iTunes' Windows Problem 332
Hugh Pickens writes "Jean-Louis Gassée writes that iTunes is the best thing that has happened to Apple because without iTunes' innovative micropayment system and its new way of selling songs one at a time, the iPod would have been just another commodity MP3 player. The well-debugged iTunes infrastructure turned out to be a godsend for the emergence of the iPhone. But today, the toxic waste of success cripples iTunes: increasingly non-sensical complexity, inconsistencies, layers of patches over layers of patches ending up in a structure so labyrinthine no individual can internalize it any longer. 'It's a giant kitchen sink piled high with loosely related features, and it's highly un-Apple-like' says Allen Pike. 'Users know it, critics know it, and you can bet the iTunes team knows it. But for the love of god, why?' People naturally suggest splitting iTunes into multiple apps, but Apple can't, because many, if not most iOS users are on Windows. It's Apple's one and only foothold on Windows, so it needs to support everything an iOS device owner could need to do with their device. 'Can you imagine the support hurricane it would cause if Windows users suddenly needed to download, install, and use 3-4 different apps to sync and manage their media on their iPhone?' But help may be on the way with iOS 5. As iCloud duplicates more and more of iTunes' sync functionality, they can start removing it from iTunes. 'Apple is very explicit about it in their marketing materials: they call it "PC Free". They're not quite there yet, but they're driving towards a future where you don't need to manage your iOS device with a PC at all – Mac or Windows.'"
who needs itunes (Score:5, Informative)
You still have to have iTunes installed for the dll it uses to copy media to the device.
I have never experimented with just loading the dll by itself with regsvr32
Re:Uhm, no... (Score:3, Informative)
The iTunes installer is already several 'apps' in one. Extract it (with 7zip or similar) and you get 6 or so different installers.
Except you don't get the choice of what to install, if you run the main installer everything gets installed.
Like android, finally? (Score:2, Informative)
They're not quite there yet, but they're driving towards a future where you don't need to manage your iOS device with a PC at all – Mac or Windows.
Sounds like my android phone. Well, I can manage it from a desktop of any breed, all I need is a normal copy of firefox and an internet connection.
I would assume when apple releases a IOS that does everything that an android phone did long ago, it'll be announced as a new innovation.
(Not a fanboy of either, own ipad and a android phone, just stating the facts)
Re:How many people use iCloud? (Score:5, Informative)
As of two months ago, iCloud had over 100M users [thenextweb.com]. This is not a small feature that isn't widely used. It's entirely likely that the majority of iOS users are using it at this point already.
It's been bad from day one (Score:5, Informative)
Errr, didn't use it in the early days did you? iTunes has always been a godawful UI that violates all of Apple's own UI standards, then ported to Windows where it made no attempt to fit in. It's been terrible from day one, along with the QuickTime player.