Adobe’s John Nack makes a good point about the disappointment some might feel over iTunes 9 not being 64-bit:
If you were directing the iTunes team’s efforts, why would you—as a customer—tell them to spend their time on Cocoa and/or 64-bit, at the expense of doing other things customers want?
It’s a good point, but I think it’s also invalid given Apple’s effort to rewrite all their Carbon-based applications and frameworks in Cocoa (see Snow Leopard’s Finder, QuickTime X, etc.) The point is that Apple wants to break ties with Carbon to streamline their development processes. The average customer doesn’t know what a 64-bit is, and doesn’t care. They want more features and more speed. But Apple has made it clear with Snow Leopard that the pathway to more features and more speed is 64-bit Cocoa, so that’s why people are curious about a 64-bit iTunes.
