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The devices aren't down, they just fall back to 3G.

If the page times out, I don't know what happens. But this time, the page explicitly responded with a 404, which it "should never do", so the device successfully detected a "MITM" and did the right thing. (Except in this case, apple.com webmasters screwed up)

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You're assuming all devices _have_ 3G. My iPad doesn't...

You are assuming all devices have 3G?

In any case, if the wifi AP responds with "impossible" results, the wifi access point is for all purposes "unusable", and you wouldn't be able to get on the internet anyways.

internet connection != http://www.apple.com/library/test/success.html

When did "successful wifi connection" mean having access to this unstable apple.com url?

Since for 99.99999% of users being able to visit a web page means the internet is working.

Remember Apple never optimises for edge case.

I had no idea the entire internet became unreachable when a particular apple.com URL became inaccessible. Is there an RFC that covers this?

nope, but a better fallback would probably be: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2549

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