How itunes Saved Apple's

 - Now when you plug in yourphone, 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 extremelybloated for a while now, and instead of iTunes,Apple is now gonna have Apple Music, Podcasts, and Apple TV.
Separate apps fordifferent kinds of media, which makes total sense. iTunes was originally only for music. When Apple released it, itwas actually built on this other application called SoundJamthat Apple had purchased, and they retooled it andturned it into iTunes. And so it was just kindaused for ripping CDs and storing your MP3s. Remember, this was the earlyaughts, so MP3s were huge, and this was just kind ofa way to manage everything.

When Apple releases the iPod, they add the iPod support to iTunes so that you use iTunes totransfer all your music to the iPod, and that's howyou manage your iPod library. In early 2003, they launchthe iTunes Music Store. This is huge because up until now, you didn't really havea digital music store. But it's also a big experiment. It was kind of a wayfor the labels to see, will people buy music? The record labels areable to target Mac users, which at this time areabout 1 to 2 percent of the computer-having population, and see if they will actuallypurchase digital music.
You're not getting a physical CD. You're just gettingfiles on your computer. And the experiment is a huge success. So about six months later, yousee iTunes come to Windows, which gives Apple two things: the iTunes Store on Windows PCs, and any Windows usercan finally get an iPod because up until now, they had no way to manage their libraryif they were to get one.

A couple of years later, Appleadds photo and video support to the iPod, which means that they have to add videos to the iTunes Store. So now you can get yourmusic, your TV shows, and movies from iTunes. And this is how you'restill managing your iPod. So it's getting a little more bloated, but it still makes sensebecause you can get all these things ontoyour iPod, so this is a single application tobasically manage your iPod. 2007, Apple launches the iPhone, which is also managed in iTunes, and they still use iTunes tomanage 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 startto come the next year when they add the App Store to the iPhone, and you have to accessthe App Store in iTunes. So now you're using iTunesfor music, TV shows, movies, and apps on your iPhone. Later on, they add podcastand book support to iTunes, so now you're using it for those things in addition to everything else. As time goes on, the iPhonebecomes more and more important to Apple, and each thingbecomes its own separate app. You have Apple Music. You have the books. You have the podcasts on the phone. But on your computer, everythingis contained in iTunes. When you connect yourphone 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 withall of these forms of media and everything else thatApple has been using to do file management on the iPhone.

As time has gone on, more andmore 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 andmusic all have their own separate app on the iPhone. It doesn't really make sense for them all to be contained inone app on the computer. Apple's doing the right thing here by breaking everything out into separate apps that will be smallerand faster and make it a lot easier to manage all of your media. iTunes gets a lot of flacknow, and it's a good thing that Apple is killing it, but for a while, it was one of the bestapps 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 invadethe PC market and give Apple a Trojan horse into Windows users and get them onto the iPodand get them onto the iPhone. And this is the softwarethat enabled that.