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Comment by haberman | Hacker News Reader

I've previously had exactly the same problem with the iPhone. I was singing in a professional rehearsal and had switched the phone to silent, but somehow in my pocket the iPod app was triggered to start playing some music. It disrupted the whole rehearsal and it wasn't clear where it was coming from at first. I was extremely embarrassed (and livid with my phone) when I realized it was coming from my own pocket. I disrupted a rehearsal that was probably costing $2000/hour.

I think Apple made absolutely the wrong choice here. The "silence" switch is next to useless if you can't actually count on the phone being silent when it's switched on.

You might ask why I didn't just turn the phone off. I put the phone in "silent" mode when I still want to receive notifications via vibrate, so I can look and evaluate whether I need to slip away and attend to something urgently.

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But that's exactly the point of the article. An alarm clock is near useless as well (for waking up anyway, that's why I use it) if it's silent just because you told the iPhone to be silent. It'd be disastrous if I accidentally muted my phone, failed to wake up, and missed a morning.

Really, you want a "don't annoy me or people around me" button, but that's context sensitive. A design nobody has been able to implement yet. Apple just made an educated guess at it here.

> Really, you want a "don't annoy me or people around me" button, but that's context sensitive. A design nobody has been able to implement yet. Apple just made an educated guess at it here.

My dumbphone pretty much did that in like, 2005 or so: https://s3.amazonaws.com/ns_pixels/blag/old-phone-volume.jpg

My dumbphone still does this.

> It'd be disastrous if I accidentally muted my phone, failed to wake up, and missed a morning.

It'd also be disastrous if you accidentally turned your phone off and failed to wake up. It'd also be disastrous if you accidentally unplugged your alarm clock and failed to wake up. Or if you accidentally pushed the gas instead of the brake in your car.

There's only so far that a device can go to protect you from yourself. If the harm done by this "helpfulness" can be great (like interrupting a symphony performance for hundreds of people) it's better to err on the side of adhering to what the user actually did. In the case of a "silence" switch, that means being silent. Otherwise why is there a silence switch at all?

FWIW, a lot of people (like me) can wake up to a vibrating phone, especially if it's laying on a hard surface like wood. So an alarm isn't necessarily useless just because the phone's speaker isn't making sound.

> Really, you want a "don't annoy me or people around me" button, but that's context sensitive.

No, what I want (really really) is a switch that turns off the phone's speaker absolutely.

Siri is a potential solution: "Siri, do not disturb me for the next 2 hours."

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