Apple Itunes Explained and Summarized

Apple iTunes The author of this report has decided to focus on the aspects and dimensions of a certain company. That company is going to be Apple Corporation. Rather than analyze and summarize them at a high level, the author will instead focus on a certain portion or "location" that Apple makes use of. Rather than point to a physical or map location, the author will focus on their online presence, which is mostly in the form of the Apple iTunes web portal.

While Apple does sell a lot of goods and services via other retailers and its own stores and corporate locations, Apple's online presence is where Apple is best able to sell their services and products with little to no physical effort expended. Analysis Apple has been around since 1977. Founded by Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs in 1977, the company has since grown to roughly 110,000 employees. Steve Wozniak is still technically employed by Apple and receives a salary every year but he is not the presence he was at Apple's inception.

As many people know, Steve Jobs passed away in 2011 after a bout with cancer. Their relationship used to be quite good but things did mostly sour over the years including a time where Jobs departed to found his own company. He later came back and brought his nascent software company with them. The Unix-based operating system that this other company, known as NeXTLEVEL, had created is what became the basis for what would become Mac OS X, the current iteration of the Macintosh operating system (Yahoo Finance, 2016).

Anyhow, the computing world used to be very driven by physically driven in that data was almost always stored on some sort of media. Movies, for example, have traditionally been stored and used from VHS tapes or DVD's. Music, for example, has commonly been used from tape cassettes and CD's. However, there has been a shift over the years as the internet emerged in the mid-1990's as a strong force with the regular computer user.

As the ability to store, change and manipulate data has changed, the way in which movies and music are consumed has changed. Indeed, there are many people that make active (or even exclusive) use of streaming and other online sources for music and data rather than relying solely on a physical CD or Blu-Ray disc. While many people out there use a blend of online and offline data forms when it comes to entertainment media, there are many that do as much as they can online.

For example, a movie for sale on Amazon can be bought in physical form or it can be bought as an online purchase and is subsequently available via streaming on devices like televisions, media boxes (e.g. Roku) or AppleTV, just to name a few options. This is where Apple iTunes comes in. Rather than do a blend of physical and virtual media, Apple iTunes is online only.

Of course, personal users of iTunes (the store and the application) can make use of physical media as part of their experience, the iTunes store itself is an entirely online presence. For those that prefer or require media to be digital and available online at all times, this is the market that iTunes and Apple is going for when it comes to their online efforts (Apple, 2016).

To facilitate this experience and online presence, Apple Corporation uses a lot of computer, internet, network and data resources so that data is streamed when it is request, is downloaded by the customer when request and there is also the necessary ability to browse what is available for purchase or other viewing. Apple iTunes even allows for people to download and listen to podcasts and many of these podcasts are completely free of charge.

Even iTunes itself in the form that the customer uses it is free of charge for casual users that just want something to load their iPods with. Purchases in the store are completely voluntary but Apple is doing quite well with their efforts with online-only access products. There is yet another shift going on whereby people are shifting from storing their music on iPods to having the music simply stream from a website rather than having it on the customer's device, such as a computer or iPod.

All of this data being made available requires a lot of data warehouses, internet bandwidth and other resources so that the media desired by a person is ready when it is wanted and without the need for a customer to buy data storage or other physical items that are not necessary with streaming music or movies (NY Times, 2016). In terms of what databases would be involved and that could be created for all of the above, one can figure this out quite easily.

Apple surely has a database of customers on their side including their name, passwords, credit card information address and library of purchased media. Similarly, Apple would have a different database that has the listings of all of the music albums and/or individual tracks that are available for sale. They would have a listing of what tracks cost what, what albums cost what, what tracks are individual for individual purchase.