Anyway, so iTunes 11 finally hit the Internet today. If you start downloading it immediately, you might be able to get it up and running by the time the ball drops over Times Square. People always wonder why this is—why a simple music player weighs in at around 90 megabytes and requires many long minutes to install and “prepare” your library before it becomes functional. Don’t ask questions—this is just what you get with iTunes. Each new upgrade brings more suckage into your computer. It makes itself slower. It adds three or four more capabilities you’ll never need. It changes its screen layout in ways that are just subtle enough to make you throw your phone at the wall. And it adds more complexity to its ever-shifting syncing rules to ensure that the next time you connect your device, you’ll have to delete everything and resync. At this point, you shake your fists and curse this foul program to the heavens: iiiiiiiiiiiiiTuuuuuuuuuuunes!!!
Apple’s marketing material describes iTunes 11 as “Completely redesigned. For your viewing, listening, browsing, and shopping pleasure.” That sums up the software’s problem. Way back in 2001, Apple launched iTunes as a simple desktop music player for the Mac. It was a great one, too, because while it didn’t have all of the features that more-advanced software had, it was very simple to use. When iTunes was released for Windows, in 2003, it did seem like something truly novel—a great-looking, easy-to-use program for PC users. It was, as Steve Jobs put it, "like giving a glass of ice water to somebody in Hell."
In the decade since, Apple has added arsenic to the water, drip by drip. What’s iTunes for now? As its unpithy tagline explains, it’s for everything. It’s for music and movies and TV shows and books and podcasts and university lectures and apps and, most of all, for shopping. There were legitimate reasons for Apple to have added all these features. As its devices morphed from music-playing iPods into do-everything gadgets like the iPhone and iPad, iTunes had to grow to accommodate their capabilities. Eventually iTunes became less a music player than a sync-master—the software you used to set up and manage your iGadgets. Indeed, up until just a couple years ago, the only way to get a new iPhone or iPad up and running was to plug it into iTunes first. Apple’s “post-PC” machines still needed a PC to work—and, specifically, they needed a big, honking piece of bloated software.
The problem wasn’t that Apple added so much to iTunes. It was that it seems to have done so indiscriminately, without much thought to design or performance. The bigger iTunes got, the slower it felt, each new feature seeming to add a new weight atop its aging foundation. Now, every time I open iTunes, whether on a Mac or a Windows machine, I expect delay. The only other program I remember inducing such consistent panic was Microsoft’s Outlook 2003, which I was forced to use by office IT people before Gmail came along. In building the world’s most-downloaded Windows program, Apple has fallen victim to Microsoft-esque feature creep.
by Farhad Manjoo, Slate | Read more:
Illustration: Justin Sullivan
