A rather questionable new rumor is coming out of Three Guys And A Podcast. They’re claiming that Apple will not only discontinue iTunes this year but they’ll replace it with Safari. What?
It’s actually not quite as crazy as all that. The idea is that Apple will leverage the technology they purchased in their Lala acquisition as well as their new North Carolina data center to bring iTunes into the cloud as a web-only application, which you’ll then sync to your iPhone through Safari.
According to the Three Guys’ source, the new iTunes/Safari application will be unveiled later this year at Apple’s September iPod event, and they claim that “moving iTunes’ organizational side-bar into Safari isn’t a monumental task.”
I’m really skeptical of this. The biggest complaint people have about iTunes is that it tries to do way, way too much. Eliminating iTunes and cramming its functionality into Safari isn’t going to make that problem go away: if anything, it’s just going to make Safari even less appetizing to use. On the other hand, if Apple did bake iTunes into Safari, they’d finally manage to make iTunes indispensable… but my guess is that it would at the cost of a Microsoft-style anti-trust lawsuit. Color me extremely cynical until September.
[via 9to5Mac]
