iTunes: Apple's Elephant in the Room

When Apple released the first iPod onto the market, I don't think even they could've expected all this to happen. From a foundling product with not all that revolutionary features, iPod's now pretty much own the portable MP3 market. Initally, they faced stiff competition for the then unheard-of portable MP3 market. Now, iPods are everywhere running away with the market share in the face of only token gestures of disagreement from Microsoft and some very high-quality, but nonetheless unsuccessful new ranges of Walkmans from Sony. Now, the iPod is available in just about any size, shape, colour, format and with almost any capability you can name. And if the iPod can't do it, there's probably an app for that. So, Apple has been feverishly making bucketloads of money and trying to keep the momentum up, sometimes failing (new iPod shuffle), mostly succeeding (iPhone, ipod touch, iPod nano, etc.).



One of the big things that has let them take such commanding control over the market is the iTunes connection. By forcing iPod users to iTunes, you take more control over their actions as well as ensuring that most users will start purchasing content from the store. The initial iPods barely did anything but then the developments started rolling in. First there was music, then photos, then videos, then PIM data, then Podcasts, then Apps, Ringtones, Games, and various other extra functions. Unfortunately, fearful of losing their market momentum and iTunes users (to others like Winamp etc.). This means that they've kept essentially the same application since the first iPods, But the first iPods contained little more than music. Now, iTunes must sync multiple devices, multiple file systems, music, videos, photos, applications, PIM data and a billion other things that it was never really written to handle. Thus, we now end with what I believe to be one of the singularly worst mainstream bits of code that the world has seen on such a scale before. It's unstable, unreliable, difficult to use, requires immense resources and is generally not a very good program. Admittedly, it probably functions a bit better on Mac, but they should realise that the majority of their consumer base is currently using Windows.


My venerable old Acer Travelmate 4602 has finally been replaced by a new Dell Studio 1557, a far superior machine running all the newest gear (i7, yay!), and still iTunes 9 is slow, only starts up around 50% of the time and is a resource hog. I'm onw very relieved that I didn't try to upgrade the old machine with the new v9. On top of this, there are a multitude of things that software like that should be able to do, that it can't. Move to a new computer without ruining one's carefully organised music colletion, for example. Or to function fully without a stable internet connection. But it can't do this, or any of the other things that the Web would so dearly love.
Apple has simply been overcautious and (to an extent) greedy, trying to hold onto every scrap of market share and so simply stuffing a not-all-that-fantastic application with so much not-all-that-well-built functionality that it is just waiting for one of two things: major overhaul or catastrophic failure...