RUSH: Oh, by the way, folks, I promised to make this clear yesterday, and I can. I just neglected to get to it ’til now. So Apple had their big developers conference yesterday, and they released betas of the new operating system for the Mac, for the iPhone and iPad and the watch and Apple TV.
And Snerdley came in yesterday breathlessly, “Are they canceling iTunes? Are they getting rid of iTunes? Oh my God, they can’t. All my music!”
No, they’re not getting rid of the functions of iTunes. And there’s been some horrible reporting on this. I mean, it’s been utterly embarrassing. In fact, I’ll tell you something else. To show you how bad this is, the iOS beta, the new beta for iOS 13, Apple does not want anybody in the public installing this thing. When you go to their developer page, there’s even a little note for you thrill-seekers, “We strongly suggest that you wait until the public beta next month.”
They’ve made it so difficult to install this thing. Installing betas normally is easy. You download a little profile, put it on your device, and that sees an update on the server, you download it over the air, you install it, you’re done, 20 minutes. Not so with iOS 13; iOS 13 requires you to download an X code — that’s an app that you use to create apps. You download that so that your phone can recognize iOS 13. Your iTunes on your computer can’t ’cause there isn’t any more iTunes.
Anyway, the install process is much more complicated, takes much more time, and I read 15 different blogs last night who had it all wrong. They simply cut and pasted from previous posts on how to install an Apple beta. Some of them are still up and running, and they’re all wrong!
They say go here to get your profile, download the profile, and then you’ll see the beta update. They’re still running this. They haven’t even corrected it, 15 of them. It’s just another glaring sign of how destroyed journalism is. If they don’t know by now that those posts are dead wrong… they’ve got people trying to find things that don’t exist to try to install the beta when Apple’s made it really hard for anybody other than developers to do it.
Anyway, I did it. And I also installed the Mac beta, which is 10.15. And I can tell you, I have used it. iTunes is gone as the name of an app. It is not gone the way it operates. If you use iTunes to download your own music, you burn CDs, you want to import them, they will be there. They’ll look exactly like they do now in the sidebar.
iTunes is still gonna live on Windows. There’s no substitute for it. So none of that’s gonna change for people that use Windows to sync with say an iPod or an iPod Touch or even an iPhone. But for those of you that use Mac, the music app — and it has the same icon that iTunes has — will do everything iTunes does with music.
The TV app will download movies and TV shows that you want, keep them organized. And you’ll play music with the music app. You can play videos and movies and TV shows with the TV app. So the name iTunes on Mac probably will be gone if the first beta is any indication, but you are not going to lose one thing you can do with iTunes as a result of this. So I assuaged Mr. Snerdley’s panic and I can assuage yours. No sweat.
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