Many years back I became addicted to my iPhone, mostly for its marvelous music player. iTunes has great capabilities to store all your music and to easily view music as albums, artists, and songs. The search capabilities are great – with around 10,000 tracks in my library, this is essential. The way albums open into color-matched track listings is cool. And I use “playlists” extensively, e.g. I have playlists like “play all the music that I love and didn’t skip in the last three years, and leave out all the classical music”. These are Smart Playlists, with a breathtaking number of options available for user-created playlists: it is incredibly powerful and fun to use. It is easy to add entire albums or individual tracks and reorder them. With thousands of songs, it is a fantastic way to listen to music that you haven’t listened to for a long time. Features like that make the iPhone a real smart phone. iTunes on a Mac or PC doesn’t offer the greatest user experience, even after all these years, I find it complex to use, but OK…

Although I buy some music directly from Apple, I still have most of my library as hard copies: CDs. For two reasons. I like extraordinary music; I buy “local” music during my travels, or vintage jazz, or non-mainstream classical music. In short, the type of music not offered by streaming services like Spotify, or iTunes. I rip these CDs and store the music in the Apple Cloud, so that it is readily available in iTunes. The second reason I like CDs lies in the fact that any cloud could break, or that at some point I might like to switch clouds.

In the public mind, the iPhone is still undervalued as an eBook store and reader

Apple Books has, and this may be a surprise to some of you, turned into a market-leading eBook store. A few years back I started to notice that more and more purchases of my eBooks took place through Apple Books / iPhone or iPad. At the moment it is by far my main sales channel. The functionality of Apple Books as a bookstore is however rather rudimentary when compared to the functionality of iTunes. Still, the biggest advantage is that if you read eBooks on your iPhone or iPad, you need only one device to enjoy music, social, productivity apps… and reading.

To tell the truth, I read all my newspapers and books on my iPhone, while streaming music at the same time. I am, for instance, also using the WordPress app on my iPhone to interact with readers and I am now writing this blogpost on my iPhone.

My novels on Apple Books.

Originally posted 2019-09-04 10:32:10.