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Honestly, you can't separate iTunes and Quicktime from OS X. In the general sense of it, OS X is as much an ecosystem as anything else. In that ecosystem, iTune
by boucher 17y ago
Honestly, you can't separate iTunes and Quicktime from OS X. In the general sense of it, OS X is as much an ecosystem as anything else. In that ecosystem, iTunes and Quicktime are extremely important. Everything Apple does now runs through iTunes, it's central to the experience. And the underlying technology behind quicktime powers much of what you see on the screen when using a mac. These things ship with the OS, and it's taken for granted that all users have (and almost all use) them.
- ptomato 17y agoBut there's certainly nothing requiring you to use them on the mac. And you don't need to have anything to do with the features he mentions. Use mpd/theremin/vlc/etc etc. And simply don't buy DRMed files in the first place. You can certainly just trash both Quicktime and iTunes from your Applications folder without deleteriously affecting the OS, except in so far as you actually wanted to use one of the two.
- duskwuff 17y agoTo be fair, QuickTime is used on a widespread basis as an audio/video manipulation library -- it's rather more than a player. However, the DRM-handling components are completely inert unless you're specifically working with protected media files. iTunes, on the other hand, can be disposed of entirely. There are a few isolated hooks into it (the "Media" section of the Open dialog, for instance), but certainly nothing essential.
- tptacek 17y agoNeither iTunes nor Quicktime are anything like IE was alleged to be in the '90s. You can work on a Mac system just fine without using DRM-tainted Quicktime code or ever launching iTunes. Everything Apple does does not run through iTunes, and iTunes is not central to the experience. You're confusing the weirdness of managing a smartphone contacts database through a "Tunes" application with, um, an operating system. Webkit is far more important to OS X than iTunes is; note that Webkit has also begun to devour iTunes.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- boucher 17y agoI'm not making a technical claim. I know what an operating system is. I'm making a claim about general mac users. I don't know a single person (even amongst the techies) who has uninstalled iTunes from their mac. I know few people who don't use it every single day. If you use an iPhone, or an iPod, you use iTunes. There is no supported alternative. There isn't even a widely used alternative for just playing music on the mac. On another level, Snow Leopard, the operating system Apple is shipping, is not just about Mac OS X proper. iTunes ships with Snow Leopard, along with probably a hundred other applications. They come installed. They are part of the product. And to the vast majority of the computer using population, there is no distinction between those two things.
- tptacek 17y agoI'm sorry, but your argument that iTunes is "central" to the OS X experience is totally unconvincing. The logic you're employing here implies that Grapher.app is also central to the experience. If you're not playing music and you don't own an iPhone, you simply don't ever run iTunes. On the other hand, there's probably no Macbook use case that avoids Safari, Finder, and either MS Office or Pages.app.