Earlier quoted context omitted.
Older software sometimes runs just as fast on older hardware, too. It’s anecdotal, but I never remember waiting on Winamp to start up. iTunes, on the other hand, has always seemed slow.
Is that really an ahem apples to apples comparison? Depending on when we're talking, iTunes had many more built in features than Winamp...
I'm not overly familiar with that period's iTunes, but I remember when I bought my first iPod, a 4th gen click wheel (don't remember the year, but it was already an "older model" at the time) I was using Amarok on Linux on an AMD Thunderbird with 256 MB of RAM. That thing would fly. And it did more than Winamp: it had an actual DB-backed music library, iPod interface, etc.
Yet, a few years later, when I got a MacBook Pro with a dual-core CPU and 16 times the RAM, iTunes would still be painfully slow. And I don't remember it doing much more than Amarok. As a matter of fact, it was inferior on pretty much every metric I could think of.