Apple Breaking Up iTunes: Terrible or Great Idea?

Trading bloat for excessive fragmentation.

Way back in ye olden days of 2001, Apple launched iTunes. At the time, it was a revolutionary one-stop shop for downloading, playing, and organizing your music. And although v1.0 might look almost impossibly crude in retrospect, it certainly eclipsed the era’s rivals (and yes, I say that despite my enduring affection for Winamp, which really kicked the llama’s ass).

But over the ensuing eighteen years, iTunes suffered from feature bloat. Apple tried to pack more and more onto the platform, including video, books, podcasts, and other downloads. Sure, the occasional UX update attempted to corral the chaos, but Apple ultimately lacked the courage to rebuild the app from the ground-up when it still had a viable chance of success. Today, virtually every iTunes process (no matter how simple) is a magical multi-click journey.

Now, according to news reports, Apple plans to finally chop up iTunes into separate apps: Music, TV, and Podcasts. This makes sense, especially given Apple’s recent unveiling of the streaming-centric Apple TV+. Moreover, these new apps will reportedly leverage Apple’s upcoming “Marzipan” cross-platform framework (i.e., they will work on all Apple platforms, from the biggest of the big macOS desktops down to the smallest…