iTunes takes 7–8 seconds to load, compared to about 1 second for each of Windows Media Player 12, Microsoft Office Word 2007, and Firefox 3.0.7.

On 11 March 2009, Apple released iTunes 8.1. ‘Faster. Smarter. Better.’ Or so Apple claims. In particular, Apple provides this snippet:

Speed improvements

iTunes gets a speed boost. Now when it comes to loading large libraries, browsing the iTunes Store, and syncing your devices, iTunes responds faster than before.

I suppose ‘speed boost’ means that it’s faster, not fast.

I’m running Windows 7 Beta x64 on an Intel X3350 (four 2.66 GHz cores) with 8 GB of memory. iTunes 8.1 takes 7–8 seconds to load. That’s unacceptable. By comparison, Windows Media Player 12, Microsoft Office Word 2007, and Firefox 3.0.7 each take less than one second to load.

Not only that, but once it loads its hopelessly unresponsive. When you click on an item in the sidebar to change to another view, such as Music, Podcasts, or Applications, iTunes appears to do absolutely nothing for half a second or so.

iTunes 8.1 did improve performance in some areas, though. For example, TG Daily reports that iTunes Plus songs download noticeably faster now. And Kirk McElhearn reports that iTunes now rips CDs and sets tags faster. That’s great.

But long progress bars when performing batch operations are not the fundamental problem. It’s the slow, unresponsive interface that makes the user experience unbearable.

Apple needs to drop the layer of bloat that translates Mac OS X system calls to their Windows equivalents, and write a native Windows iTunes interface that just works.