Does Apple Really Need To Put These Features Into iOS 7? Or, Is Someone Just Pulling My Eyeball?

We both know that everyone is entitled to an opinion.

After all, listening to or reading someone else’s opinion can inspire a person to greater works, thoughtful introspection, or, tell us that this person with the crazy opinion has an ulterior motive and contact should be avoided after dark.

On a related topic, what are you willing to do to find 15 features Apple should include in iOS 7?

Thoughtful? Insightful? Deceptive?

The ZDNet headline was a grabber. ’15 features Apple should include in iOS 7.’ Alright, I’ll bite. Apple is working on iOS 7 already, so it’ll be nice to see what another tech writer for a major tech media publication has to say about iOS’s needs.

What I was looking for was something thoughtful, perhaps insightful, but instead I was, to my way of thinking, utterly deceived.

How so? Well, first, the 15 items that iOS 7 should have could not have taken 15 minutes to dream up. Some are worthy, some are not.

What really caught my hair on fire about this list was how the 15 items were delivered by ZDNet. Bullet points? Nope. That would be thoughtful and considerate.

Paragraph by paragraph? Uh uh. That would be logical. Instead, good old ZDNet reverted to 1999 technology and the non-journalistic practice of bait and switch. These items are for iPhone enterprise customers.

Instead of a nice bullet point list, the 15 items that Apple should put into iOS 7 take up 16 pages (and each page has a few advertisements to catch your eyeball before it rolls back into your head).

Spoiler alert invoked here.

• Divvy up ‘Personal’ and ‘Work’ – Because it’s just very hard to do in iOS 6 now.
• Improve Email Management – Everyone hates email. I say drop Mail altogether. Enterprise users would get more done.
• Quick Access To Wi-Fi and VPN – Because three taps is just too much and I’m getting paid by the, uh, month?
• Automatic App Updates – Sounds great, but am I the only one who sees a problem with ‘automatic?’
• Unread Item Count In Lockscreen – Yes. Finally, a good one. The lock screen needs to be a notification center. Wanna bet we see one in iOS 7?
• Spotlight Custom Domain Search – Because the boss pays for the bandwidth.
• Location-aware Sounds – Great idea. Now, the lockscreen needs a legend so I can be prompted to remember what each sound means at each location.
• Location-aware Wi-Fi networking – Isn’t this a waste of a bullet point?
• Guest Mode for BYOD – OK, I’ll bite. Again. Is this really important?
• AirDrop File Sharing – Because sharing files is so difficult on the iPhone. Bump? Dropbox?
• Longer PIN number – Fair enough. But guessing a four-digit PIN isn’t child’s play. How about alphabetizing it?
• Set Default Apps – To assign documents to specific apps, of course. Lots of problems with that.
• iPad Multitasking – Because, you know, Samsung can do it and there’s almost two dozen apps where it works. And knowledge workers are so into multitasking.
• Uninstall Native Apps – Fair enough. But you never know when you might want one back again. I just hide them in a folder. Case closed.
• Offline Maps – Yes. Finally. A good one. Now, how much space will that take up on my 16GB iPhone?

To be fair, the list is interesting, and it wouldn’t take much effort to double it or triple it, and even more if you ignore the enterprise-centric nature of the ZDNet list and add some for the rest of us.

I managed to summarize all 15 items that should or could be included into iOS 7, and get them down with bullet points and on one page. Compare that to the 16 pages ZDnet wants you to view.

Say, ‘Thank you, Kate.’

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