Bye bye, iTunes -- we never really loved you anyway

Apple is due to kick off its Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday, and at the event the company is expected to kill off iTunes.

Having been with us for nearly two decades, it seems that the software everyone (well, a lot of people) loves to hate is finally being put out to pasture. At WWDC we should see Apple kill off iTunes, breaking it up into a number of individual apps for macOS, just as has happened on iOS.

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The writing has been on the wall for iTunes for some time now. Apple has slowly developed and refined its media and hardware management tool over the years, but it remained slow, bloated and largely unliked, and numerous far more capable and elegant options have sprung up. Apple itself already has standalone apps for managing music, movies and podcasts, so iTunes has become irrelevant.

News of the impending closure comes courtesy of Bloomberg which says:

iTunes has been the way Apple users listen to music, watch movies and TV shows, hear podcasts, and manage their devices for almost two decades. This year, Apple is finally ready to move into a new era. The company is launching a trio of new apps for the Mac -- Music, TV, and Podcasts -- to replace iTunes. That matches Apple's media app strategy on iPhones and iPads. Without iTunes, customers can manage their Apple gadgets through the Music app.

Of course, we'll have to wait until Monday to have this confirmed, but at this stage it seems highly likely that we can now wave goodbye to iTunes.

There will of course be much more news coming out of WWDC, including a batch of app updates, and we'll have full reports next week.

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