I've never used Zune, but iTunes has always bothered me. I get that people took to it because you could buy new music and get it to your phone from the same application.
But I've always considered the interface to be a cross between the worst web page on the web and the worst native app. What the hell were they thinking?
It's especially a nightmare on Windows with all the extra services it installs that start with up with the OS. Does anyone actually use Bonjour? The automatic updates that decide to install Safari & Quicktime, it runs like molasses even on the latest and greatest hardware, you also seem to have to resign-in to your apple account every time the software even thinks about doing anything. One of the worst offenses is it won't monitor folders for new music, if you decide to acquire music outside of iTunes you have to manually tell it to rescan for music each time. iTunes is an offense against humankind and will probably be what starts WWIII.
You have to understand a few things. First, iTunes has grown a ton over the years. It has some serious warts. For some reason the integrated stores are slow as hell despite displaying simple webpages. Navigation has gotten worse and feature after feature has been added to the left hand pane.
But by and large it works. It plays music, you can purchase music easily, it does a good job syncing my iPhone or my old iPod. That puts it head-and-shoulders above some manufacturer software for controlling hardware devices.
I'm also going to guess you're a Windows person. I promise you that iTunes ran much faster on my old G4 PowerBook than on my much more powerful P3 desktop I had at the same time. iTunes runs on Windows... and that's about all you can say. Apple wants it to look like the OS X version and it does, but they clearly don't care much about making it perform well.
As for Bonjour, it's actually very nice. When I open iTunes my iPhone shows up if it's on the network and they can sync. The button to play sound or video on my Apple TV shows up and with one click I've got playback on my home theater. It's been doing that since I got an Airport Express when they were released in 2004. It's amazingly simple and easy to use.
If it doesn't work, you're sort of up a creek as there is no way to know why the devices don't see each other, but that's quite rare. And Apple announced a total rewrite of iTunes during the iPhone 5 event, which is long over due. While iTunes works pretty well on OS X, it could certainly be better in many respects. I'm quite hopeful.
As for the reason the iTunes store is a web page, I'm sure that's so they can totally restyle it without having to push software updates. It's too bad because it's easily the slowest part of the application, and not having tabs means you can't open a few store pages to compare applications.
> it does a good job syncing my iPhone or my old iPod
And I think that's a big plus over a lot of Apple's other software offerings. iTunes is usually the last thing to still work with old software and hardware. If it was a typical Apple app, it'd require 10.8.2 and would reject icky old armv6 devices.
> As for the reason the iTunes store is a web page, I'm sure that's so they can totally restyle it without having to push software updates.
It seems to have its limits — the new layout in iOS6 has not appeared on iOS5 at the same time.
I think the point is that TODAY it's a bit bloated and slow. I don't believe it really matters if it ran fine in the past (on your G4 or wherever) or what led to where it is now.
I'm sure Apple acknowledges this and will rewrite it sometime before long, but until then it's a bit of a sore spot for many (including myself).
My point with the G4 comment was that it ran much better on my G4 than it did on my much more powerful P3 because the software was so poorly optimized for Windows.
I agree that, in general, it could be a LOT faster. Hopefully the rewrite that's due out soon will fix that.
iTunes at least works on a Mac. Microsoft have failed at creating a usable UI on their own platform. The formerly-known-as-Metro design has completely failed when implemented in Zune.
It's also missing features such as backup and sync for contacts and messages, while offering a mandatory(!!) sync with their cloud. No thanks, I just helped a friend switch from WP to iPhone for this last reason alone.
