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Comment by snprbob86 | Hacker News Reader

In practice, it's a "Mute- all sounds, but don't frustrait me when I try to watch a movie, or need to get to work on time -switch".

Theaters, weddings, etc. are absolutely not the only time you want to mute things. A very large number of people work in shared offices and operate their phones in silent mode all-day, every-day. I for one really appreciate that I don't have to think about what state my mute switch is in when I get home hours later and try to watch a YouTube video.

The common case is that your alarm is only ever set to wake you up in the morning and your timer is only ever set when you're sitting around, waiting for your dinner to be ready. It's very rare for you to set an alarm or a timer which will affect a quiet group environment.

I don't think that a hard mute-always rule is worth compromising the common case ;-)

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In practice, it's a "Mute- all sounds, but don't frustrait me when I try to watch a movie, or need to get to work on time -switch".

This definition is fuzzy, and thus harder to understand, which was my second point.

Theaters, weddings, etc. are absolutely not the only time you want to mute things.

I didn't say these were the only times, I claimed this was the most common use case. Granted, I don't have data to back this up, so perhaps I'm wrong. I'm sure there are plenty of other reasons to mute, this just seems to be the classi case that I anecdotally see the most.

I for one really appreciate that I don't have to think about what state my mute switch is in when I get home hours later and try to watch a YouTube video.

This is hardly a big problem, though, certainly not worthy of confusing behaviour.

I agree you wouldn't normally have an alarm/timer set for these times. It's probably a rare mistake, but an embarrassing and costly one! These aren't the only ways that an iPhone will ignore the mute setting, though. This "feature" gives you plenty of ways to shoot yourself in the foot.

Is it really a "costly" situation? Really?

> A very large number of people work in shared offices and operate their phones in silent mode all-day, every-day.

If that's the case, can't you just turn the ringer to off in your phone's settings? Why do you need the silence switch for this? The silence switch is useful when you want to switch back and forth a lot.

That's definitely not the use case I would imagine for the Mute switch.

The shared office situation should be handled by setting the phone into a "Vibrate only" mode. On "Mute" mode, my phone doesn't even vibrate, and that's exactly what I expect to happen.

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