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Comment by siculars | Hacker News Reader

That’s straight garbage town. There are other ways to remind users that their WiFi is off than tricking users into thinking it is off when it really isn’t. Standard “engineers know best” mentality. Off means off. As in the opposite of on. This nonsense feeds into people (rightful) distrust of technology.

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I'm a generally well educated person in both security, radios, etc. I can tell you that the control Centre Wi-Fi is basically always used by me to disconnect from the current network. And it persistently infuriated me when I would later forget and was on mobile data.

I can also see users frequently being confused by things like their Apple Pencil not working.

I love this change. You can still turn it off properly in settings. I generally trust Apple with frequent and speedy security updates. Their security track record is industry leading. I'm not remotely concerned.

Also most of the time people tell me they want this option they really mean they want to save battery life. I'd suggest just using low power mode for that, it's what it's designed for.

Hi Lathiat. Why do you need to disconnect from the current network? I can think of many alternatively implementations which would meet most requirements that have been proposed, like turning the wifi back on when the battery is charging or at 5am. All the proposals involve compromises, but it seems much easier to make a notice that clearly says "Wifi will reconnect at 5am" then to say "Wifi is still using your battery, but we've disconnected from the current network". I mean, the message itself fits in the same space as the current message, and the icon itself could have a timer band counting down till 5am so you know that it's only temporarily disabled. (I too have accidentally used up all my month's data because I left the wifi off for a few days. It's not nice. I'd appreciate a feature which deals with it. But this one is unpredictable, unreadable and confusing.)

Also, are you proposing that low power mode with wifi uses the same amount of power as lower power mode without wifi? If I know I'm not going to see a power point for many hours, I turn my phone onto low power mode and turn wifi off (and the brightness right down and some other things). I might do it as I leave the house in the morning when I still have 95% battery. In these cases, I very often need my phone most in precisely when the battery will be weakest.

Not who you asked but: Public wifis tend to stop working if too many users log in. For me that frequently happens at airports. They still broadcast and pretend to have a connection but no throughput. So switching it off is the only solution. When I then go somewhere else (esp abroad), I'd still like to join the next wifi. Having it switched off for the rest of the day can be very expensive.

Disconnecting from the current network is usually because something is broken about that network for some reason (or in some cases, 4G is just much faster). Having said that, the number of times I do this has been significantly reduced by "Wi-Fi Assist" (which turns off the wifi network automatically if the connection seems poor/broken). People also complained about this feature (because it uses my mobile data!!!) -- but I imagine the majority of people are now blissfully unaware when their iPhone saves them from apps or pages not loading and the general experience is much better.

Having had this discussion a few times, I'd love to do a solid battery life investigation of turning off wi-fi properly versus this toggle.. given it disables auto-join I imagine the scanning frequency is significantly reduced and thus the power usage is probably relatively comparable (close enough). But that's just a guess, I don't know for sure, but I'd sure love to know.

I'd also love to know the battery impact of turning bluetooth off entirely. These things all seem like antipatterns to do as a regular usage thing and I think that, in most cases without actual research, they're a bad idea for people to get into the habbit of. For precisely the reasons outlined here and by apple.. later using mobile data accidentally, being confused your apple pencil works, etc.

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