A Chink in Apple’s Armor?

When Apple first added the airport express to its line of products, they seamlessly integrated the experience of connecting remotely to your stereo. As an unabashed admirer of their products, I picked one up fairly early on and was quite pleased with it. At the time I had only one device but did hear some rumblings about multiple adapters and Apple's inability to play through multiple sources at once. The grumbling quickly faded to the background and I forgot about it. Recently, I picked up a second device and hooked it up to my network, discovering Apple had fixed the issue and enabled multi-speaker environments. After my pleasant surprise faded, I quickly noticed a fairly large UI discrepancy. A screen shot for you to follow along with: Discrepancies of note:

1. The interface is a pop-up. Aside from the menus, I was only able to find one other pop-up in the interface, a random little window for displaying album art.
2. The interface is using incorrect checkboxes, as though pulling them from the system default as opposed to the iTunes default.
3. The font is a bit different than the font used elsewhere in the application

If you want to accuse me of nitpicking, of being an obnoxious designer-type, go right ahead, you'd be right on most counts (though I'd be a little hurt by the obnoxious comment). Why have I brought this up? Apple is renowned, and iTunes especially, for paring down excess interface cruft and delivering a simplified, user-centric experience that is both elegant and profoundly useful. This addition to iTunes reaks of feature-ism, as though Apple caved and simply tacked a feature on at the last minute using whatever tools that particular developer had at hand to complete the task. Again, so what? With each release, Apple ties more and more of its hardware products to the iTunes platform. It is their primary, cross-OS application for syncing their peripheral devices (appleTV, iPod, iPhone). Aside from OS X, iTunes is their flagship piece of software. Admittedly, the feature in question is small and most likely impacts a tiny audience. Yet, to see something implemented with little obvious design thinking could pose trouble for Apple. Has their popularity lessened their resolve about the direction of their product? How did this happen? As the Apple family of peripheral products increases, the complexity of iTunes will increase as well. iTunes will be an interesting place to watch for the overall integrity of their interface design philosophy.