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Apple's Quietly Huge iTunes Business Gets A Massive Redesign, And It's 'The Real Deal'

itunes 11 apple macBecause Apple is a $500 billion company generating $100 billion a year thanks mostly to iPhones and iPads, it's easy to forget that iTunes is itself a huge business – set to generate revenues around $15 billion next year.

Revenues like that are bigger than Yahoo and Facebook's revenues combined.

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So it's worth paying attention to iTunes, especially when Apple releases an entirely new version of it, like it did yesterday.

Yesterday, the world's most influential Apple blogger, John Gruber, took a long look at the update.

Here's a bullet-point version of what he had to say:

  • On the missing sidebar: "iTunes 11 is in many ways a redefinition of what it means to be a modern Mac app. There’s an iOS-inspired emphasis on putting less stuff in your face at the same time."
  • On his favorite new element, "Expanded View": "In a graphical list of albums or movies or shows, you click one and it opens in a subview right there under the album/movie/show. Instead of going to a new view, you stay where you are. No way to get confused about where you are, more of a sense of direct manipulation."
  • On another good feature, "Up Next": "This is pretty much how I always wanted the old Party Shuffle feature to work — show me what’s coming up, and let me add whatever strikes me to the top of the queue."
  • On the new MiniPlayer: "Their goal with the redesigned MiniPlayer was to allow you to do almost everything you’d want music-playback-wise without leaving the MiniPlayer mode. I think they got pretty close."
Apple
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