- Now when you plug in your phone, this is what you see:
nothing.
Matt: Yes, Apple is killing iTunes.
But in retrospect, it's one of the most
important products Apple ever made.
This has been a very long time coming.
iTunes has been extremely bloated for a while now,
and instead of iTunes, Apple is now gonna have
Apple Music, Podcasts, and Apple TV.
Separate apps for different kinds of media,
which makes total sense.
iTunes was originally only for music.
When Apple released it, it was actually built on this
other application called SoundJam that Apple had purchased,
and they retooled it and turned it into iTunes.
And so it was just kinda used for ripping CDs
and storing your MP3s.
Remember, this was the early aughts, so MP3s were huge,
and this was just kind of a way to manage everything.
When Apple releases the iPod,
they add the iPod support to iTunes
so that you use iTunes to transfer all your music
to the iPod, and that's how you manage your iPod library.
In early 2003, they launch the iTunes Music Store.
This is huge because up until now,
you didn't really have a digital music store.
But it's also a big experiment.
It was kind of a way for the labels to see,
will people buy music?
The record labels are able to target Mac users,
which at this time are about 1 to 2 percent
of the computer-having population,
and see if they will actually purchase digital music.
You're not getting a physical CD.
You're just getting files on your computer.
And the experiment is a huge success.
So about six months later, you see iTunes come to Windows,
which gives Apple two things:
the iTunes Store on Windows PCs,
and any Windows user can finally get an iPod
because up until now, they had no way
to manage their library if they were to get one.
A couple of years later, Apple adds photo and video support
to the iPod, which means that they
have to add videos to the iTunes Store.
So now you can get your music, your TV shows,
and movies from iTunes.
And this is how you're still managing your iPod.
So it's getting a little more bloated,
but it still makes sense because you can get
all these things onto your iPod, so this is
a single application to basically manage your iPod.
2007, Apple launches the iPhone,
which is also managed in iTunes,
and they still use iTunes to manage your iPhone library.
It still makes sense for it to be iTunes,
but you're still using one application
for all these different forms of media.
The problems really start to come the next year
when they add the App Store to the iPhone,
and you have to access the App Store in iTunes.
So now you're using iTunes for music, TV shows,
movies, and apps on your iPhone.
Later on, they add podcast and book support to iTunes,
so now you're using it for those things
in addition to everything else.
As time goes on, the iPhone becomes more and more important
to Apple, and each thing becomes its own separate app.
You have Apple Music. You have the books.
You have the podcasts on the phone.
But on your computer, everything is contained in iTunes.
When you connect your phone to your computer,
it still launches iTunes automatically.
It's gonna bring up your phone.
It might try and automatically sync stuff.
It's still bogged down with all of these forms of media
and everything else that Apple has been using
to do file management on the iPhone.
As time has gone on, more and more things go to the cloud.
You see Apple Music launch, and it kind of makes
iTunes not really be needed that much,
especially when you see that things like
books and podcasts and music all have their
own separate app on the iPhone.
It doesn't really make sense for them
all to be contained in one app on the computer.
Apple's doing the right thing here by
breaking everything out into separate apps
that will be smaller and faster and make it
a lot easier to manage all of your media.
iTunes gets a lot of flack now, and it's a good thing
that Apple is killing it, but for a while,
it was one of the best apps that Apple had,
and it really helped with the early aughts
turnaround of the company.
The turnaround of Apple is one of the
greatest stories in the history of tech.
And yes, it is time for iTunes to die,
but it shouldn't be glossed over when
looking at Apple's turnaround and how much
iTunes helped it invade the PC market and give
Apple a Trojan horse into Windows users
and get them onto the iPod and get them onto the iPhone.
And this is the software that enabled that.