Don’t order the fish

Marco Arment on Apple Music:

But the iTunes Store back-end is a toxic hellstew of unreliability. Everything that touches the iTunes Store has a spotty record for me and almost every Mac owner I know.

And the iTunes app itself is the toxic hellstew. iTunes has an impossible combination of tasks on its plate that cannot be done well. iTunes is the definition of cruft and technical debt. It was an early version of iTunes that demonstrated the first software bugs to Grace Hopper in 1946.

Probably not coincidentally, some of iTunes’ least reliable features are reliant on the iTunes Store back-end, including Genius from forever ago, iTunes Match more recently, and now, Apple Music.

I feel like iTunes 13 has to be a re-do.  Maybe I’m wrong, but Apple Music is such a bolted-on mess compared to the relatively well-done iOS versions that 12.x has to be a placeholder for a fairly ambitious rewrite.

Right?

Initial Apple Music Impressions

On June 30th at around 10am, the switch was flipped on the iOS 8.4 upgrade that contained the new Apple Music app and about an hour later, Beats 1 went live on the new streaming service. Overall, it’s been a fairly smooth launch from what I gather, and I’ve had a chance to kick the […]

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A quick Apple Music scorecard

Recently, I posted my wish list of what I’d like to see in Apple Music before the WWDC announcement and while I’m really excited overall, I do still have some questions.  Here’s a few bulleted thoughts based on what we know right now. Things I’m excited about They nailed the ‘architecture’ question I had. You […]

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My ‘Apple Music’ Wish List

In the next few weeks Apple is set to announce a slew of updates to iOS and OS X. Most rumors indicate that we’ll see a lot of small improvements with every corner of the Apple ecosystem, but I’m looking most forward to the impending announcement of the new Apple / Beats product that should […]

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