Last Monday, Apple announced that it would be putting out several new products and programs that will ultimately phase out iTunes entirely. It’s a bit of a surprise considering that iTunes was their bread and butter for nearly two decades, but all things have to advance sometime. We can expect these replacements as early as Monday.
We’ll learn about the vast majority of these changes from CEO Tim Cook during the annual developer conference in San Jose, California. It’s a pretty big change, especially for individuals that have been using iTunes for many different purposes, such as music, movies, TV, and podcasts. While Apple is getting rid of iTunes, they plan to release three new apps to fill in all of that missing content, simply labeled music, podcasts, and TV. So far Apple iPhones and iPads have these apps to facilitate the change, but Macs and Macbooks don’t yet.
iTunes was announced in 2003 by then CEO Steve Jobs, who claimed it would be a way to prevent illegal file sharing at a time when certain sites, like Napster, made piracy a real problem for artists that were trying to make a living. In his own words, “Consumers don’t want to be treated like criminals and artists don’t want their valuable work stolen. The iTunes Music Store offers a groundbreaking solution for both.”
And yet, while iTunes has been the cornerstone of Apple for so long, it was predicted that it would be done away with for some time now. It was 2016 in which MIDia Research founder Mark Mulligan made a prediction: by 2020 Apple’s download business would be tracking far below its streaming revenue, and it would be time for Apple to cut things short. It would seem that he was right on the money.
While we might miss the absence of a program that many of us have heavily relied on over the years, there’s no doubt that Apple has done the math and foreseen this move as more profitable for their company as a whole. Hopefully they also have found ways to make the new system as easy to use and accessible as possible. iTunes wasn’t awful of course, but it could get a little complicated from time to time.
Other announcements expected to be made by Apple during the conference includes the extended development of iPad as a replacement for PC and the addition of some new health monitoring apps. Hopefully all of these new additions and changes will go over well for the company as a whole, and we’ll be able to see them well implemented soon. Whether or not the new system will be as well received as the original iTunes system remains to be seen.
