Since 2011’s OS X Lion, Apple’s desktop operating systems have borrowed increasingly from its mobile releases. If you want grounds for optimism about a reborn iTunes at some point, look to the retooled iOS App Store introduced Monday –a welcome move for another Apple product that had begun to sink under its own weight. Instead, Apple announced its HomePod, a $349 Siri-powered smart speaker that costs almost twice the Amazon Echo.
Īlas, the big news about music playback at WWDC was not any sort of rebuild or breakup of iTunes, and early tweets from developers point to High Sierra including the same old bloated beast of an app. And yet this mission creep has kept iTunes from fulfilling some common music-management tasks: It won’t sync your music to an Android phone should you commit that computing heresy, but its cloud-storage options can apparently sometimes make iTunes lose purchased music. But all of that interface bloat has made iTunes less capable at its core task compared to music players that just, you know, play music.
