I'm not defending nor evangelising Apples current solution.

I'm lead to believe it's not iPhone users specifically, but people in general.

I've worked in IT, but qualified as a tradesmen nearly a decade before, and I occasionally forget to turn wifi back on when I get home. I currently work for a large steel fabrication company. One of the project managers here doesn't even use email.

It's way too easy for the average person to forget to turn wifi on and blow all your mobile data / get slogged with overage.

In a similar fashion, it's not hard to see and feel when a / the tyres on your car need a bit of air, but we mandate tyre pressure monitoring systems.

We are, for good or bad, reluctant to regulate software system. So, I guess, as always, if we think of a better design we should probably make a demo or promote it, maybe iOS / Android will pick it up along the way.

In 5 years we're gonna wonder how we got to the point where you can't easily turn off wifi, slowly dumbing down devices for all of us for the sake of your project manager and the like.

You can still easily turn off WiFi. It's two or three taps, depending on how you want to get to the setting and what you count as a "tap".

The problem isn't that Apple made it hard to turn off WiFi, it's that they changed one of the controls without making it clear that it had changed.

@mikeash it takes a minimum of 4 or 5 taps and button presses.

On my 6+, the sequence is: press home button, tap Settings, Wi-Fi, Off. That's 3-4 depending on whether you count the home button.

On a 6s or newer, with 3D touch, you can cut it down to 2-3: unlock, force touch on Settings and toggle WiFi from the menu that appears. (That might be 1-2, I forget whether you can force touch and drag to what you want to activate, or whether it has to be a separate tap.)

I didn't know about using force touch on the settings app. However when I tap on the wifi menu entry that appears, I still need yet another tap to disable wifi.

Anyway, here's my count: 1. use touch-id to unlock the phone 2. press home to get to first screen with the settings app (if you aren't already) 3. tap Wifi 4. turn it off

You then need to navigate back to where you were previously.

It does sadden me there aren't a bunch more advanced options a level or two below the standard options on iPhones.

I didn't down vote you by the way.

Android does the same thing, more or less, now. For quite a while Wi-Fi has not been truly off unless you access a buried setting—it's scanning for access points for location data. Now in the latest release the Wi-Fi will turn itself back on after having been turned off once you're near a known access point. I never really had an issue with this, as you say it is not that hard to notice the icon in the status bar, but I will admit it is a nice touch. Granted, I have already signed my soul over to Google so I have little to care about.

Most users notice very little, ever.