But the company’s presentation, at its developers conference in San Jose, Calif., offered a lot of suspense around iTunes. “Tell me about iTunes or leave me alone while I feverishly try to back up my library lmao,” tweeted one user.
Apple laid to rest a misapprehension that the iTunes Store (where users purchase songs and albums for download) would be going away in favor of Apple Music (the company’s streaming service). The iTunes Store will remain, as will the music that people bought from it. But Apple did address a long-running complaint from users of the iTunes desktop app: mainly, that it’s trying to be too many things at once.
At Monday’s conference, Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, joked about this. “Customers love iTunes and everything it can do,” he said, before sarcastically asking: “But if there’s one thing we hear over and over, it’s ‘Can iTunes do even more?’ ”
Apple announced it will be launching a new stand-alone music app for Mac, as well as a new and improved TV app and a podcast app. And it said device syncing will now be handled in the Finder, the macOS file manager. Apple did not say how syncing iPhones or iPads would be handled on Windows machines.