TL;DR: Apple’s upcoming iOS 18, macOS 15, watchOS 11, and tvOS 18 updates are expected to be “ambitious and compelling,” featuring generative AI improvements, especially in Siri. The revamped Siri may offer enhanced integration with Messages, auto-generated Apple Music playlists, and productivity app integration. Apple is investing $1 billion annually in AI research, aiming to compete with Google and OpenAI. The company is debating whether to deploy the new AI technology via the cloud, on-device, or a combination. (via ChatGPT)
It does feel like it’s ignored, mostly due to features being inconsistently integrated like for example Smart Playlists, but would you really call it the bare minimum? IMO both mobile and especially desktop app is a lot better than e.g. Spotify in terms of what it can do. Of course it probably wouldn’t compare well against other current full music library managers though, I wouldn’t exactly call Spotify fully-featured either, but against other streaming services I’d say it definitely holds up.
I think Apple needs to let Music go from the release cycle of the operating systems, especially if they’re doubling down on Android and Windows support.
I mostly interact with it through iTunes on Windows, which is sort of just sort of frozen in time and frustrating as hell to use (that’s a whole other issue in and of itself), but even switching over to a Mac and trying to interact with my iPod just feels like a more irritating experience than it should be. Hell, most of the stuff I that I should be able to do on the iPod itself, just can’t be done apparently and requires you hook it up to a PC/Mac. Simple things like just adding a song file, renaming a song name, adding it to an album, or adding a picture. Yeah, it’s easier on a computer, but there shouldn’t be any reason you can’t have the same functionality on an iPod or iPad at this point. I dread having to add songs to my iPod anymore, because half the time it will just refuse to add it and I’ll spend an hour or two trying to troubleshoot it to figure out what the problem is.
Good point, I’ve heard iTunes on Windows is awful. And yeah lack of library management except on desktops is something I find annoying too. Thankfully it’s not too bad for me since I’m subscribed to Apple Music so it syncs between my computer and phone, and I only have a few albums that I uploaded myself, but I can imagine it being very awful if you have a big local library only and have to hook it up to sync. Here’s hoping at least iPhone/iPad get library management features in the future, iPod is unlikely since that’s discontinued :(
Apple Music has a proper Windows app now, if you’re willing to install from the Microsoft Store.