Comment by cjmb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cjmb | Hacker News Reader

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I rarely see this sentiment since the entire Tech class has moved to Spotify subscription streaming as their music platform of choice (slight hyperbole, only slight). But as one of the 12 remaining iTunes app users out there, I am shocked at how terrible the software has become.

The 2005 version of iTunes that ran on my PowerPC macbook was strictly better than the app that I have installed today on my Windows 10 gaming PC. The 2008 iPhone iTunes app was better than the "Music" app on my iPhone today -- when I open my phone in airplane mode on a flight to listen to music, it bricks itself for 10 seconds trying to get wifi connection and prompt me to pay them for their crappy music streaming service. There is no way to disable that self-bricking advertisement.

I suspect that the average Apple employee uses Spotify to listen to music and doesn't have a large personal collection of songs not available for streaming on common platforms. The lack of dogfooding shows through.

As another point of anecdata: I still use iTunes 10.6.3 on Mac OS 10.13 for this reason.

It's also modded with coloured icons. I still use an iPhone 4S with USB sync, and iPod 5.5G video.

The laptop (2014 Retina 15") has a 4 TB Sabrent SSD upgrade inside, using an M.2 adaptor. The iPod has a 128GB Kingspec SSD.

It's an intentional choice to lag behind, which will probably happen until the Digital Hub model makes a comeback. Privacy is easy to control when it syncs over USB.

I actually downgraded the library from iTunes 10.7 to 10.6.3 so that I might be able to use it on an OQO Model 2, Mac OS 10.5 Hackintosh, or PowerPC. For now though, I still just keep it going on the Retina: the beautiful screen, weight/ports balance, and repairability still make that the best model of Mac IMHO.

When Apple brings replaceable SSDs to the M1 though, I may well consider leaping forward. Ideally with a 3.5" phone again too.

Funny you mention that. I recently accepted their offer for a free 3 months, mainly out of exasperation of constantly seeing the interstitial every time I launched the app.

The UX of Apple Music is downright horrible. It proceeded to completely hose my existing music library. I could no longer access songs I had purchased in the iCloud Library, and it threw up a dialog stating I need to sync every Apple device I own with Apple Music to be able to stream music from their service. I was on a trip at the time, so good luck with that. Tons of embarrassing UI glitches, like widgets overlaid on top of others rendering them unclickable. Did Apple fire all their QA staff?

Lack of dogfooding is part of it, but I have to wonder how many product managers they've brought in to convert their player to a cloud music service?

Changes like requiring you to sync all your devices with Apple Music are part of many changes to try and make the transition. It's a big one because a player is very different from a service (historically something Apple have been bad at), but they've had a lot of time. Apple have been able to get this far because going "all in" is accepted by Apple customers more than those on other platforms.

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