“A Time to Kill iTunes” – Another Prediction of It’s Eventual Disappearance
I, for one, cannot imagine a galaxy where I can’t purchase music to own. While I’m a big fan of streaming, it’s still too effervescent and evanescent for the uses I have for music. In order to do what I do for a living, I need the file/CD/vinyl. And right now, the easiest way for me to obtain music is to buy it through iTunes. You don’t wanna know how much I spend on the store every year.
Apple rarely gets specific when it comes to breaking out their financials when it comes to iTunes. And while I believe that sales of digital music are going down–I get the weekly sales numbers every week and I see how they’re dropping–I can’t believe that Apple would kill iTunes completely.
Some disagree, though. This comes from a website called 500ish.com
Today brought the news that Apple would soon be distributing iTunes through the Windows Store for the first time. This may not seem like a big deal — again, iTunes came to Windows over a decade ago — but it is a big deal in the context of the forthcoming Windows 10 S operating system, which will only be able to run apps distributed through the store. So,without this move, every iPhone user who buys one of the new Surface laptops wouldn’t be able to sync it with their machine.
Anyway, the jokes came fast and furious on Twitter after the news was announced. But what’s actually funny here is that the jokes are basically the exact opposite of the one Steve Jobs made. Whereas Jobs noted that many Windows users would write to Apple to tell them that their favorite software on Microsoft’s OS was iTunes, no one says that anymore. In fact, no sane macOS user, myself included, would dare say such a thing about iTunes. Because it has been awful for the better part of this past decade now.
In fact, at this point, it’s old hat to rag on iTunes. It has been so bad, for so long, that the joke is stale. And yet, somehow Apple doesn’t seem to be in on the joke. Because if they were, surely iTunes would no longer exist.
