Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What the death of iTunes says about digital habits

theatlantic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 120 posts

Re: What the death of iTunes says about digital habits

#61

Post by bordercases »

claudiawerner wrote: post #60
mnemonicsloth wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Walter Benjamin is the original inspiration for the postmodernists. His writing is nonsensically opaque. If his name appears in an article, it's a good sign that the article is about to go off the rails.

Your comment is wonderfully muddled, since Benjamin was not an original inspiration for so-called postmodernist thinkers at all. Benjamin (and his intellectual companions, Adorno, Marcuse and others) were very much modernists, right before the heyday of the French "postmodernists". One has to wonder how 'opaque' Benjamin is, given that he is one of the most studied critical theorists in philosophy and literature. He…

> given that he is one of the most studied critical theorists in philosophy and literature

Found your problem.

Re: What the death of iTunes says about digital habits

#62

Post by xnyan »

Ididntdothis wrote: post #36
JMr3c376 wrote: 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.

They totally destroyed the audiobooks feature. Can't edit ID3, no playlists with Catalina. It's hard to believe how they could destroy it so thoroughly.

First, I agree with you - it's bullshit they took away the features they did.

That said, of all the people you know in the Apple ecosystem, how many people know/do the following: know what an id3 tag is, manage the metadata of their digital audio content, listen to audiobooks. Maybe I'm wrong, but most non-nerds I know don't and would not ever want to think about 1 and 2. Plenty of people who fall into 3, but again all people who don't like or work in tech that I know use audible or the public library or some other service.

I like so much about Apple products, but my big and growing fear is that my needs and the needs of the kind of person who edits ID3 tags are constantly being subsumed by the much larger portion of their customer base that has no need and no desire be involved in anything like editing file metadata.

Re: What the death of iTunes says about digital habits

#63

Post by Ididntdothis »

xnyan wrote: post #62
Ididntdothis wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They totally destroyed the audiobooks feature. Can't edit ID3, no playlists with Catalina. It's hard to believe how they could destroy it so thoroughly.

First, I agree with you - it's bullshit they took away the features they did. That said, of all the people you know in the Apple ecosystem, how many people know/do the following: know what an id3 tag is, manage the metadata of their digital audio content, listen to audiobooks. Maybe I'm wrong, but most non-nerds I know don't and would not ever want to think about 1 and 2. Plenty of people who fall into 3, but again a…

To some degrees I understand but I think this a dangerous path. The Mac is a tool for creators and professionals so if they make the Mac into an iPad then people will just buy iPads. Maybe that’s what Apple wants but I think it’s very dangerous to drive away the people who made you successful.

Re: What the death of iTunes says about digital habits

#64

Post by blihp »

I wouldn't say that iTunes died of natural causes, but rather that Apple killed it. Bit by bit over the course of years starting with the iPod Photo when they added picture syncing, then video, etc etc. Even podcasts never really fit in that well with the static library model that worked so well for your music library.

It's too bad because when it was just an app to manage your music library it was clean, easy to use and logical. When it had to manage the kitchen sink of crap that Apple piled into it and morphed into a syncing app first and music player/library management became a secondary (or lower) priority, it never had a chance.

Re: What the death of iTunes says about digital habits

#65

Post by ihuman »

rblatz wrote: post #55
cortesoft wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But I can backup to my computer for free... I would have to pay $9.99 a month for 2TBs of iCloud storage....

You have 8 256gb iOS devices?

If you want more than 200GB, you have to get the 2TB plan. There's nothing in between.

Re: What the death of iTunes says about digital habits

#67

Post by claudiawerner »

bordercases wrote: post #61
claudiawerner wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment is wonderfully muddled, since Benjamin was not an original inspiration for so-called postmodernist thinkers at all. Benjamin (and his intellectual companions, Adorno, Marcuse and others) were very much modernists, right before the heyday of the French "postmodernists". One has to wonder how 'opaque' Benjamin is, given that he is one of the most studied critical theorists in philosophy and literature. He…

> given that he is one of the most studied critical theorists in philosophy and literature Found your problem.

I'll bite: what problem is that?

Re: What the death of iTunes says about digital habits

#68

Post by unlinked_dll »

tus88 wrote: post #66

A someone who lives outside the Apple bubble...how Apple users listen to music now? Spotify? What if you have a local library?

I don't use my phone as a listening device at all. I'm split between Foobar 2K and Plex on other devices, Spotify at work.

For the car it's basically local NPR but I don't drive much.

Re: What the death of iTunes says about digital habits

#69

Post by dredmorbius »

mcenedella wrote: post #49

“(A note for older readers: More time separates us today from the debut of the first iPod than separated the first iPod from the debut of the first Macintosh computer.)“ Wow.

Similarly, OS X is now older than Classic Mac OS (1984) was when OS X was released (2001).

Re: What the death of iTunes says about digital habits

#70

Post by DonHopkins »

disposedtrolley wrote: post #21

On a side note, that quote by Fitche is the perfect summary of refactoring spaghetti code: > you could not remove a single grain of sand from its place, without thereby, although perhaps imperceptibly to you, altering something throughout all parts of the immeasurable whole

The Abelian sandpile model of software design.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abelian_sandpile_model

Post reply on HN