Apple

Apple’s next big macOS update will reportedly break up iTunes

Pretty sure this isn’t the breakup of Big Tech we envisioned.

by
Joe Rice-Jones
April 12, 2019

Image: 9to5mac

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In the glut of Apple news following the “It’s show time” event at the end of March, the importance of one of the announcements was slightly lost. While the tech world was harping on about Apple Card and how it locks you down to Apple’s ecosystem even more, the humble Apple TV app coming to the Mac set off a conversation about the rest of Apple’s media apps.

Currently, Music, Podcasts, TV, and Books, are all served up via iTunes when you’re on a Mac, along with pretty much everything except for App Store programs. It’s a bloated mess and far from the usable tool that came out in 2001 that let us buy legit digital music and later, manage our iPhones. According to 9to5mac, however, Apple is working on splitting up iTunes into its individual parts, with standalone apps for Music, Podcasts, TV and also a redesign of the Books app.

That will make Apple’s overall ecosystem more coherent, with the same apps used on iOS gaining macOS versions

Those apps will be made using Apple’s Marzipan tech, which ports iPad apps so they can run on the Mac operating system. Developer Steve Troughton-Smith also came to the same conclusions, with evidence he found that points towards the standalone apps.

The new Books app will be restyled to be similar to the News app, with a sidebar, narrower title bar and tabs for Library, Book Store and Audiobook Store. We don’t yet know if the other Marzipan apps will get any redesign to make them different from the iPad versions, although Apple should at least do a few UI tweaks to make them fit better on the landscape orientation screens on the Mac range.

Does that spell the end of the road for iTunes? Probably not, although Apple might clean it up a bit so it’s more of a homepage to link to the other apps, rather than the current confusing mess. Apple would have to break out iPhone management to another app if it was to kill off iTunes altogether, and it’d be foolish to do so when the iTunes branding is one of the longest-running in its portfolio.

What do you think? Happy to see Apple moving some things outside of the iTunes ecosystem? Let us know down below in the comments or carry the discussion over to our Twitter or Facebook.