Apple: Maybe they do listen to customer suggestions!
So a few weeks ago, my daughter Maggie got all hot and heavy into Dr. Who. (I think for her it boils down to “David Tennant is hot!”, but for a nerd Dad, any excuse to get into something like Dr. Who is a good one!) Because not all the old episodes are available on NetFlix streaming, Maggie asked if she could purchase a season or two from iTunes. So in lieu of an allowance that week, yes, she got to purchase a season of Dr. Who.
The problem, though, was that as soon as I purchased them, I had to download every friggin’ episode. Which was silly in a couple of different ways. First, because she was going to want them on her laptop, not mine; she just needed me to purchase them for her so they would be available on the cloud. And second, who wants to download 20-25 GB of videos that you know you don’t want right away? But despite some searching in the support area of Apple’s site, and a nice chat with a support guy on the phone, I found that: Sorry man; you need to download stuff when you buy it. After that, you can download at will from the cloud, but in the interim, you have to do that initial download.
I wouldn’t say that I complained to the Apple guy; I just expressed my frustration that one is forced to download everything immediately, like it or not. (And from the Apple message boards, I’m not the only one who has found that to be irritating.) He agreed to forward the suggestion. And frankly, I expected absolutely nothing to come of it. You can read about it in my post, here.
And then the other day I logged on, bought something, and was greeted with an Apple dialog button in iTunes asking me if I wanted to download my purchase now, or did I want to wait?
Look: Delayed downloading is a small thing. And I’m sure there’s not a direct hotline from Support to Tim Cook’s office where they say, “Hey, Doug Moran of Gear Diary wants this new feature!” (If there were, there would be a less ugly “refresh” button for podcasts in iTunes . . .), but I was still pleased to see this feature that I had wanted suddenly popping up with no fuss.
So thanks, Apple; this one customer appreciates that feature very much!