As a card-carrying Apple fanboy, I often have a hard time keeping an objective journalistic head on my shoulders when faced with the company's offerings. My home is a museum of iPods, iPhones, iPads and MacBooks. I may not have bought the Apple Watch — not yet, anyway — but I certainly admire the beauty of the design and the effectiveness of its marketing.

I've been delighted, ecstatic, and occasionally puzzled in 17 years of Apple keynote events. But I've never before experienced frustration or anger in the house that Jobs built.

That changed Monday, and it changed because of Apple Music.

One thought kept racing through my head as Beats supremo Jimmy Iovine and Apple executive Eddy Cue introduced the new service: This doesn't feel like Apple at all. Rather it felt like something designed by committee, a committee of strong egos (like Iovine) who are overly enamored with glitzy music industry culture, and not familiar enough with Apple culture — let alone with how people actually want to access music.

Apple fixes things; it solves problems; it strives towards elegant simplicity. But Apple Music seems like the company has doubled down on all the worst features of iTunes — including one that was dead and should have stayed that way, a musician-based social network. It added more features no one asked for (who was clamoring for a 24-hour radio station?), and tried to dazzle us with star power (Drake's baffling content-free appearance, which was reminiscent of the disastrous Tidal launch).

Apple users like me — hardcore fans who have nevertheless strayed to Spotify — were left wondering why the heck our favorite company can't get its musical act together.

The rise and fall of iTunes

Let's back up for a second. In the beginning, back in 2001 (not 2003, as Iovine claimed on stage), iTunes was born. It was a beautiful, minimalist music player. In contrast to the rival software out there at the time — bloated nightmare software like Real Player Jukebox, which I shudder to admit I once used — it just worked. Searching for one track in thousands became a snap, which was unusual at the time.

But over the course of a decade, iTunes became a bloated mess. Part of this was due to the fact that it was required to do more and more heavy lifting; it had to manage your iPod, then your iPhone, then your iPad; it had to talk to the Apple store and keep your content in sync. Part of it was misguided assumptions about how we wanted to view our music (remember Cover Flow?). But another part of it was the tech design phenomenon known as feature creep, the same problem that leads to remote controls with too many buttons.

See also: The 6 Worst Things About iTunes

The worst of those creeping features was Ping, a music-based social network that lasted from 2010 to 2012. Ping was touted as a way for artists to connect to their audiences; it was launched when MySpace was still a big deal. It never took off. Facebook ate Ping's lunch, and it had MySpace for dessert.

Turns out we actually want our social networks to be as, well, social as possible. Facebook has the network effect. More than a billion people are there, including most of any given artist's fans. Twitter is important for visibility and immediacy; Instagram for its visual impact. Maybe you're an artist with the resources to hire a social media staff and maintain a presence outside those three services, but it's strictly optional.

What exactly does Apple Music's social element, Connect, bring to the party? By way of explanation, Cue showed us a video of the band Bastille recording a new song. Great! Now tell us why they won't just post that on YouTube and cut out the middleman.

Of playlists and power

Perhaps the biggest head-scratcher of the whole affair was Iovine's insistence that human curation is better at picking the next song than algorithms. That's a fair enough statement, but it doesn't tell us anything unique about Apple Music. Indeed, from the brief glimpse we got, the "For You" tab appears to be mostly machine-based; it's Apple's algorithm offering up tunes based on what it has learned about your music habits.

Meanwhile, Spotify — Apple's chief rival in the music streaming space — is king of the human-curated playlist. That's because Spotify actually built a social network, from the bottom up, without any hoopla, without even calling it a social network. Its users just like making playlists. You can find playlists for just about any artist or TV show or mood under the sun. You can also see what your friends are listening to at any given moment, a deceptively simple but powerful feature.

Will be interesting to try Apple Music, but I've been working on 'Best of year' playlists going back 30 years on Spotify. — Jon Hicks (@Hicksdesign) June 9, 2015

I held out against Spotify for many years, determined to protect the walled garden of my iTunes content — the tracks I'd painstakingly uploaded, the playlists I'd curated. Once I took the plunge, I discovered I could upload my iTunes playlists while adding dozens more. Within about 10 minutes, I was a convert. Every time the company updates the app I'm sold again, most recently with the excellent addition of running playlists that match their beat to your cadence.

When Iovine talked about getting the right track that pumps you up at the gym, he was apparently aware that his competitor just solved that problem far more elegantly.

Spotify just works, with a speed and simplicity that reminds me of the old-school iTunes. It works across multiple platforms — not just on iOS, Android, Mac and PC, as Apple Music will, but also Roku, Sonos, even BlackBerry. Searching (and saving for offline listening) from 30 million tracks is a snap, and it's the very first function Spotify offers. It even offers streaming music at a higher bit rate than Apple (320 kbps vs 256 kbps) for the same monthly fee.

Nobody has yet been allowed to take Apple Music for a real spin just yet — just a quick look at an incomplete version of the app under monitored conditions. But by its tabs shall you know it. The app wants you to go to its curated music section, its new music section, its blaring 24-hour music station Beats 1, the Connect network, and only then, belatedly, do you get to My Music. This, apparently, is where all that iTunes and Spotify-like streaming music functionality lives.

Your personal choice of song and your personal collection have all been shunted to one side. The rest of the app may just as well be Jimmy Iovine shouting at you.

What was lost

It didn't have to be like this. Apple had a golden opportunity to return to a beautifully simple interface, one that combines your music with streaming music, your playlists with other users'. They could have focused on making Music load faster than Spotify; they could have offered higher bitrate streaming for the audiophiles (Tidal's one good feature), and easy playlist uploading from other platforms to mollify the prodigal iTunes users who strayed.

They could even have mentioned all the music they can stream that Spotify currently can't. No, Apple doesn't appear to have persuaded the Beatles to sign over streaming rights, but from the brief Music demo it appears that Taylor Swift is on board.

(•_•) If you want Tay Tay ( •_•)>⌐■-■ (⌐■_■) you've got to Pay Pay #AppleMusic #Spotify — InfoSec Taylor Swift (@SwiftOnSecurity) June 8, 2015

Instead, we got this design-by-committee approach — and a very underwhelming response over on the real social networks.

One notable thing about the Twitter backlash against Apple Music on Monday was the fact that its defenders were not keen to focus on the quality of the service itself. Instead, they tended to make the business argument. Apple has more than 800 million iTunes account holders; persuade even 5% of them to pay the monthly fee for Apple Music, and you've got a huge hit, right?

But that 800 million figure is a pretty weak indicator. It includes anyone who's ever synced an iPhone, or bought a single 99-cent song from Apple in the last 12 years. They're not hanging around on iTunes eagerly waiting for streaming to kick in; those who are interested in such things have had years in which to try out one of the dozens of competitors in this space. Competitors who didn't feel the need to throw kitchen sinks at their products.

And while I'm fully prepared to eat some kind of headgear if I'm wrong on this, all signs point to the fact that Apple is running scared on music. Its dad-dancing executives appear to have ceded control of the space to Iovine, seduced by his fast-talking patter and the sense that he (along with Trent Reznor and Dr. Dre, remember him?) has some sort of magic formula to attract millennial listeners.

Hence the anger and frustration. Apple didn't need to buy Beats to retake the high ground in online music. It went in precisely the wrong direction — and by doing so, it appears to have poisoned the company culture where music is concerned. That doesn't bode well for Apple under Cook's decision-making. Because while having strong morals is great and necessary as a leader, having strong products, and knowing how to take them to new highs, is the company's lifeblood. Any fanboy or fangirl will tell you that.