Everyone has their gripes about macOS, even if they mostly like it. It’s the rough edges on a product that’s matured and refined over time that keeps scratching at us, though, making us ask for better.

I asked people what they’d like to see in macOS 10.13 and added my suggestions from my experience and from reading thousands of your emails over the last few years to our Mac 911 column.

(While macOS 10.13 doesn’t yet have a name, I’m going to pretend it will be called Joshua Tree, as Apple has a habit of installing unwanted U2 things.)

iTunes

The biggest blemish in macOS remains iTunes, something Macworld writers have spilled virtual ink about for years and years. iTunes was an odd choice to add more and more features, but a necessary one, back when iPhones could only sync over USB to a Mac.

That was six years ago when that changed.

It’s extremely difficult for many users to figure out where any particular feature is and how to manage it if they don’t use it regularly, and the app is simply bloated and out of date. As many readers may know, a lot of iTunes is a wrapper around what are effectively web pages, resulting in slow and erratic display and interaction. Native apps that work as well as those in iOS seem respectful to Mac users.

Because iTunes remains deeply integrated across macOS and with iOS, macOS has to be updated to allow an iTunes break up. Many readers want iTunes to more closely resemble iOS organization:

• Store for managing purchases and your account.
• Music to handle Apple Music, Internet radio, and one’s own locally stored collection.
• Video for purchased, rented, and owned movies and television programs.
• Podcasts for, uh, podcasts.
• Sync/Backup for those who still use USB with their iPhones or for local backups. (Remember iSync?)

Apple downloads iOS apps into iTunes, which is useful only for providing a central place to sync new versions and when restoring from an iTunes backup.