> it seems like pretty much every features of iTunes is designed to force you to buy more stuff from Apple that you don't actually need.
I actually highly doubt this. Apple has done a lot of work (starting in iOS 4 IIRC) to actually remove the need for iTunes.
From my personal experience, and that of working at the Genius Bar, most people don't use iTunes at all. With regular backups and sync happening over iCloud, with Apple Music/iTunes-over-the-cloud/Spotify, the use case for iTunes - ESPECIALLY for managing an iOS device - is incredibly small.
In fact, more and more iTunes features are added to lessen the space it takes up - the default behaviour of iTunes (as a music listening app) is for it to stream songs and download as much as possible on-demand. My 45GB iTunes library only takes up 15GB on my Mac.
I say this as someone who uses iTunes daily to listen to music, but never actually touches iOS devices through it.
I still think there should be some kind of iOS device management on Mac (for backups and old-fashion-sync), but I'm not the first person to call for it to be overhauled and split out into a seperate app (iSync anyone?)
iTunes is not necessary at this point. I have never agreed to the terms of service in iTunes desktop and thus have never used it. I don't know if there are any terms to agree to on the phone because it also never gets used there. iTunes for me lives in a folder called "other" that I never open. (Spotify is my music player)
I actually highly doubt this. Apple has done a lot of work (starting in iOS 4 IIRC) to actually remove the need for iTunes.
From my personal experience, and that of working at the Genius Bar, most people don't use iTunes at all. With regular backups and sync happening over iCloud, with Apple Music/iTunes-over-the-cloud/Spotify, the use case for iTunes - ESPECIALLY for managing an iOS device - is incredibly small.
In fact, more and more iTunes features are added to lessen the space it takes up - the default behaviour of iTunes (as a music listening app) is for it to stream songs and download as much as possible on-demand. My 45GB iTunes library only takes up 15GB on my Mac.
I say this as someone who uses iTunes daily to listen to music, but never actually touches iOS devices through it.