You make a fair point, you can mostly avoid bad Apple software.
The one choice you can't make is iTunes. Being forced to use that dreadful piece of software is why I gave my first iPhone away after little less than one week. It's abysmally incompetent as a music player. You could probably count the number of codecs it supports on one hand - a core feature of a music player is, well, playing your music. Last time I used it, it still didn't have a media library and dumped tens of thousands of songs into a flat list. You have to have that garbage installed on your machine if you own an iPhone. Not interested.
"Last time I used it, it still didn't have a media library and dumped tens of thousands of songs into a flat list."
In the "Advanced" tab, which I'd expect any self-respecting HN denizen to go to first, there's a checkbox for "Keep iTunes Media folder organized" which explains that it will "[place] files into album and artist folders, and [name] the files based on the disc number, track number and song title". Mine is a very hierarchical structure - and I've had it for a decade. No flat list here.
"You have to have that garbage installed on your machine if you own an iPhone. Not interested."
Not true, either - hasn't been true since the advent of iCloud in 2011.
As to the codecs - it does do MP3 and AAC, which probably covers 95% of available content, though it doesn't do Ogg Vorbis, Quo Vadis, or various others. For that sort of thing there's VLC.
> hasn't been true since the advent of iCloud in 2011.
Assuming I'm using AIMP3 as my media player of choice, how would iCloud play into getting my song library onto an iPhone? Like Winamp and Foobar2000, it allows you to treat a removable drive as a media player.
> For that sort of thing there's VLC.
That's a non-starter. Even Windows Media Player, which is probably used by a total of three people, can be extended to support any arbitrary audio codec using a documented API. I don't get phone calls from my 90y/o father asking how to get media to work, the codec pack that I installed guarantees that almost any codec under the sun will work with almost any Windows application (notably excluding iTunes).
iTunes has had a media browser since I started using it in the 10.3 days.
You haven't needed iTunes to use an iPhone for several years now. I still plug mine in once in a while for a local backup but I can't tell you the last time I've needed it. Apple's cloud backup is pretty good in my experience.
Don't get me wrong... iTunes is definitely getting worse. The media browser is too hard to find in the new version and the new default views don't handle large libraries very well.
The one choice you can't make is iTunes. Being forced to use that dreadful piece of software is why I gave my first iPhone away after little less than one week. It's abysmally incompetent as a music player. You could probably count the number of codecs it supports on one hand - a core feature of a music player is, well, playing your music. Last time I used it, it still didn't have a media library and dumped tens of thousands of songs into a flat list. You have to have that garbage installed on your machine if you own an iPhone. Not interested.