I’ll admit, I was skeptical about iTunes 11 before it finally arrived late Thursday. Announced by Apple during the launch of the iPhone 5, it was promptly forgotten, rating not a mention during the iPad mini launch. Promised during October, it only just made it under the wire at the end of November. During a period of extreme executive reshuffle and the flap over Maps, the iTunes delay contributed to a sense that the Cupertino company had lost its way in software.

Like many an iTunes user, I also had diminished expectations from a decade of downloading updates. It had become a dreaded routine — hold out as long as possible, download only when Software Update reminded me for the sixth or seventh time, then go through a tortuous process of turning off all the options the update had turned back on (such as the awful Ping and Cover Flow). I had to make iTunes mine again, and suffer with the fact that the update had made it slightly slower.