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Comment by bonch | Hacker News Reader

> Apple themselves only just recently got iTunes from out of their Carbon compatibility layer

iTunes is still a Carbon application, but in fairness, it mostly has to due with retaining Windows compatibility, and Carbon maps more easily to Win32 than Cocoa would.

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Safari is most definitely a Cocoa app, and Apple has a Windows compatibility shim for it.

NeXT used to have a Windows compatability layer - it was rumoured to be included in Mac OSX (yellowbox). I'd bet Apple maintained it alongside Cocoa (just like they kept the x86 port alive). itunes being carbon is probably just down to the size of the rewrite.

I suspect they're on the tail end of a big rewrite, and it could even be that they're announcing a cocoa-based itunes next week. It's been pretty quiet around itunes for a while now, and it's a product that needs a lot of love to bring it back up to apple's standards.

I get the impression that iTunes is the one division in Apple that's truly like a different 'business unit' and doesn't sit in the same ship as the rest of Apple, who are all on board and sail together in the same direction when focusing on 'the next thing'.

iTunes 10 was the worst thing Apple have launched recently (IMO). I hope they fix it soon, but I'm not holding my breath.

It's a shame, because iTunes 3 and 4, when it was just Mac-only music management (with a couple of devices supported), were amongst my favourite bits of software ever.

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