The incredible shrinking iTunes

Digital media 1 Minute

Once upon a time, someone pointed out that Steve Jobs appears to be surrounded by a reality distortion field that makes it impossible for independent observers to see his actions clearly. George Hotelling has been following the remarkable disappearance of features with each new iTunes version:

It seems every new version of iTunes removes some feature in the interest of Apple’s suppliers. Are Apple’s customers filing bug reports saying “please make your program not work with my other programs” and “please let me do less with my music”? Is DRM a dealbreaker for the music industry? If people demanded that their music to work with every music player would the music industry respond by stopping production and sales of music?

It’s a lengthy list. All I can say is, if Microsoft did anything like this, it would be on the front page of Slashdot.

Unknown's avatar

Published by Ed Bott

Tech journalist. Author of 25+ books. ZDNET Contributing Editor since 2006. Contact info: https://edbott.com/contact-me/

Published

4 thoughts on “The incredible shrinking iTunes”

  1. I cannot emphasize enough how bad a decision it is for companies to place the interests of content owners and advertisers over customers. While these effort yield the short term benefit of access to more content, they yield a long-term bad taste in the mouthes of consumers. TiVo has started to do it with their Ads, and now iTunes is gradually eroding functionality in favor of their other constituents. I predict that this will end badly for Apple as open systems (DRM-lite) become increasingly attractive.

  2. That same hypocrisy drives fans of the Firefox browser. Anything IE or Microsoft = All bad. Anything Mozilla or Open Source = Not a big deal. Three security issues have been disclosed in the past eight days on Firefox and instead of merely acknowledging that no browser can be safe (for long at least), they froth again, “Oh yeah? Well IE is worse!”

    DRM-cripplied media is an amazing phenomena to me. At my age, I don’t need any music bad enough to pay someone 2, 3, or seven times for it. I’ll just keep it in my head for the price that Apple sells it.

  3. 4 of those aren’t features. They were ways of circumventing iTunes FEATURES.

    one had a corresponding improvement (burns from 10 to 7) computers authorized upped to 5 from 3.

    Which leaves 0 features lost.

Comments are closed.