Goodbye sweet friend, and good riddance. iTunes, the app that you’ve been using since those iPod television ads with the dancers in white wired headphones were on air, will soon be taken out back, shot, and ripped apart.
At today’s Apple developers conference, the company announced that iTunes for desktop — a sprawling octopus of content — is finally being broken up into separate apps, similar to iOS: Music, Podcasts, and TV.
iTunes has already been broken up on iPhone into Music, Podcasts, and TV for a while. Finally, it’s being broken up on desktop too.
The new Podcasts app will have better search, and the TV app will be largely similar to what it is now (with all that new possible extra TV+ jazz announced in March).
In 2015, Apple launched Apple Music, its streaming subscription service answer to Spotify. But Apple Music had an unpleasant side effect for some avid music fans: It replaced the songs you had stored with a version stored in the cloud, sometimes overwriting an obscure demo or version of a song with the more standard version. Syncing between devices was supposed to be simple, yet it always seemed vaguely confusing, like at any moment by clicking “OK” you could lose your entire music library.
Soon, when you plug in your phone to back it up and sync it to your computer, iTunes won’t automatically open it to try to sync anymore (a nightmare!). You’ll be able to work with your device from the Finder instead.
RIP, friend. May you sync seamlessly to the great cloud in the sky.