I use iTunes because I have to, not because I particularly want to. Apparently that’s not uncommon among iPhone users:
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. It was 19 years old. There will be no funeral, because it had no friends.
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). Updating your phone — which never had anything to do with music, podcasts or video — will now be a function of the operating system. This sounds promising. It sounds normal.
But the mystery remains how Apple, of all companies, found itself sullying its machines for so long with iTunes’ wretched presence. By the end iTunes wasn’t just bad, it was fascinatingly bad — a “toxic hellstew,” as programmer Marco Arment put it in 2015. It was a master class in bad user experience from a company whose brand is excellent user experience: Put your trust in Apple’s machines and its native apps and everything will just work. There are no viruses, no blue screens of death, no pre-installed junkware popping up all over your brand-new desktop. Things just show up where they’re supposed to be. Mac’s user interface is so vastly superior to Windows’ that it seems ridiculous even to compare them. They’re both operating systems in the sense that the stick-shift on a Yugo and the flappy paddles on a Ferrari are both transmissions. Yet by 2015 one of Apple’s essential apps wasn’t just horrid to look at and baffling to use — it couldn’t even store and play people’s MP3s properly.
I never experienced the horror stories myself; [lucky bastard!] the idea of buying music from Apple and, because of its aggressive digital rights management, not even getting an MP3 file with which I could do what I liked always struck me as daft. But the Internet is full of tales of woe from people who entrusted their music collections to Apple and got royally screwed. iTunes would make curatorial decisions all by itself: If you bought Neil Young’s 1977 compilation album Decade, but already had On the Beach in your library, it might just decide not to include Walk On and Tired Eyes on your version of Decade. Or it might delete them from On the Beach, depending on its mood.
This was presumptuous and annoying, but at least somewhat explicable: iTunes consumers were far more singles-focused than album-focused. (Indeed the app is widely credited with ending the “age of the album.”) Less explicable were reports of Apple Music replacing people’s legacy music collections — songs they had ripped from CDs and entrusted to iTunes — with new downloads. People spoke of entire collections being corrupted or lost overnight. People reported that their libraries looked nothing alike on their various Apple devices. At one point, apparently under the impression that not many people loathe U2, Apple famously went ahead and beamed one of the band’s new snorefests onto everyone’s iTunes without asking.
My experiences with iTunes have been mostly of the minor irritant variety: disappearing songs, paid-for tracks that refused to play on certain devices, and songs showing up in playlists that they don’t belong to, for example. But at least — most of the time — the non-Apple songs were not randomly deleted from my library. Not too often, anyway.
