Note how they even use privacy as one of the main (at least, in my opinion) selling point for Apple devices[0] ("Every Apple product is designed from the ground up to protect that information.").
If you just pull up control center and tap the button is says “Disconnected from ‘WiFiNetwork’”.
If you expand the panel with 3D Touch or a long press under the WiFi icon it either says WiFiName or Not Connected.
On the other hand the cellular radio says Off if you toggle it.
This isn’t completely hidden. The information is there. And I agree with the other posters that this is a far better setting considering how many people have run up ridiculous cellular bills because of bad Wi-Fi and forgetting about the setting.
At this point I’m not sure there’s a need for normal users to actually turn off Wi-Fi. The only real case would be something like airplane mode which already has its own setting.
That's exactly what happened to me when I was desperately trying to save battery and turn off services.
I'll admit that this behavior is what I want 99% of the time, so it also doesn't bother me.
I do think the new behavior is better for me as a user 99% of the time, but at the same time i also want to know what is happening and how to override it.
Silent mode on android shows how to do it correctly, there you get a popup when activating it asking for how long you want it to be silent. It has a few presets so you just need one extra tap. That is the correct behaviour, if that's to much for an Apple mind to handle, the very least they should do is to inform of the actual state with a more descriptive label.
I like this change because when I turn just wifi off it was always because of an acting up network. Now that I don't have to remember to turn it back on is a good thing. My guess is that Apple has a lot of data, and found that this behavior is what most people want.
Edit: I originally said that having wifi on "at least doubles" the power drain on my phone but since I haven't actually taken hard stats on that, I'll just say "greatly increases."
I thought the basic mobile connection was active all the time (unless there was no signal). Are you saying if I turn WiFi on, and I receive an SMS (not through iMessage) or a phone call, it's actually coming through WiFi and the mobile connection is totally off? Surely not.
I have a generous data plan, so I don't need to use wifi to preserve it.
It's on par with OSX's "some menu items change if you hold down alt while they're open" behavior. Aggressively obscured.
Maybe I’ll get used to it but right now I’m old man grumpy.
(The other problem is the light touch/hard touch thing)
Although lacking discoverability, I personally find it very quick, useful and natural in a couple of use cases: acting on notifications, keyboard cursor movement and selection, (sadly defunct) app switching, on Apple Music track listings.
Haven't found a single other place where it does anything I find useful.
Can you take a screenshot of where this is explained?
I ran into a use case for turning off wifi the other day. My ISP was having problems and the wifi network could not reach the internet. Turning off wifi saved me the trouble of forgetting my wifi network, and then looking up / typing in the password when I rejoined.
This is backed up by people's previous experiences with the toggle, which did actually turn off the wifi.
I do it all the time when my home wi-fi is slow and I want to use 4G to quickly access something. My home internet is crap; my phone 4G is fast but with a low bandwidth cap.
You can’t have it both ways. Apple either miscommunicated this ever since Control center was added till today or they are miscommunication pang today.
I would lean in the direction of miscommunicating today because Apple has spent years teaching its customers that this behavior means X and now it’s been changed to Y.
And that's the expected outcome of me turning off wifi. Something I deliberately tried to do through clicking the on/off toggle.
I agree with parent poster: Either apple has been miscommunication the whole time, or they are miscommunication now. You can't have it both ways.
I appreciate the feature is a nice one, that the wifi will turn back on sometimes. I've been caught out. But I can't know what hidden features exist and how to distinguish them.
Moreover, "Disconnected from WifiNetwork" only communicates what you say it does once you know what the feature does. Until then, you don't know. There's also nothing that says "the network has been disabled until you go home" or whenever it's going to turn back on.
Apple used to care about their products being useful to power uses and beginners alike. Now they care about their products being useful to beginners and capable of letting the elite know who they are — the power users who are not amongst the elite know that too. It's really not very nice.
I was really happy with it when I first got my iPhone. It was awesome. I'd never used one, and it kept telling me what to do next. If I guessed wrong, it was like "haha, no you've gotta do this instead". But it is not going to be replaced with another iPhone. I just can't stand it any more.
Maybe a lighter shade of blue? Or a white background with the icon colored vivid blue?
Seems fine for me /shrug
Or anyone who doesn’t want to be tracked by random retailers. I worked for one such company, so I know intimately how it works, including how MAC address randomization doesn’t actually work in the real world at completely obscuring your device.
Battery life, esp. if the battery is low and you need to ensure you'll be able to use it until you can get to a charger.
To preserve battery. I don't know about iPhones, but on my Android phone, Wi-Fi is certainly the largest battery hog, if I leave Wi-Fi location scanning on.
Just checked again to make sure. Wifi 0%, Bluetooth 0%
Right now wifi is at 8%, and I used it for maybe 15 minutes this morning, that's it.
Motorola Moto X Play, Android 6.0.1, for what it's worth.
As far as I know, Marshmallow has a battery drain issue, but Motorola (now Lenovo) does not seem to be interested in updating their software anymore.
I get around 1.5 days normally, less than a day if I use wifi and BT.
This really sounds like members of my dev team trying to explain why their terrible UX is actually quite clever.
Define 'normal'. After I educated my (retired, nontechnical) mother about wifi and bluetooth tracking, she started turning them off when she left the house.
I think the folks who think this is just peachy are in their own bubble. 'Normal' (by my working definition) people do care about this stuff if they understand it. Thankfully, Apple gets this stuff right-ish more often than not, but in this case, I think they blew it.
If they made this change I imagine the number of people who actually toggle the radios on and off a lot (manually, not airplane mode) must be very small.
I’m sure th know how many people have written them about the ‘I ran up my cellular bill and it’s your fault’ thing too. I know I’ve heard that from people.
It’s a change from what it’s been doing for 10 years but I think it makes sense.
Folks who worry about, say, wifi and bluetooth walk-buy surveillance are going to be much more likely to opt-out of just about anything they can, including usage instrumentation. So of course they'll be underrepresented in statistics generated from that data.
"Decent" means easy-to-access without jumping through a ton of hoops, being reliable after you jump through those hoops, and being faster than cellular data. Yes, my own wifi at home is decent, but when I'm away from home, I just assume there's no such thing as public wifi and use cellular data. My stress is lower that way.
Well, there IS a strike-over in the icon when you fully disable wifi.
And since a state between on and off is not intuitive and cannot be imagined out of the blue by end users, the onus is on the implementing party to leave no room for confusion. The current vagueness with the control has no logical explanation.