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iTunes Expected To Be Retired After Over 18 Years (macrumors.com) 82

While it was initially reported that iTunes would live on in macOS 10.15, it now looks like the app will be retired, over 18 years after it was introduced by the late Steve Jobs at Macworld on January 9, 2001. MacRumors reports: Apple will be replacing iTunes with standalone Music, TV, and Podcasts apps in the next major version of macOS, expected to be unveiled at WWDC 2019 next week, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman: "iTunes has been the way Apple users listen to music, watch movies and TV shows, hear podcasts, and manage their devices for almost two decades. This year, Apple is finally ready to move into a new era. The company is launching a trio of new apps for the Mac -- Music, TV, and Podcasts -- to replace iTunes. That matches Apple's media app strategy on iPhones and iPads. Without iTunes, customers can manage their Apple gadgets through the Music app."

This information lines up with a recent report from 9to5Mac's Guilherme Rambo, who claimed that iTunes will be renamed to "Music" on the Mac. In other words, iTunes is going away and will be replaced by the new Music app, which is expected to become the new utility for syncing and managing Apple devices.

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iTunes Expected To Be Retired After Over 18 Years

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  • by Anonymous Coward

    Nearly everyone hates iTunes and wishes it was gone. And after it is gone we will hear about how much they miss it.

    I hate the internet.

    • Re:Here it comes (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 31, 2019 @06:10PM (#58688396)

      Of course they'll miss it, Apple is replacing one bloated, buggy piece of shit with three bloated, buggy pieces of shit. How does this sound like a good idea?

    • i mean, R.I.P. listening to my apple music on windows.
    • I like it. But I only really use it for podcasts. There really is not equivalent that I've found for this on Windows. Ie, updates your podcasts; copies the new ones to your ipod and removes the ones you've listened to already. Now that my ipod seems to have died last week I went to an mp3 player and it's highly painful (ipods are amazingly expensive). I have to drag over the podcasts manually and clean them up manually. (and the damn mp3 apparently doesn't work in my car so I'm going to have to use a

  • iTunes on Windows? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by duke_cheetah2003 ( 862933 ) on Friday May 31, 2019 @06:06PM (#58688382) Homepage

    So what happens to all the Windows folks who have iTunes on their machines and own a library of music on the service? SOL?

    • If you're using the windows version of iTunes, you are SOL to begin with.

      • by tepples ( 727027 )

        One of my relatives carries an iPhone SE. What tool to back up an iPhone and load new music onto an iPhone would make an iPhone user not SOL?

  • by OzPeter ( 195038 ) on Friday May 31, 2019 @06:17PM (#58688418)

    So now in iTunes I use it to sync my music and my podcasts to my iPod and iPhone.

    But Apple will split iTunes into Music, TV, and Podcasts. And that Music will become the new utility for syncing and managing Apple devices.

    Soooooo .. how do I sync my podcasts? Using the Music app instead of the Podcast app? Or will the Podcast app be used just to sync podcasts?

    Methinks someone left something out somewhere.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Through the Cloud, of course.

      It seems fairly clear to me that Apple has basically given up on podcasts as this point. The podcast app hasn't seen any real updates in years and has some rather noteworthy bugs (settings revert randomly, subscriptions to podcast randomly cancel for no reason, downloaded podcasts will stop halfway through for no reason, etc.).

      So I'd imagine that they just assume everyone downloads podcasts directly to their phones and has no reason to ever want to sync them from their computer.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      As designed. What's this "syncing" you speak of? The future is the cloud! Streaming from the cloud. Get with the times!

    • So, what does that mean for syncing my personal ebooks and pdf collections to my devices? Currently, they may be stored in iBooks but still depend on iTunes for syncing to those devices.
    • by dcw3 ( 649211 )

      Nobody seriously gives a shit about podcasts. There's no money in it, so there's no market for businesses to push the envelope.

  • by tsa ( 15680 )

    Finally the beast has become too unwieldy to manage even by Apple. I can only think of this as a good thing.

  • ... over 18 years after it was introduced by the late Steve Jobs at Macworld on January 9, 2001.

    Surely he wasn't the late Steve Jobs at that Macworld event? Did the audience scream and try to run away?

  • they'd let a brand that recognizable go?
    • Probably because it's a brand that is associated with a bygone era rather and isn't really useful today. I'd bet the only reason they didn't make this decision sooner is because they were afraid to let go of the brand and they were waiting for marketing research to show that the brand no longer holds much sway.

      They also want to compete with Netflix, Amazon, and Disney. "iTunes" is more closely related to streaming music, not video. Apple always goes for simple—if they can make "I'm watching TV" mean "

      • by dcw3 ( 649211 )

        "Probably because it's a brand that is associated with a bygone era rather and isn't really useful today."

        So, if you don't want to use cloud backups, what options do you have? I can currently sync across several devices, and not have any of my shit (music, photos, apps, etc.) floating around someone's cloud that I don't trust.

  • by quonset ( 4839537 ) on Friday May 31, 2019 @06:55PM (#58688560)

    At work, we install iTunes for people who want to backup their iPhones to their Windows machines, specifically things like pictures and files.

    How will this change affect them? Will the iTunes they already have installed cease to work? What will replace this backup feature? Please don't say it goes to Apple's Cloud because that defeats the entire purpose of having your files where you want them.

    Also, we inform people they are not to use Apple's Cloud due to security issues.

    • You don't understand how this works - They tell you which features you need this year, and which you don't. It's called "bravery." You will use Apple's backup service - at $0.99/GB/mo, why not? You only think you want your files locally stored. If you're concerned about security, you must have forgotten - this is Apple. As long as you pay up, you'll be secured, no thought required.

      Don't think too differently... that's hard, like using one of those Android-PCs. Ugh!
  • by swell ( 195815 ) <jabberwock@poetic.com> on Friday May 31, 2019 @07:00PM (#58688572)

    If you've been a GOOD Apple consumer, iTunes will have organized your music collection inside many deep layers of folders. If you now want to remove those tunes and put them all into one folder, you're out of luck. You will face many hours of work. Apple has done the same thing with your photo collection.

    And if you've been a GOOD Apple consumer and bought all those tunes at the Apple store, no problem. They'll make it easy to recover them if lost or move them to new Apple hardware or Apple software. It's just those BAD Apple consumers who will have difficulties. People who added their own music to iTunes. They are locked into Apple's proprietary file system which may still work if they are lucky. If not, their personal collection may evaporate.

    It is possible to store tunes and photos outside of Apple's proprietary system if you adjust your Preferences. The indexing system is convenient in many ways, but you can still play music from any normal folder you choose. BTW, some professional photo programs also use proprietary filing systems- think long and hard before you let them take control of your work.

    • iTunes > Preferences > Advanced > iTunes Media folder location

      Mine is under /Volumes/myBook/iTunes Music/Music

      A few years ago I moved it from another external drive. Moving it was a matter of copy and pasting the root folder.

      Am I the only one who doesn't find this difficult?

    • If you've been a GOOD Apple consumer, iTunes will have organized your music collection inside many deep layers of folders.

      Hyperbolic nonsense. They're organised in a "Artist name/Album name/track name" format with the artist name being "Compilation" if it's, well, a compilation. This is not many deep folders.

      If you now want to remove those tunes and put them all into one folder, you're out of luck. You will face many hours of work.

      More nonsense. You just open up the folder where your music is stored and co

  • by Anonymous Coward

    the itunes code has gotten so fucking scrambled over the years, and there is nobody left in our entire company that can make sense of any of it... so we're starting over from scratch.

  • Although the cloud service is pretty good, I do hope they have an easy path to saying "back up this device"

    Also that the concept of local itunes libraries, with smart playlists, survives :-/

    if they really screw the pooch on this one, they will loosen the lockin they have for some people who have been reasonably happy with music stuff since the iPod days -- I always knew there were some android-y things to manage my playlists but nothing I knew I'd be able to trust...

    • The only path they're concerned about making easy: The path to storing everything on iCloud. The faster they get you there, and the more content you have to dump on it, the faster they can get you to pay by the gigabyte-month.

      The concept of the local music library is something they would like to kill outright. They don't make any money off your MP3 collection, they do make money from your Apple Music subscription.
  • And every version got worse and now it really sucks. But probably not as badly as what it will be replaced by. Music is depressingly free now. You can go to youtube music free and browse pretty much anything on itunes as long as you are willing to listen to obnoxiously bad ads.

    They provide free music to force you to listen to ads that will ensure you shun the advertised products. The business model is perfectly awful. And the artists get pretty much nothing, well, except for the ones pushed in ads a
  • Two points : i) iTunes is not gone, just renamed. they have followed a strategy of cutting the cruft off their product branding — they have been stripping the 'i' prefix from things (e.g. iBooks has become Books). the biggest pain about iTunes was that it was grown too monolithic — now they are decomposing the monolithic app (itunes) into its singular components: music + podcasts + video. this is consistent with improvement of the overall sense of design clarity throughout iOS and macOS.

    ii) iTun

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