> Apple/NeXT have done things that were completely mind-blowing and heretofore impossible.
I actually see this in their transition from amd64 to arm64. While of course they aren't first and there were some bumps, they were confident enough to execute on doing it _at all_.
NeXT had already done the work to support M68K, Sun/SPARC, HP PA/RISC and IA-32 before Apple acquired them. They have been architecture-independent for quite some time.
iTunes was awesome back when the fanciest thing it could do was audiobooks, and nobody had heard about podcasts.
I know quite a few Windows users (that did not own iPods) that converted to using iTunes to manage their music library. The alternative at that point was often Winamp, and they managed to mess up the good thing they had with Winamp 3.
Overall the library functionality, as well as the Rendezvous-based library sharing (made LAN parties into interesting ways to discover new music) made for a quite sweet deal, and the Windows version truly was good.
Stuff went downhill sometime post-iPhone, when it started to become a weird one stop shop for phone sync, backups, movies etc, but even then the odd cool thing was added, like coverflow, or the fairly nice UI where the album coverart’s edge color faded into the background of the listing.
Point being, iTunes wasn’t crap from day one, it was cool before it deteriorated into that.
EphPod was way better than iTunes. It was free, straightforward music management for the iPod, and in fact the only way for Windows users to use an iPod. To this day, iTunes (or "Music") still can't automatically keep your library in sync with the files on your computer, but EphPod automatically operated that way.
I elaborated on other iTunes problems below, many of which it suffered from on day one. People just forget, or become used to degraded standards and functionality over time.
As much as I hated (and still hate) iTunes, it was better than WinAmp. I'll give you that.
And yes, the decade of forcing people to manage all the data and applications on a handheld Unix computer with a shoddy JUKEBOX app was an embarrassment to Apple and insulting to its customers.
In the early 2000‘s iTunes had some pretty neat features- it supported a handful of non-Apple mp3 players including my Rio and Motorola SLVR. It had a pretty decent encoder and great AppleScript support. One of my first “software projects” was an AppleScript droplet that accepted an dragged audio file, the sermon from the church where the owner ran the sound booth, and output a 128kbps and 64kbps audio file for upload to the church website. I remember getting excited when the color changed, indicating a new version (Green>Purple>Blue IIRC). I curated my music library in it, carefully cleaning and updating id3 tags for LimeWire (and later BitTorrent)-acquired albums. iTunes will always hold a special place in my heart, “Music” with its generic generic icon just can’t bring me the same joy.
Yes, and the feature where you would type in the search bar and while you were typing results would appear was killer. That just seems the way searches work in general today, but that definitely wasn't the case then.
From the beginning, iTunes lacked simple functionality that EphPod had. Remember EphPod? It was the only way 95% of the world could use an iPod, because it was the only Windows software to interact with one. And it was free.
For example, a major flaw in iTunes (which it still suffers from) is that it didn't automatically pick up files you added to your music directory. You must manually "add to library..." every time you add music to your computer. EphPod, on the other hand, managed to stay in sync automatically.
Another historic defect: By default, iTunes would sync with an iPod automatically when it was connected to the computer, and you had no opportunity to stop it. There was a checkbox in iTunes's settings to turn this behavior off... but it was HIDDEN unless an iPod was connected (obviously too late to prevent the syncing)!
The profound defectiveness of this design became apparent when people replaced their hard drives and plugged their iPod in... only to have all their music blown away when iTunes "synced" with an empty library.
Another one that still exists: When a file goes missing, you don't know about it until you try to play it; it's not indicated in the UI (again, because iTunes lacks auto-syncing of your library to files on disk). And when it happens, you obviously want to troubleshoot it. The first question you have is, where does iTunes think the file should be? Guess what: You can't find out. It inexplicably won't show you the path it expects the song to reside at. You can get that info if you right-click on a song that DOES play; but if it goes missing, iTunes refuses to show you where it's looking for it.
Then there was iTunes's inability to separate identically-named albums by different artists ("Greatest Hits," anyone?). I haven't checked this lately, but it was a problem because Apple apparently couldn't figure out how to group by two criteria.
Also, if the library DB gets corrupted and you need to delete everything and re-add it, your playlists are lost. They're still shown in the sidebar, but they're empty. This doesn't make sense, because you can export your playlists to text files and reload them after you replace your library. So they can clearly refer to song metadata. Why does this break simply because the library was refreshed?
And when Apple decided to shoe-horn the management of its handheld Unix computer/phones into a JUKEBOX application, the results were predictable. I'll spare you the rant.
Today, iTunes suffers from even more baffling functional defects. For example, if you subscribe to Apple Music and you find a show you like, there's no way to bookmark or save it so you can listen to it in the future. Also, there's no way to right-click on an episode and say, "Other episodes" or otherwise see them. And, when you reach the end of an episode, it doesn't play the next one; it just repeats the same episode forever (and there's no control for this behavior).
To this day, photo syncing doesn't work. I don't even know how Windows users are supposed to copy pictures off their phones. Millions of people have been E-mailing pictures to themselves for 15 years, and that's pretty sad.
And need we mention the disastrous implementation of Music Match, which had iTunes replacing users' files with bogus versions of songs with the same name from the iTunes Store?
No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.