Rumors today have indicated something the community has been wanting for a while. It seems that the end is nigh for iTunes.
At the last Apple media event, Apple mentioned that a new TV app was coming to Mac, which was the first sign that iTunes might be no more. We didn’t have any other information about the TV app and that left us with questions. Would the TV be built into iTunes or would it be its own app? If it is its own app, what happens to the Movies section in iTunes.
Since then, two of the best coders, Steve Troughton-Smith and Guilherme Rambo, have found evidence in the code that iTunes is going to be broken up.
Well look at that. Music, TV, Podcasts and a new Books app are real, Marzipan-based, and coming to the Mac in 10.15, and @9to5mac has the icons to prove it 😬 Great scoop @_inside https://t.co/ZsHwqixzFO
— Steve Troughton-Smith (@stroughtonsmith) April 10, 2019
According to the scoop at 9to5mac, Apple is planning to release Marzipan versions of the music, podcast, books, and Apple TV apps on macOS this year. They even have the Mac app versions of the Podcast and TV app, which you can see below.
Marzipan Apps are Apple system it is developing to bring iOS apps to the Mac easier. Currently, if you are running your Mac on Mojave, there are 4 Marzipan style apps: Home, News, Voice Memos, and Stocks. So far, I’m not a fan of these apps.
Is This The iTunes Future We Wanted?
This move gives me pause. While I’ve asked for the break up of iTunes to these apps as well, I wasn’t really asking for an iPad version of the Music app on macOS. What I wanted was a Mac version of the app, just breaking out each section to it’s own app to make iTunes quicker and more efficient.
If Apple is truly just porting over the iOS versions of these apps we will lose functionality. While most people are moving towards streaming music, there are still things that I do inside of iTunes that I don’t want to lose. I want to be able to change the metadata of music I own if I need to. You can’t do this in the standard Music app on iOS, and requires you to default to the Mac.
If Apple were to just build the app in the new system that they are building to help bring iOS apps to the Mac, but they aren’t just porting it, that will bring some hope to me. I would love for this experiment of bringing the app platforms together to be a two-way street. I don’t just want iOS apps on the Mac, but I want iOS to get more Mac-like functionality.
Podcasts, on the other hand, can go the way of iOS. I rarely listen to
This gets me excited for what’s to come this summer at WWDC and the future of the Mac. Especially since I just got a new iMac.
