by Jason Snell
Marco Arment zeroes in on the ‘Toxic Hellstew’
Saying Apple’s online services are terrible is a serious oversimplification of matters. As Marco Arment writes, some Apple services—push notifications and iCloud Photo Library—are pretty good.
But the iTunes Store back-end is a toxic hellstew of unreliability. Everything that touches the iTunes Store has a spotty record for me and almost every Mac owner I know.
And the iTunes app itself is the toxic hellstew. iTunes has an impossible combination of tasks on its plate that cannot be done well. iTunes is the definition of cruft and technical debt. It was an early version of iTunes that demonstrated the first software bugs to Grace Hopper in 1946.
It’s time to end iTunes as we know it and try something new, but I’m afraid that that day of reckoning will never come because iTunes has just gotten too big to fail.