There continues to be contradictory information from Apple and its support staff. Well, may be not anymore.
Just last week I was just told by someone who had an Apple engineer at their site that we should be able to choose to not upgrade a new iPad when preparing it for Supervision in Apple Configurator 1.4. This is still not correct. If you choose the Supervise
option in the Prepare step, the drop down menu is greyed out and the "Update when available" is chosen for you.
So we thought that we could get around this by using the Custom iOS" trick. That worked for the first week after iOS 7 was released, but Apple put the kibosh on that by not allowing any new device to be activated unless it is running iOS 7.
So trying to understand what is going on I called Enterprise Support today. Initially the tech told me that we should be able to stay on iOS 7 using the custom iOS preparation trick, but I told her that does not seem to be working. She put me on hold for
a long time to "escalate" this issue, but when she came back she said that word from upstairs is WE HAVE NO CHOICE BUT TO UPGRADE TO iOS 7!!!!!
I am just curious what people's reaction to this is? Is there anything we can do? Are all schools and enterprise sites just OK with this and just accepting this strong-arming? This is NOT a minor upgrade. I personally love iOS 7 and have been running it
on my personal devices since it went beta, but forcing an enterprise site with 100's (if not 1000's) of devices to upgrade their iOS and inevitably all their apps just seems insane to me. I know for a fact that we can not do MAP testing if running iOS 7, and
who knows what other issues we may encounter (there have already been a few pointed out on this site).
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Shahin Kashanchi
Technology Department
Telluride School District
970-369-1235