Apple's Stacey Lysik speaks at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in San Jose, California this week. Photo / AP
Apple's Stacey Lysik speaks at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in San Jose, California this week. Photo / AP
COMMENT:
This year's Apple World Wide Developer Conference brought news that left users reeling with shock: iTunes will go away later this year when the macOS Catalina operating system update is ready to roll out.
Actually, go away isn't the right term. iTuneswill be deconverged, which sounds more techie-geeky, and split into Music, Podcasts and Apple TV instead.
That's how iPhones and iPads do it and really, I won't miss the bloated 18-year-old iTunes.
Will iTunes die off completely? No, it will continue to annoy people on Windows 10 and older macOS versions. On iOS (which will be called iPadOS on Apple tablets for some reason) it looks like iTunes U for student lectures, and the iTunes Store for entertainment will be kept.
iTunes is a bizarre piece of software. It's a showcase for how Apple, which works so hard to provide a top-notch user experience, every now and then does the opposite.
Who can forget having to activate early iPhones with iTunes? Apple removed that mis-feature fast but to this day, iTunes is where you back-up and restore iPhones and iPads and transfer files on Macs.
You could even select whether to backup iPhones locally, or to your iCloud account … in iTunes. This will now be done via the Finder file management application when you plug in devices to Macs, which is much more sensible.
Then there's fun stuff like finding an old iPod with your ancient music collection on it, and discovering that iTunes on macOS wants to nuke your device because it set up with iTunes on Windows. Okay, so my music collection is embarrassingly bad, but that's still harsh.
Enterprise developers will be watching this space with trepidation, because iTunes was used to deploy apps. Apple moved the App Store from iTunes version 12.7 in 2017. It had to quickly release 12.6.5 for businesses that continue to use iTunes for app deployment and that version is still available for download.
In other WWDC news, my nerdy friends and I won't be able to resist clicking on the different configuration upgrade options for the new cheese grater case Mac Pro when pricing becomes available.
Apple CEO Tim Cook speaks at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference. Photo / AP
With a Pro Display XDR screen that has 6K resolution and graphics cards, a crazy 28-core Intel processor plus a massive 1.5 terabytes of memory, 4TB storage and various cool bits and bobs, speculation online is that the Mac Pro could cost more than US$50,000. Better get that Givealot page going then.
Apple is doubling down on security and the privacy as a marketing tool strategy. Users will be happy with that, but app developers could chafe at tight new guidelines from Apple that try to control and limit how much data can be collected from users and where it is allowed to go.
The sign-in with Apple feature that uses randomly generated burner email addresses linked to real ones for site log-ins sounds great from a security and privacy angle.
Companies that want real email addresses so they can have a direct relationship with customers will hate the new signing-in method though.
Enhanced privacy and security could be construed by companies as Apple having too much control over users. There is already an upcoming court case claiming the App Store is too tightly controlled, and the United States Congress will investigate Apple, Google, Facebook and Big Tech in general for being too dominant and powerful.
It will be interesting to see if Apple's focus on protecting user privacy and security backfires on the company.
