More thoughts on iPhone Mute Switch
Just finished listening to last week’s The Talk Show on the iPhone “Mute” switch. It’s an interesting debate. I like Gruber’s point that, while people feel very strongly one way or the other, there aren’t camps of fanboys here. It really is an interesting design problem.
I think most of the confusion about the iPhone’s Mute switch behavior stems from two other aspects of the iPhone’s volume control design. First, the Mute switch does, in fact, mute most other applications. Second, the physical Volume Up/Down buttons adjust the volume of non-mutable alerts like Calendar. To me, the Volume buttons and the Mute button should behave consistently with each other.
Gruber mentioned that few people embracing the “mute means mute” position report being burned by this issue. I have been burned by it, though thankfully it was during a small company meeting instead of at a symphony. I had set a timer so I could step out in time to feed the parking meter. When I flipped the switch into silent mode, I expected the timer alarm to be a vibrate-only, just like the telephone/voicemail/text alerts in silent mode. Needless to say I was surprised when it the Jazz tone started playing.
I appreciate the notion that alarms are set for more important reasons and shouldn’t be inadvertently suppressed. Like many iPhone users, I use my phone as my alarm clock. Funny enough, I have been burned by not waking up to my alarm clock because I had turned the volume all the way down.
My preferred behavior could be boiled down to this. The mute switch should be behave identically to turning the volume down to zero, with exception to Find My iPhone. I want to be confident that when I tell my phone to STFU, it will do that. Otherwise, I lose trust in the mute switch in any of the places where I’d be embarrassed for the phone to suddenly sound (concert, movie, meeting, interview, church, funeral, wedding, etc…). I don’t want to have to power it off to have a high level of confidence.
Incidentally, my wife seems to think this is how an older version of iOS actually worked. She recalls missing several morning wake-ups because she left the mute switch on, then being surprised by the non-muted alarm clock after upgrading. I can’t remember, though. Did it change?
I don’t think Apple should add a flurry of configuration options for the switch. That just makes it more confusing. Remember the old Nokia phones that had a dozen or so different mode combinations for various circumstances like Normal, Silent, Vibrate Only, Meeting, Dinner, Movie, etc? The idea was to choose the combination of ringer volume and vibrate for various situations. The only ones I ever used were Normal, Vibrate-Only, and Silent. Everything else was too much.
