But why now? Apple has been a major player in music – no less than the world’s largest music retailer, thanks to iTunes – since the launch of the very first iPod back in 2001, and until now has barely seen fit to acknowledge that 24-bit and 192kHz even exist; it has always suggested that 16-bit, 44kHz Apple Lossless (ALAC) files are as high quality as iTunes users need to go.

One reason could be the fact that the music industry has started pushing Hi-Res Audio in a bigger way than ever before. Sony has launched a range of Hi-Res gear and Neil Young’s Pono Hi-Res player smashed through its Kickstarter funding target in under 24 hours. There’s a sense that there’s money to be made in Hi-Res now, and the proliferation of broadband and cheaper storage means that most people can now download these huge music files in seconds and have somewhere to keep them afterwards. Previously that wasn’t the case.

And while the iTunes Store continues to be a profit-making part of Apple's business, that profit is mostly coming from apps: music downloads are falling. Introducing Hi-Res Audio may be an attempt to convince consumers, many of whom have turned to the convenience of streaming services like Spotify, to start downloading music again. If iTunes did offer a huge Hi-Res library, it'd be in a unique position, because there's nobody else out there doing it on anything approaching a large scale.