV app they've foisted on iOS and ATV users is a joke. On ATV3, I hid it immediately and returned the regular TV app to where it was on the icon list. I would never buy an ATV4, of course.
But you can't get the old app back on iOS, more's the pity.
They can try to make Apple Music front and center all they like, but I won't waste significant time with it as long as continues to restrict functionality if you refuse to enable iCloud Music Library. I'm only a AM subscriber because VZW is giving it away.
The TV app they've foisted on iOS and ATV users is a joke. On ATV3, I hid it immediately and returned the regular TV app to where it was on the icon list. I would never buy an ATV4, of course.
But you can't get the old app back on iOS, more's the pity.
They can try to make Apple Music front and center all they like, but I won't waste significant time with it as long as continues to restrict functionality if you refuse to enable iCloud Music Library. I'm only a AM subscriber because VZW is giving it away.
In Apple's effort to make the Mac more like iOS, they've encountered a conundrum - the Mac is used to manage/sync to iOS devices, so it cannot, by definition, be exactly the same as iOS.
I believe that their effort to split iTunes into multiple apps will serve to confuse users more than anything else, especially if they can now only sync content to their iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch via the Music app.
So they can access/manage their videos via the videos app but need to sync those videos via the Music app? There is no logic to that.
Maybe they think that this will encourage people to store everything on the cloud, but the reality is that not everyone can do that, especially in the US, where internet speed/availability is still so ridiculously fragmented and inconsistent.
I believe that their effort to split iTunes into multiple apps will serve to confuse users more than anything else, especially if they can now only sync content to their iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch via the Music app.
So they can access/manage their videos via the videos app but need to sync those videos via the Music app? There is no logic to that.
Maybe they think that this will encourage people to store everything on the cloud, but the reality is that not everyone can do that, especially in the US, where internet speed/availability is still so ridiculously fragmented and inconsistent.
LOl it will replace iTunes don't you worry about that. Just like when apple discontinues a product its not discontinued until they actually run out of stock..
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makes me wonder why I ever purchased a mac with a 5k screen guess its so I can have those cool desktop pics LOL
Bottom line I loathe thinking that Apple actually intends to make the MacOS more like iOS over time...
Your post is certainly on the money regarding cloud issues and net speed/availability. And I'm one of those who liked iTunes in what others have called "bloat mode" anyway... apps, audiobooks, music, movies, TV... I liked having them all in and switching around in-app to what I wanted to focus on at the monent.
I'm certainly not going to keep everything in the cloud --even if I do have less erratic net service than used to be the case for me-- so long as Apple presumes that I would want a change made on say an iPod touch to take effect "across all your devices."
Why would I want "everything" in the way of entertainment options on a 32GB ipod Touch to be the same as "everything" on a 256GB XR? All my mobiles are loaded with exactly and only what I want to have on them via individual manual syncs of those mobiles to one or another iTunes library. The day I cannot do that is the day I migrate to other music management apps on my laptop and my mobile devices. I've been a big fan of Apple since the 1980s but there are limits and taking iTunes-sync functionality out of the picture would be one of them. Bad enough we can't sync apps the way we used to be able to do.
I'm also a huge non-fan of iTunes being incorporated into the MacOS in the sense of the app no longer being a separate download. I sort of get why that is, considering Apple supports more than one OS in order to extend for us the usable life of our Apple hardware, and that iTunes may get tweaks in a newer OS that an older one can't deal with, and mostly that users don't always pay attention to "little details" like "oh btw you can't use this version of iTunes with that MacOS" etc. Still... when something goes south in iTunes now and a tech support person casually suggests reinstalling the darn MacOS, as if in the old days saying "Well just reinstall iTunes"... then I have to work hard not to be impolite, while considering the bother of preparing properly for a reinstall.
To me Apple's "solution" to complex relationships between iOS and OS and certain apps is one of dumbing things down and infantilizing the end user. We get enough of that in the educational system, apparently, or so I would say looking at apparent outcomes, and I don't fancy seeing it spread generally as well into any of the technology-driven sectors of our life.
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I feel like Apple has basically become bored with producing software. 99% of their apps now are just the bare minimum functionality.
Even where they're not, you have to prowl around or just hear about some feature that's not intuitively apparent. I don't mean like Easter eggs. I mean like stuff that disappears off the iTunes main window or main menu and then later on in some other release shows up again as a "feature" in some right-click menu. Like someone has said "hey the boss said we shouldn't have ditched that, people are raising hell about it. Put it back in some place easy to patch.. we have to ship this out next week."
I remember once complaining about being unable to resize album art in a version of the mini player and someone said "oh you can still get that version it's a third option now, it's just to get it you have to command-click in the little album cover in the track window of the main iTunes player, think of it as an Easter egg."
Well look... Easter eggs are surprises. Having a feature take a hike and later turn up just buried in some other place is... something else.
The major problem with iTunes is it's lack of support for both hi-rez formats (24bit/192 etc) and Flac. Apple only offering low quality compressed downloads and streaming is also a major turn off from their ecosystem. Time will tell but my guess is this will continue regardless of the new music app.