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iTunesFeature

Over the past xvi years, Apple has built a reputation for creating loftier-quality products. The iPod, iPhone, iPad, and Macintosh are often criticized for being overpriced or poorly positioned for sure use cases. Gamers, in particular, get short shrift on Apple tree Macs. But no ane really argues over Apple device quality — only how much yous pay for it.

At that place are exceptions to every rule, even so, and Apple tree's most egregious exception, iTunes (or more specifically, the iTunes Music Store) is turning 13 today. As a veteran of the PC industry, I recall the cursory halcyon moment when iTunes was actually a useful slice of software for managing a local media drove, peculiarly back when motion picture trailers were being released more often than not in QuickTime and Windows Media Actor had limited codec support compared with other third-political party utilities. Then, on Apr 28 2003, Apple added back up for the Apple Music Store. It's been more than-or-less steadily downhill from there.

Today, iTunes is a grab-basket kludge of mishmashed features and poorly organized options. It's crash-happy, performs remarkably poorly when asked to organize classical music, and has been known to eat large libraries (or parts of them) when asked to synchronize across its ain services. It is, as one developer put it, a "toxic hellstew of unreliability" — and that's coming from someone who uses the Mac version, which really ought to exist ameliorate behaved than its boorish Windows cousin.

AppleMusic

Yeah, it certainly did. Repeatedly.

The screenshot above is from my ain installation of iTunes for Windows. Since I have an iPhone, not using iTunes isn't really an option. Clicking on "Connect" gave me the above message. A second click fixed it, a third brought it back again. This is the sort of irritatingly obtuse message that used to be the provenance of Microsoft.

iTunes eats 200MB of RAM to start and close to 400MB of retentivity in one case I've cycled through each tab once. "For You" is nothing but a full-folio ad for Apple Music, which means Apple hijacked i of its master tabs as a way to sell me on a monthly service partly delivered through a desktop awarding with the grace and poise of a vi-week dead manatee rotting on a Florida embankment. After clicking on a few tracks and albums, iTunes has striking 500MB of RAM; clicking "Movies" and then "Books" nudges this over the 600MB threshold. I click on every choice (Music, Movies, Goggle box Shows, App Store, Books, Podcasts, and iTunes U) and am non surprised to encounter that the RAM footprint is edging towards 900MB.

900MB of RAM isn't much in this day and historic period; Firefox regularly eats 1.6GB of RAM thanks to various continuing bug that the Mozilla team apparently tin can't gear up. In iTunes case, however, this bloat is just the easiest way to illustrate the underlying problem: This is an application that stuffs way too much content into a wrapper never meant to concord it.

Every bit Marco Arment wrote last yr:

iTunes' UI design is horrible for like reasons: not because it has bad designers, only because they've been given an impossible task: cramming style too much functionality into a single app while also making information technology look "make clean."

iTunes is designed past the Junk Drawer Method: when plenty cruft has built up that somebody tells the team to redesign it, while besides calculation and heavily promoting these great new features in the UI that are actually important to the company'southward other interests and are admittedly not-negotiable, the but affair they can really do is hibernate all of the old complexity in new places.

iTunes is the worst office of owning an iPhone. Information technology'southward its own argument against using any Apple tree service. If Tim Cook actually has a shred of decency, he'll celebrate the anniversary past taking the application out back and shooting it in the head before ordering the software team to get back to piece of work on something ameliorate.

There will exist much rejoicing.