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Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

All they had to do was implement it to cycle between three states: on, off-temporarily, and actually off.

Or label the damned things.

But no, they fundamentally changed how an important UI widget worked with no obvious indication that anything is different.

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This decision seems so fundamentally "anti-Apple". What happened to "it just works"? Heck, they could have even promoted a third option as being super innovative (not like it is, but marketing "Now with 'WiFi Safe Sleep!' or something like that would have been the old Apple way).

Eh. Apple has always been about making decisions for 'you' to resolve the bigger problems for the most amount of users. People who don't fall into that are just collateral.

Even the work around is far from what I'd expect, so much hidden functionality behind long presses, 3D presses, swipes, etc from the company that used to think the right mouse button would confuse people. That's about as useful to the average person as putting the setting in an ini file.

> hn_throwaway_99

Is really HN so hostile to statements critical of anything Apple does that you actually need to create a throwaway for it?

To me, that seems a bit extreme.

Edit: Not so throwaway after all then. Didn't consider checking.

    created: 228 days ago

Age doesn't make the account not a throwaway. Number and frequency of comments, and variety of topic, make it not a throwaway.

This decision is not anti-Apple at all, in fact it's Apple in a nutshell: We decide what's best for you, there should be no settings whatsoever to toggle any kind of preferred alternative option and we don't have to inform you what's going on because things obviously "just work".

Yes. Apple used to be about empowering people. That's what ease of use was about. You can keep doing the same thing and you get the same result, but when you're ready you can finally press that button you've always ignored. You'll discover something new which you might want to undo. But that's fine too, because it's clear and obvious how to.

This meant they got a reputation for building easy-to-use tools.

This meant they got a reputation for building things for people who want their stuff to just work.

This meant that they believed their role should be to remove things that are ugly or powerful, hiding features.

This means that they're no longer building easy-to-use tools. You don't know what your phone is going to do any more. You can't predict if wifi is off or not. There's two ways to turn wifi off, one of them doesn't work. One of them allegedly works. There's no way to know this without reading documentation or relying on word of mouth.

There's a good reason to want wifi to only be pseudo-off, but there's other ways they could have implemented this feature that would have been empowering. They opted for this one not because it's the right option, but because they've given up on the spirit that made them great in the first place.

RTFM. It's the new motto of the Apple apologist. Soon we'll be saying "next year will be the year of Apple on the desktop".

To be fair, Apple apologists have been saying things like “You’re holding it wrong” for a while now.

Exactly. What is it with Apple refusing to implement simple UX solutions like this one or the back fingerprint reader, which have been on Android phones for years?!

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