Sources: the next major version of macOS will include standalone Music, Podcasts, and TV apps alongside a redesigned Books app
During the “It's show time” event in late March, Apple announced that the TV app would be coming to the Mac soon. This naturally sparked discussions …
Context & Ripple Effects
This report is the first concrete look at what became the end of iTunes on the Mac. Two months after these sources spoke, Apple confirmed the split at WWDC, breaking iTunes into separate Music, Podcasts, and TV apps for macOS, and the Catalina release that October shipped them alongside Find My and Screen Time.
The significance is architectural rather than cosmetic: each media function becomes its own app surface, which is what later let Apple carry the same apps beyond the Mac entirely — Microsoft said in 2022 that desktop Apple TV and Apple Music apps would come to Windows.
First-order effects
- Mac users get dedicated Music, Podcasts, and TV clients instead of one iTunes app, with a redesigned Books app joining the lineup — syncing and device management move out of the media player.
Second-order effects
- Standalone apps create room for per-app monetization: Apple followed within two years with Podcasts Subscriptions across 170 regions, something harder to sell inside a general-purpose jukebox.
- Once the apps exist as discrete products, porting them off macOS becomes trivial — the same code path led to Apple TV and Apple Music arriving on Windows.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Apple's media strategy keeps unbundling monolithic apps into single-service surfaces that can be updated, monetized, and shipped cross-platform independently — the TV app's continued evolution, including the updated Podcasts app in tvOS 27, shows the split apps becoming long-lived product lines rather than one-time replacements.
The trend: Apple is dismantling bundled media software into standalone, subscription-ready apps that then expand from the Mac to every other platform.