Honza Dvorsky With the upcoming release of the new versions of the operating systems iOS 7 and OS X Mavericks, Apple is trying to prepare the employees of its brick-and-mortar stores. He launched an initiative on behalf of iBooks Discovery (discovery of iBooks), thanks to which they will receive certain iBooks e-books for free in order to become more familiar with the product and to be able to answer any questions that customers may have.
The timing of such an initiative makes sense due to the addition of iBooks to OS X (as of the new Mavericks version), which will also allow Macintosh users to read, annotate, and use their iBooks as study tools on their computers. Launching iBooks Author and interactive iBooks Textbooks in January 2012, Apple is following this year by bringing e-books and textbooks into everyday life. Together with e-books, Apple is trying to better educate its own employees by distributing the beta version of OS X Mavericks and the possibility to participate in improving stores or the products themselves.
One of the reasons for such efforts may be the new goal of Apple CEO Tim Cook to increase the number of iPhones sold in Apple Stores. Especially in the US, telephone operators are the majority sellers, which hurts Apple. The iPhone makes much more sense with the entire Apple ecosystem at the customer's fingertips in every Apple Store. Cook rightly considers the iPhone to be the "magnet" of the Apple ecosystem, which motivates users to buy other products such as the iPad, iPod or Mac. Apple therefore also launched other discount events (e.g. Back to School) and the purchase of older products for a discount on new products.
As part of the big launch of iOS 7 and OS X Mavericks, Apple is preparing all employees to make the transition of users to the new versions as easy and pleasant as possible, or that the new marketing move will attract new users. We'll see if it's successful in a quarter of a year.
For me, the magnet was the iPad ... and I was quite disappointed with the iPhone from the beginning. I haven't found (until today) functional alternatives to the two apps I had on HTC. Then I kind of got used to it ;-)