The term airplane mode will persist as an anachronism forever. Some day we will have to explain to our grandchildren why disabling networks has anything to do with airplanes.
Actually photograph was already out of date, because graph had morphed from "to write" to making any kind of image. Which itself I believe meant something akin to inscription /engraving.
Actually while photograph may no longer be a graph as in image on a surface, in some ways it's still an image impressed on rocks. Made using lithography. Have we gotten closer to its roots?
No, they were all floppy. You are just thinking of the hard plastic case that 3.5" diskettes had. If you crack it open and disassemble it, the actual spinning disk is just as floppy as the 5.25" was.
This is as opposed to a "hard" disk which is a hard platter inside a fixed disk.
(Without Airplane Mode, the phone will keep trying to connect to cellular towers, which just makes the network experience unstable)
Perhaps "Underground Mode" would be more suitable in a modern context /s
As a tangent, I feel that a lot of these problems are fundamentally because engineers don't understand how poorly their software performs on unstable networks. Unless you live in a large metropolitan area with a well used underground transit network (in the USA, I suppose NYC would be the only qualifying city... sigh), you'd likely never experience these symptoms on a daily basis.
I don't honestly believe many developers don't experience this a lot. It's probably just such a transitory experience that it's not worth the rearchitecting required to really solve it.
Or anywhere more than ~50km from the nearest town. I dunno what coverage is like in the U.S. but in parts of Australia it’s not uncommon to lose reception when country driving.
Yes, you would think ... but that is not the case.
QA and design of modern mobile apps and software - and even devices and appliances - neglects the testing of bad network connectivity.
Both my physical Sonos devices and, for instance, the apple-provided podcasts app, can handle being fully offline reasonably well. On the other hand, if you start dropping ~50% of packets they lose their mind and (in the case of Apples podcast app) freeze or crash.
Also even if i'm listening to music I have downloaded locally, Apple Music will do a system-wide popup complaining that it lost cellular connection. Sometimes in Safari a webpage that was downloaded at the station will suddenly erase itself and attempt to refresh itself upon losing connection. Those are usually the kinds of ad-ridden sites that are making nonstop ajax calls, but sometimes that's what i'm reading.
By far, my #1 wish for my iPhone would be a mode to basically "detect subway networks constantly changing" and just give up trying. Like, if it observes all cell and wifi networks disappearing entirely together with movement... then totally new ones appearing... every 45 seconds... just stop. And wait passively until there's some kind of heuristic indicating you're above ground, before trying to establish new connections with everything.
Obviously make this optional, but I turn on airplane mode every time I enter the subway and turn it off after I leave, just so I don't have to worry about running out of battery during the day otherwise in case I take 3-4 trips.
‘Because of the long historical association of activating that mode on airplane flights?’
“Well, yeah, but, like, it’s actually anachronistic, because it doesn’t really affect the airplane anymore if you’re transmitting.”
‘Okay, but, I mean, it is the mode that, even today, in 2060, most commonly comes up when you’re on a pla—‘
“Look, I was just trying to sound wise. Just let me have this one.”
“Well Nancy, before instant interdimensional travel…”
You can, just long press the wifi icon in control center, it will expand to show all wifi points nearby. Then click on "settings" button, and it will take you to the actual wifi settings page in the settings app.
This isn't a recent change btw. Idk when they added it, but I remember using it since at least iOS 13 or 14, which was 2-3 years ago.
If you want, you can also just add that shortcut to lockscreen as well and do it via a single tap from there (which is also less clicks than even control center).
0. https://support.apple.com/guide/shortcuts/run-shortcuts-tapp...