Its 2017: Time to put iTunes down
We are one month into 2017 and I think that its long overdue that Apple demolish iTunes and make 2017 the year of multimedia. iTunes, you were great. You started off as fantastic way to get music into our young, hungry iPods, thirsting for music. You pioneered easy to rent videos for my beloved iPod with Video and introduced me to the wonderful world of podcasts to feed my tech addiction like a crack-addicted squirrel furrowing needles away for the long, long winter. The last few years iTunes has gotten bloated and disease-ridden. Its gotten slowly, but surely more buggy and unstable with each release since the iPhone came out. In 2017, its an application that nobody, especially Mac users like using. I think its time for Apple to finally put down the old program and release it from its misery.
Apple TV Subscription
Apple has been removed to be working on this for a few years, but I hope that 2017 is the year that they can get the deals to make this a reality. I would love to pay Apple $40/month to get all you can eat TV and live television like you can with SlingTV of DirectTV now. Those services are neat, but I would love to see Apple’s take on streaming TV and movies. I enjoy Apple Music over Spotify now because of Apple’s human and AI curated playlists. I also enjoy using the AppleTV’s new TV app to collect the mess of a dozen TV channel apps on my AppleTV. I would like to see what Apple could do with the TV and movies that I watch since I do not get the normal recommendations out of left field now that one would get with traditional cable TV.
Hand-Off
Hand-off support for music/video to be a thing. It’s a huge pain that I cannot stop a TV show on my AppleTV and cannot use Handoff to start it immediately on my iPad, Mac, or iPhone. TV is one thing, but I would use this all the time with Apple Music. I got my family Spotify Connect over Christmas and I love being able to send my music anywhere with it and resume a playlist or album when I hop on a new device. Apple has been hand-off for document-based apps like iWork and Mail for years now. Multimedia apps desperately need this.
Separate Mac Apps
We already have separate apps on the iPhone, iPad, and AppleTV. I think that users are okay with this now. Let each application have its own tailored interface and features. It will make getting around multimedia much easier and I imagine these separate apps will be much lighter on CPU and battery life than the battleship that is iTunes.
- TV app
- Podcast App
- Apple Music
- iTunes Store
iTunes in the Cloud
This is plumbing more than anything, but I think that Apple should make it easy to get to your movies, TV, podcasts, and music in a web browser. Not everybody lives completely in the Apple ecosystem and it would be nice to be able to watch purchased content on non-Apple devices. I know Apple is a hardware company, but people do not buy Macs or iPad because they want to watch iTunes movies through iTunes. It’s a nice plus of having a Mac, but iTunes is a battleship of a program that I hesitate to launch on the go least it destroy my Macbook Pro’s battery life.
Airplay
Airplay was cool back in 2009, but its progressed very little since then. If anything, multitasking in newer versions of iOS breaks it horrible. I cannot start streaming a video on my iPad to the AppleTV and decide to browse Twitter or Facebook least some video or audio auto plays from them. Chromecast came out a few years ago from Google and it’s a vastly superior way of streaming content around. Apps do not try to take over the experience and run over each other and it does not kill my battery life since it’s not forcing my device to use up precious battery life.
Apple Books Subscription
Apple’s iBooks is a great reading experience on the iPad and iPhone, but it feels like a “Me-too” product. I think that a book subscription of 1x book a month for $10/month would be an interesting idea. Make it like Netflix or Spotify and be able to enjoy as many books as you can handle. As a book-lover I would honestly rather have something like this than Netflix. I don’t know if I really want to lock myself into buying books on Apple’s iBooks platform because it requires me to have Apple hardware to read them, but being able to rent books for a fee would be an interesting proposition.
Android Apps
If Apple were to do an Apple TV or iBooks service I think that perhaps Android apps would be a good investment. Android is the new Windows for consumers and with Chromebooks taking off in education and homes it’s time to consider bringing more of Apple’s services to Android. If Apple wants services to be a profitable business, then it should not hesitate to extend Apple TV and iBooks to Android devices. I feel Google has shown that distributing top-notch consumer services to the iPhone and iPad can lead people towards their own platform.
Wrapping Up
iTunes is a big, battleship of a program that really does a lot on the Mac these days. Its much more than it was originally designed to do and while adding functionality over time made sense I think its well beyond the point of being useable now. The user interface is confusing on top of that now and updates over the last few years have done nothing beyond serving as a band-aid for the problem. I know that the Mac is not a consumption platform or the center of everybody’s digital hub in 2017, but until iOS grows up iTunes is a mess that should be cleaned up. If Apple were to break apart iTunes into separate services and applications on the Mac it would be the biggest update to MacOS in years and I believe that people would sing its praises. As somebody who works on a Mac 8+ hours a day I would really appreciate it if only for podcasts or Apple Music. I feel silly using my iPhone in my pocket while I’m working on my Mac because I don’t want iTunes running and I really do not want to have to switch to Spotify just to have a more lightweight music experience.
As great as iPads and iPhones have become I still do see Macs around my college as students, faculty, and staff’s primary devices to get work done throughout the day. I see a lot of students every day using they Macs for music, video watching, reading textbooks, surfing the web, getting work done, and more. I think it would be a big service to the Mac users to delivery a truly excellent experience. Services like Spotify, Netflix, PocketCasts, Soundcloud, Hulu, or SlingTV are nice, but they are available everywhere, including $250 Chromebooks. Apple really should be delivering the full meal-deal to Mac users they do their iPhone and iPad customers. I also think that having a good multimedia experience on the Mac keeps people in the Apple ecosystem and was one of the reasons I chose to get a Mac in the first place was its integration with my iPhone so many years ago. I think in 2017 everybody has replaced their lightening cables with cloud services. Apple loves to make dongles. This is a dongle I would love to see; one connecting my Mac with their modern multimedia cloud services. Apple doing that would make me a very happy camper more so than any amount of Siri support on the Mac.
