iTunes

» see apple.com/itunes as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

itunes was the strangest piece of consumer software apple ever shipped. it started as a music player. soon it was selling music too, and then movies. then it had to manage your phone and the podcasts and tv shows on it. somewhere along the way a social network nobody used called ping got bolted on as well. by version 12 the app opened with a sidebar nobody understood and a row of top-level mode buttons the dev team kept rearranging, and even the mac press was writing eulogies for it years before it actually died.

the killing was bureaucratic. macos catalina shipped on october 7, 2019, and the itunes mac app was simply gone from the dock. its functions were split into separate dedicated apps the same day. on windows the brand kept moving for a few more years out of microsoft-store inertia, and in 2024 the windows side fragmented too. by then the itunes name was, formally, just a podcasts client.

itunes for windows was on every pc that ever met an ipod, and in turkey 2003-2010 that was a lot of pcs. the program loaded slowly. half the time it wanted to update itself; the other half it wanted you to authorize the computer again. the catalina split was a mac event i read about from the sidelines, but the underlying truth was global. itunes had outlived the device that made it necessary.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it was ~

itunes started life as soundjam mp, a small mac shareware mp3 player apple bought from casady & greene in 2000 and rebranded six months later. the first version, released january 9 2001 at macworld, did exactly one thing: it ripped cds and played mp3s. then the ipod shipped in october of that year and itunes had to learn how to sync. then the itunes music store opened in april 2003 with 200,000 tracks and itunes had to learn how to sell. each year another mode got bolted on, and each year the sidebar got longer.

~ what it killed on the way ~

itunes outlasted every desktop music competitor. lala got bought by apple in 2009 and quietly killed a year later. mog and songza both folded into other streaming services that also folded. windows media player held on by being preinstalled, but it lost the ipod sync war the moment apple shipped itunes for windows in 2003. by 2010, on a windows pc, itunes was simply the path between the music you bought and the ipod in your pocket.

~ what survived ~

the unified-library model survived. apple music and apple podcasts on macos both inherit it, and the windows replacement apps do too. the playlist export format that itunes used is still the format every other desktop player imports from. wireless sync killed the cable-and-wait habit a decade ago, but the library idea itself is still alive across the icons that replaced the original window.

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