I recently bought an iPhone. It’s great. But there’s this weird friction: when you turn off Bluetooth or Wi-Fi via Control Center, it’s not really off. Instead, it just pauses until the next day. Turning them off entirely requires going through additional steps via Settings.
Being Apple, they must have a good reason for doing so. After a closer look, it starts to make sense.
Apple wants your devices to just work
Airdrop, Handoff, Continuity features, etc. all need Bluetooth or Wi-Fi to function. If they’re off, things start to break. And most users don’t know why, or worse, they blame Apple.
So instead of asking users to micromanage toggles, Apple nudges them to leave things alone. You get seamless device integration, less friction, and Apple avoids being blamed.
You won’t save much battery anyways
A quick Google search (or just ask ChatGPT for the sources) shows that turning them off only saves ~1-5% battery. Not worth the extra friction.
The less you need to control your device, the better the design
You don’t need to babysit these settings. If you want to disconnect a device or network, you can do that without turning Bluetooth/Wi-Fi off entirely. And if you do pause them via Control Center, they’ll come back on automatically. It’s more convenient that way than having to consciously decide to toggle radios 5 times a day.
Sidenote on “until tomorrow”
Why “until tomorrow” instead of something like “for 6 hours”?
People already chunk their day that way: morning, afternoon, next day. Whereas “next X hours” nudges you toward doing calculation: “it’s turned on now, when did I turn it off?”, “when will it turn back on?”.
Also, radios don’t turn back on at midnight, they reset at 5AM. “Tomorrow” is when you wake up. It matches your rhythm, not the clock’s.
The word “tomorrow”, and the mechanic behind it, make the phone feels humane.