iTunes is NOT dead

I am writing this on an iPad Pro, sitting in the front seat of my new Aston Martin. The iPad is fast and the Aston Martin is very comfortable. So comfortable in fact I might never go back into the house.

So how, I bet you are wondering, did I afford all of this luxury? Well I simply charged $1 for every person who came up to me freaking out about the “death” of iTunes. OK, I didn’t charge a dollar, I gave the answer for free but HAD I charged I would be sitting in an Aston Martin ignoring calls to come in the house. Instead, I am sitting in front of a 6 year old Mac in a room heated by a radiator that has all the power of a hyperventilating ant.

So what is all this noise about iTunes dying? All this news about you losing all your music and TV shows. All this guff about Apple getting out of the music business. In a nutshell, it is all rubbish.

First, a little bit of history.

Back in, God knows when, Steve Jobs introduced the iPod. A music player that everyone said would fail and ended up changing the world. Like the iPhone that no one was going to buy or the Apple Watch that no one was going to wear.

Anyhow… in order to best serve this music player Apple then introduced iTunes, a music player and organiser that helped take music off your CD and streamline administration of your iPod. As it was all music it was called iTunes… so far so good.

iTunes was another Apple product that was predicted to be a failure and well… a few billion downloads later…(cough)

But then the iPod was given the ability to play video and so iTunes became a music AND video organiser. Even Apple fanatics had to wonder what the sense was behind launching and application with the word “tunes” in the title to play a movie?

But when the iPhone came out it needed an application to help organise its content and so iTunes became a phone organiser as well.

It all got a bit out of hand and so 18 years after it was released iTunes became a bloated, confusing mess whose name still didn’t make sense. Something had to be done and finally, in 10.15, Apple are doing just that and it is no where near as scary or doomsdayish as the eye swivellers would have you believe.

Basically what Apple is doing is splitting iTunes into three separate applications… in much the same way they have done on the iPhone and iPad for years… something everyone accepts and is comfortable with.

The Music application will, err, play music and will actually look alot like the present day iTunes. Only less cluttered with tasks it shouldn’t be doing. When you fire it up all your personal music and purchases will be brought over.

The TV application will play video content. Movies and TV shows. And again, all your data will be brought over automatically.

The Podcasts application will play, you guessed it, podcasts.

Ah, but what about the iPhone I hear you ask reaching for my email address? Well, if you are not using iCloud to do all of that (and you really should be) the management of the iPhone will be incorporated into the Finder. Just plug it in and it will appear on the side bar like a USB stick.

Oh and that hyperventilating ant… just passed out.