At the time of the purchase, Kincaid, Jeff Robbin and Dave Heller left Casady & Greene to continue development of the program as Apple employees. Apple purchased the program from Casady & Greene in 2000. History iTunes icon since version 12.2 on June 30, 2015Īpple based the initial release of iTunes on SoundJam MP, a program developed by Bill Kincaid and released by Casady & Greene in 1999. ITunes enables users to manage media content, create playlists, synchronize media content with handheld devices including the iPod, iPhone, and iPad, re-image and update handheld devices, stream Internet radio and purchase music, films, television shows, and audiobooks via the iTunes Store. iTunes was finally discontinued for new Mac computers in 2019, but is still available and supported for Macs running older operating systems and for Windows computers to ensure updated compatibility for syncing with new releases of iOS devices (refer to Devices section). Over time, iTunes developed into a sophisticated multimedia content manager, hardware synchronization manager and e-commerce platform. The iTunes media platform was first released by Apple in 2001 as a simple music player for Mac computers.
