“Apple has started training its AppleCare technical support staff on the changes and feature-set of iOS 7, according to multiple AppleCare employees,” Mark Gurman reports for 9to5Mac. “These people say that training began today, and AppleCare employees are required to complete the iOS 7 training by the second week of September.”
Gurman reports, “With iOS 7 being a major redesign and feature update, Apple is expecting that its support staff will be inundated with calls… AppleCare employees will also be trained on the new iTunes Radio streaming music service, and employees have been told concrete information regarding skips and in-app advertising. According to the AppleCare training, there are more than ‘200 genre based stations’ to choose from. Additionally, as users have already discovered, iTunes Radio allows users to skip 6 songs each hour per station. Additionally, it seems that iTunes Match subscribers, in addition to receiving an ad-free experience, will be granted unlimited skipping abilities.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]
Will be interesting to see how all this is received by the non-techie masses.
Limited skips. That’s how AOL Radio does it. Don’t like it. Pandora makes you watch an ad if you skip a song. I prefer that. I’d rather be subjected to an ad for 30 seconds than a song I don’t like for 3 minutes.
Mind you, I don’t expect iTunes Radio to be serving me up a bunch of songs I don’t like, so I’m not worried.
——RM
$4 a month too much for you for Pandora? Gee, I think that is a bargain. And even better will be ad free iRadio for $2.08 a month.
Free is a lot better than $4. And I don’t have a problem listening to Pandora’s ads. Probably because I grew up listening to regular AM & FM radio with 20 minutes of ads per hour. Compared to that, the occasional single quickie ad on Pandora (or iTunes Radio) is nothing.
——RM
Ad supported isn’t really “free” though. It’s paid for, by your time and attention being sold to advertisers. You could say it’s “cheap” – but only if you don’t place much value on your time and attention – and cheap still isn’t free.
Even if you wouldn’t place a monetary value on your own time and attention, the entire market of people buying and selling it clearly do.
Okay, fine. Replace “free” with “I don’t have pay for it with cash out of my bank account”. That good enough? Sheesh, you know what I meant.
An occasional single 15-second ad doesn’t bother me. Again, I used to listen to radio with 20 minutes of ads an hour. That was maddening, but in those days before iPods, you really had no choice unless you happened to have a CD you wanted to listen to on you at the time. Compared to that era, listening to a short little ad on Pandora every five seconds or so is heaven.
Are you really so obsessed with the “monetary value on your own time and attention” that 15 seconds of it is too much to give up?
——RM
Of course you can opt out of the Flower Power Pastel OS downgrade and not worry about all of this nonsense.
No ads. It is as big a turn off as rental (subscription) software.
“Flower power pastel iOS…” Are you sure you’re evolved?
DE’s about as evolved as intestinal flora.
He hasn’t got the brains to work out that OS7, just like any OS, can be customised; the simple process of changing the wallpaper background instantly changes the appearance.
I’m amazed that a mammal as slow as DE actually has respiratory functions; there’s precious little cognitive functioning between his ears, that’s for sure.