Their UI quality is more mystique than reality. iTunes was a particular abomination among many. Not only did it have a terrible interface which conformed with nobody's standards and looked nothing like any other Mac app, it also had a propensity for eating your music, especially music which was yours and acquired outside the Apple store. Hardly a quality program. Apple apps are still famous for focusing more on keeping you in their walled garden than on making the best UI for the user.

> iTunes was a particular abomination among many

It didn't have to be really good: It was better than any other digital music store out there!

Software that does this: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250315803 is likely worse than nothing at all.

Assuming you mean Apple Music (iTunes was an okay MP3 player/ripper, but is dead), I consider it the exception that proves the rule. Enjoy the schadenfreude of this recent Apple Music for macOS review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gE8ZikfrpFU

No, I meant iTunes. Their willingness to make that was a harbinger of Bad Things to Come, ala the review you linked.

Apple had some good UI ideas in the past. For a fleeting moment, they were the best. But eons ago they sold out the user to sell him a lifestyle/subscription system built around keeping people from leaving. This vastly compromised their UI designs to the point of making them frustrating and sometimes futile.

I once read a composer complaining that iTunes has deleted his master records and "helpfully" replaced them with compressed files (lossy compression of course). I tried to find it to prove your point, but found this instead:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250315803

Software that loses data it fetched or produced is an accident. Software that actively search for and deletes data it has nothing to do with (in backups!!), is malware. People went to jail over such things.

There are many iTunes stories like that. A friend of mine who is a composer and singer had his original songs erased from his library, irreplaceable live recordings, because of Apple's open hostility toward files they didn't create.

iTunes was SoundJam MP with an Apple makeover. Both SoundJam MP and Audion were the shit at the time, so I recall being thrilled at the acqui-hire.

Why specifically do you hold iTunes in such low regard? The bolt-on, beyond-music functionality has always sucked, but I didn't find it wanting from a music management POV. (Although I never used it for ripping. dBpoweramp for me, thank you.)

iTunes was never as good as any of the free music managers out there at the time. It lacked most serious features that users with a real collection (of their own) might need. Anything related to finding, sorting, organizing, naming, changing metadata, moving, sharing, re-ripping, ripping at all, etc. were severely crippled. Perhaps that's because SoundJam didn't build those features. But they stayed unbuilt because Apple didn't want them.

As far as the raw UI, they were shown to the door by Zune which was a massive failure! Couldn't Apple with its money and music business success have made Zune or something even better? Of course they could. They had an early lead. My point is they chose not to because openness and control in music (or anything else) is antithetical to their business model. This adversarial view of users is also what lead to terrible iTunes bugs like eating your music, which others also recall well.

I agree. The Mac ecosystem has long valued quality, especially when it comes to UI/UX. One of my favorite proprietary software companies is The Omni Group, which has made a lot of very well-done software tools for the Mac, such as OmniGraffle. The company's adherence to Apple's UI guidelines is strict, and its products are wonderful to use. Apple itself has also made excellent software (I'm a longtime macOS user), though I feel that its UI/UX perfectionism has slipped in recent years.

> Apple itself has also made excellent software (I'm a longtime macOS user),

Then how would you know how good or bad Apples software UI/UX is if you have only one frame of reference? It's good or bad compared to what?

I don't think you can easily make that claim.

I’m not exclusively a Mac user. In the past 30 years I’ve also used MS-DOS, every version of Windows since 95 (except for Me and server-based versions like 2003 and 2008), various Linux desktops, Android, ChromeOS, and iOS. I’ve even played around with NeXTstep, Haiku, Pharo, and Plan 9.

The classic Mac OS and pre-Big Sur macOS were the best environments I’ve used from a UI/UX perspective, with Windows 95/98/NT/2000 being worthy runners up.

This answer is how you should preface your argument. Gives people like me context. Saying Im long time mac user in a vacuum misleads small minds like mine

How's Pharo in practice? It seems really cool in demos.

Reputation, yes, however this is no longer reality IMHO. Think of all those posts about how the keyboard sucks on macbooks, think of the posts complaining about Apple's quality in general over the past couple years. It may be a somewhat recent change, but Apple does not produce good quality any more. Apple is useful, but a bit janky these days.

Agreed about their software quality, but their laptops are still the best. The keyboard was an very real issue for awhile, but now they seem sorted out and are one of the best keyboards out there. Not to mention I cannot find a non-Apple laptop with the quality of screen and especially touchpad. It's a shame too because I am trying to move further out of the Apple ecosystem, but I can not find an acceptable laptop.

I'm not going to weigh in on Apple but raising one of the most monolithic, insular, biggest capitalization companies on the planet to talk about software craftsmanship feels so so so so far from the point, from the question of software craftsmanship in the world. Icd rather not start the discussion by looking at extremes.