During Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday, senior vice president of software engineering Craig Federighi announced the end of iTunes, though not in so many words. He confirmed reports from late last week that set off a wave of eulogies for one of the 2000s’ most transformative platforms.
When users update their operating systems to MacOS Catalina, which will be released this fall, the stand-alone iTunes app will be no more. After jokingly announcing that iTunes would include a calendar function to acknowledge how bloated the platform has become, Federighi said, “The future … of iTunes is not one app, but three: Apple Music, Apple Podcasts, and Apple TV.”
Users who have spent the better part of two decades curating iTunes playlists with songs not available on Spotify have little to fear. According to a company spokesperson, when you update to MacOS Catalina, your iTunes songs and playlists will automatically transfer to Apple Music, your podcasts to Apple Podcasts, and your videos to Apple TV.
Although iTunes will no longer exist as a centralized platform for storing different mediums of entertainment, it seems like its absence won’t be too noticeable in macOS Catalina. Leaked images of Apple Music that 9to5Mac published last week look almost identical to the current iTunes interface.
