Live data from Hacker News

What the death of iTunes says about digital habits

theatlantic.com

11–20 of 120 posts

Re: What the death of iTunes says about digital habits

#11
post #7

> Most iPhone users, instead of tapping on a favorite app, now just search for it from the top bar. Funny how "intuitive" interfaces must regress to ideas that must be over half a century old by now just to work properly.

Didn't expect the article to mention this, but this is absolutely true for me. I only know the locations of some apps, and I search for the rest.

I rigorously organize my mobile apps, so this is quite rare for me. However, pretty much everything I do through my desktop (GUI at least) is done with search. Actually, I do the same in my terminal too with `fzf`, but to a lesser extent.

Re: What the death of iTunes says about digital habits

#12
post #3

[flagged]

I don’t know. He really floated away into his own sea at the end there. I sort of get his point, just not how he got there, or whether it’s really the case at all.

Some things sound great when you write the first few paragraphs and turn to hash by the time you get it all down.

If I were reborn as an author I’d hope I was wise enough to always trust my editor more than my ego. They don’t hand em out to non writers.

Re: What the death of iTunes says about digital habits

#13
post #2

... iTunes became a bucket of too many features, so apple split it up into multiple applications. Apple music is pretty much exactly the same as iTunes was without a bunch of non-music related features. It's silly to say ~"iTunes died" it just changed names.

Uses same 1gig of ram and misses some key features like proper track search. Go figure how it’s an improvement...

Re: What the death of iTunes says about digital habits

#14
post #2

... iTunes became a bucket of too many features, so apple split it up into multiple applications. Apple music is pretty much exactly the same as iTunes was without a bunch of non-music related features. It's silly to say ~"iTunes died" it just changed names.

Probably just became to unweildy for the developers and they split it out.

I can't imagine successfully staffing a giant monolithic application. I think it would be hard to get job satisfaction working on a tiny piece of an app with decades of cruft.

Most apps like this are several orders of magnitude larger than say, the linux kernel.

Re: What the death of iTunes says about digital habits

#15
post #2

... iTunes became a bucket of too many features, so apple split it up into multiple applications. Apple music is pretty much exactly the same as iTunes was without a bunch of non-music related features. It's silly to say ~"iTunes died" it just changed names.

Uses same 1gig of ram and misses some key features like proper track search. Go figure how it’s an improvement...

>proper track search

Please explain. What is is missing? I find that it works pretty well. Is was one of its main selling point at the time and its interface spread throughout the OS: Finder, Spotlight, System Preferences, etc

Re: What the death of iTunes says about digital habits

#18
post #2

... iTunes became a bucket of too many features, so apple split it up into multiple applications. Apple music is pretty much exactly the same as iTunes was without a bunch of non-music related features. It's silly to say ~"iTunes died" it just changed names.

Not to mention, the standalone iTunes Store is still called that, although it is certainly less successful now that Apple Music (the service, not the app) is available. And there is as of yet no plan to move away from the iTunes app on Windows.

Re: What the death of iTunes says about digital habits

#19
post #8

My take on the author's take is that by point 10, he's realized what a muddled and silly thing this is. > So what really failed, maybe, wasn’t iTunes at all… At which point whatever substance he's abused to get that far really kicks in for his final point. > In 1940, the German critic Walter Benjamin wrote about an angel in a Paul Klee painting. […] It is now clear, 80 years later, that the angel is looking at his ph…

“It is now clear, 80 years later, that the angel is looking at porn on his phone”

Re: What the death of iTunes says about digital habits

#20
post #2

... iTunes became a bucket of too many features, so apple split it up into multiple applications. Apple music is pretty much exactly the same as iTunes was without a bunch of non-music related features. It's silly to say ~"iTunes died" it just changed names.

> Apple music is pretty much exactly the same as iTunes was without a bunch of non-music related features.

Hmm, not really. I took a brief look at the UI during the Catalina beta and concluded that I wanted nothing to do with it. I have spent years learning how to use iTunes well. I'm not about to throw away that investment of time and energy on a new, untested app with a different UI. I'll stick with iTunes to manage my music library. Catalina will have to wait, probably forever.

Post reply on HN