Tuesday, January 12, 2021

iTunes at 20

Kirk McElhearn:

On January 10, 2001, Steve Jobs went on the stage at Macworld Expo in San Francisco and presented a new app that would change the course of Apple. iTunes would become Apple’s most important app, not only because it was the companion of the iPod that would be released later that year, but also because it would become the framework for all of the company’s future online stores. (Watch the original presentation: part 1, part 2.)

[…]

It’s interesting to look back at the first presentation of iTunes, to see how little the iTunes interface has changed in twenty years. Aside from the fact that, on the Mac, it’s not iTunes any more – when Apple released macOS Catalina, they split it into four apps – the Music app is a direct descanted of the original iTunes. (iTunes still exists for Windows, with the same features as the previous integrated app on macOS.)

Previously:

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It’s interesting to look back at the first presentation of iTunes, to see how little the iTunes interface has changed in twenty years.

Superficially, maybe. The UI/UX changes in iTunes 12 made it so unusable for me that I switched away from iTunes entirely.

@vintner
I keep itunes 11 on my media player specifically because of the superior interface. Even today, it’s still supported by the itunes remote app and provides a simple way to organize and play my music and ripped videos.

How is that the best quality we have of that presentation?

Soundjam cost money right, at least for the full version? As a teenager at the time, I was happy iTunes was free at least.

Replying to myself: I think it cost money for the version to rip/encode MP3s, but playback was free?

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