Apple is not deleting your iTunes or movie purchases, and it isn't getting out of media sales

It's true that Apple likes the Apple Music streaming service, and it is true that it's breaking up iTunes into separate apps. Nothing else you've heard is true, in particular the rumors that Apple is getting out of media sales are completely bogus — and you're not going to lose anything with macOS Catalina because Apple wants it gone.

This is not the "end of iTunes" like television news hosts and other venues have breathlessly exclaimed. It is not the end of an era with Apple abandoning selling you music, film and TV. And it is most definitely not the end for all those tracks you've bought.

Apple ditching the iTunes Store and deleting all your purchases makes for a great story, but it is baseless and deliberate scaremongering.

Today you can open iTunes on your Mac and play music, films, TV and so on. You can also download and buy more of it all, and then later you can re-download it if you want.

You will of course still be able to buy tracks in the new Music app

Tomorrow, or whenever you move to macOS Catalina, the only bit of this that in will be in any way different is that you'll be opening a different app, and the files will be in a slightly different location.

You'll be opening the new Music, Podcasts or TV apps and that's it. Carry on exactly as you did, and keep buying or renting or streaming new media.

Valid concerns

We don't know everything about how macOS Catalina will work with these apps, though really we know so much that there are just little details we're waiting to see.

We are also curious to find out what Apple does after this. The company keeps speaking of this trio of Mac apps — Music, Podcasts, and TV — but there's also already a Books app where you'd imagine audiobooks would go nicely.

Then, too, the TV app is about video. But there Apple isn't making a confusing simplification, not completely. Today there are film and TV awards committees around the world who are struggling to define what the difference is now that Netflix does single dramas that it may or may not put into cinemas.

Nonetheless, it is going to take us a time to get used to the new apps and where everything we have is. Speaking of which, though, if you're used to looking in Finder for your iTunes Media Folder, like we alluded to a few paragraphs above here, you'll just be looking for a different name.

The iTunes Media Folder is gone, long live the likes of Music and Movies folders instead

Yet everything we have is still going to be there and it will mostly be in exactly the place you expect. The new Music app is going to be particularly welcome as it so resembles the Music app on iOS, for instance.

And if you're used to watching movies on an Apple TV, the newly redesigned TV app is going to look pretty familiar too.

You'll still be able to watch all your previously purchased movies. There are films that aren't Star Trek, by the way, and you can buy them in the TV app

And stirring up fear in people that they've spent money on digital items that are going to be removed is plain wrong.

Apple's Home Sharing isn't gone either. It's just been moved in macOS Catalina. Instead of it being in iTunes, it is now a checkbox in the Sharing preferences pane. And, the "Computers" app is still in tvOS 13.

We're not even losing the ability to share media around our devices

CD ripping remains as well, assuming you still have an optical drive.

All of this is just the latest anti-Apple and anti-iTunes story, the latest in a long line of them throughout the years. Up to this week, the criticism has been that iTunes is too big, too bloated, too confusing. Apple was legitimately criticized for not fixing this issue, but now it has — and immediately it's being criticized instead for the fear of doing something that it isn't doing.