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Turning Off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth in iOS 11's Control Center Doesn't Actually Turn Off Wi-Fi or Bluetooth (vice.com)

An anonymous reader shares a Motherboard report: Turning off Bluetooth and Wi-Fi when you're not using them on your smartphone has long been standard, common sense, advice. Unfortunately, with the iPhone's new operating system iOS 11 - which was released to the general public yesterday - turning them off is not as easy as it used to be. Now, when you toggle Bluetooth and Wi-Fi off from the iPhone's Control Center -- the somewhat confusing menu that appears when you swipe up from the bottom of the phone -- it actually doesn't completely turn them off. While that might sound like a bug, that's actually what Apple intended in the new operating system. But security researchers warn that users might not realize this and, as a consequence, could leave Bluetooth and Wi-Fi on without noticing. Numerous Slashdot readers have complained about this "feature" this week.

10 of 226 comments (clear)

  1. Burying the takeaway by Wrath0fb0b · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The takeaway is that if you want to really and completely turn off Bluetooth and Wi-Fi on iOS11 you can't do it from the Control Center anymore, you'll have to do it through the Settings app.

    So the takeaway is that there is still a UI element that powers the radio off and the only thing changed is that a different UI element performs a disconnect rather than a power off. So a power-user that knows precisely which of the two she intends can pick the right one.

    Calling it 'stupid' is a bit of an overreaction to what is basically a UI change to map a more-commonly-held button on what is perceived to the more-commonly-intended outcome. Maybe that attribution of intended outcome is wrong (as anyone that has tried to help less technical people, trying to figure out what someone is actually trying to do is a hell of a thing) but it seems at least reasonable to me that "get me off this shitty coffeeshop WiFi but do associate with my home WiFi when I get there" is a more common intent than "don't get on any network whatsoever until I remember to hit the button again".

  2. When...? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Can we go back to the 'old' way, where I buy something, its mine, and I get to determine how I want it to work.

    I know, I know, grumpy old man grumbling about progress....

    Maybe just go back to the old dictionary... where "off" meant off, and progress meant something other than "up yours".

  3. Re: Very Brave by cayenne8 · · Score: 4, Insightful
    You know...while I do not consider myself an Apple Fanboy....I have enjoyed many of their products over the past years.

    But man...after Steve passed away, it does seem to be going downhill there. The UI is just not as intuitive anymore. Gaffs of things not working, like the watch LTE problems on release, and stuff like this.

    I had hoped the folks he'd had following him had had some of the intuition he'd displayed on how things should be (some losers, but mostly good IMHO) and work that make products easy and fun to use for he user, and have them be intuitive.....but alas, that does not seem to be the case and we see blunder after blunder and design and UI flaw after flaw.

    --
    Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
  4. This reminds me of something... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely." -- 1984

  5. Re:And the point then? by quintus_horatius · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You can turn off both radios in the settings app

    Then why have this "false" radio-off setting? Why not turn them off the way users expect when they, for instance, toggle the radios off using the easy-to-find settings?

    Also, FTFA:

    ...both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi will become active again when you toggle them off in the Control Center at 5 AM local time, according to Apple's documentation

    What the hell is the point of THAT?!

  6. Re: Very Brave by ilsaloving · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The problem is that they replaced an engineer with a pointy haired boss with an MBA. Tim Cook knows how to do is squeeze people for more cash, exploiting their captive user base until people throw their hands up in the air and walk away.

    It's ironic, Microsoft is trying so hard to be like Apple, but Apple is trying very hard to be like Oracle.

  7. After giving this some thought by the_skywise · · Score: 4, Insightful

    After being outrageously outraged I lied down and took a stresstab and I think I see the usability standpoint. They're probably getting tons of customer support calls from naive users whining that they can't airdrop from their iPhone to their iPad because they turned off wifi on their iPhone. (I do that all the time as I leave my macbook connected to an ethernet connection and turn off the wifi and then can't figure out why my macbook doesn't show up on airdrop but the 15 people's iPhone in the office cubes around me do!)
    That said, they've broken the first law of UI design - DON'T CHANGE THE BEHAVIOR OF A BUTTON ONCE YOU'VE ESTABLISHED ITS USE. If anything it should be a tri-state button now - full on - apple services only - off. That would've clarified the intent to the user of the change AND alerted the user to its valid state.

    Is it any wonder that many considered Steve Jobs an asshole when he would go off? He was probably going off on UI designers doing stuff like this. "DUDE - I PAY YOU A QUARTER OF A MILLION DOLLARS A YEAR AND YOU'RE PUSHING THIS S$*@ ON ME?! WTF?!"

  8. Re: Very Brave by ColdWetDog · · Score: 4, Insightful

    MacPro, the dwindling mini, the 'touch bar', dongles, port starvation, thin, thin, thin!!!

    Oh, and iTunes.

    I win!

    --
    Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
  9. Re: Very Brave by Khyber · · Score: 5, Insightful

    https://youtu.be/ZBma82g3Uag

    Apple has become exactly what Jobs originally did not like.

    --
    Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
  10. Re:Facts by ilsaloving · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The only thing factually correct in that sentence is that Tim Cook does have a MBA degree and there is no evidence that constitutes a problem for Apple. Steve Jobs was not an engineer and did not have an engineering degree (or any other degree for that matter). Tim Cook IS an engineer and does have an engineering degree from Auburn University.

    I have great difficulty believing that, considering that there has been virtually zero innovation since Jobs died. Unless you count "making products less useful and more expensive" as innovation. Seriously, only an abject idiot would leave out HDMI on a modern laptop, for example. And have you used the keyboard on the most recent MBPs? It's the single worst keyboard I have ever used in my life.

    There is no evidence that Apple customers are walking away in any meaningful numbers.

    Really? Then mind explaining why their laptop sales figures are tanking? I myself have been using Apple for over a decade. My "current" MBP is a 2011 because every version after that has been worse than the last. Nothing is upgradable on it anymore, and even the stuff that's built into it is crap. I already mentioned the god-awful keyboard. A whopping TWO USB-C ports, or 4 if you wanna splurge, and nothing else. Wanna connect to a meeting room TV? Nope. A projector? Nope. Someone wants to give you a file on a USB key? Nope.

    It's like they took the top 10 use cases for a laptop in the business world, gave a good belly laugh and said, "Fuck'em all."

    If you think that then I don't think you've actually dealt with Oracle. The experience of working with Apple is NOTHING like the experience of working with Oracle.

    I didn't say they were Oracle. I said they were trying to be like Oracle. That takes time, but they're doing it. Have you bought a USB-C power supply from Apple? They don't even provide a USB-C cable in the box. You literally have to buy the cord separately. So you're now paying $125 for a power supply instead of $100.

    And never mind the whole donglegate thing where you literally need to buy dongles if you wanna so much as scratch your nose.

    Apple has taken nickle and diming people to amazing new heights, while *at the same time* jacking up their prices of their products across the board. You cannot possibly tell me that that is anything other than customer hostile.

    It's literally a battle of what you hate less now. Everyone I know who is an apple user is only using apple products because they hate Microsoft's bullshit more than they hate Apple's bullshit. That's not a particularly good long term strategy. It means that should Microsoft ever mistakenly pull their head out of their ass and make a product that doesn't suck, Apple is going to be in serious trouble. Google is slowly gaining ground on both of them with their chromebooks, and that's going to accelerate as they get more useful and people realize they arn't dependent on the encumbents anymore.