5 ms·

The term airplane mode will persist as an anachronism forever. Some day we will have to explain to our grandchildren why disabling networks has anything to do w

The term airplane mode will persist as an anachronism forever. Some day we will have to explain to our grandchildren why disabling networks has anything to do with airplanes.

imwillofficial 4y ago
“Grandpa, what’s an airplane?” “Well Nancy, before instant interdimensional travel…”
- cercatrova 4y ago
  Imagine physically traveling through a medium. I only transmit my bits instantaneously and get reconstructed on the other side.
spideymans 4y ago
My most frequent use of the airplane mode, is when I go underground on metro systems, which I find pretty ironic. (Without Airplane Mode, the phone will keep trying to connect to cellular towers, which just makes the network experience unstable) Perhaps "Underground Mode" would be more suitable in a modern context /s
- smabie 4y ago
  Isn't an unstable network experience better than no network experience?
  - rsync 4y ago
    "Isn't an unstable network experience better than no network experience?" Yes, you would think ... but that is not the case. QA and design of modern mobile apps and software - and even devices and appliances - neglects the testing of bad network connectivity. Both my physical Sonos devices and, for instance, the apple-provided podcasts app, can handle being fully offline reasonably well. On the other hand, if you start dropping ~50% of packets they lose their mind and (in the case of Apples podcast app) freeze or crash.
  - formerkrogemp 4y ago
    Not if you're conserving battery life I suppose..
  - core-utility 4y ago
    Depending on what you're doing. Many apps that reach out to the internet at launch will hang if there's an unstable connection, but will recognize when there's no connection and open in an offline mode.
  - stuart78 4y ago
    Not for apps like Audible which (this is my guess based on personal experience) prevents you from doing anything if you seem to have connectivity but can’t get a real response. Offline mode is simply more stable, unless you need to sync status from another device.
    - Arrath 4y ago
      Audible is terrible for this. The parking lot at work is situated juuuust right to the point that when I'm leaving the office, my phone thinks its connected but has no actual connectivity. Audible sits there trying to sync the storefront and whatever else instead of just playing my damn book when I turn on my car to leave for the day.
  - spideymans 4y ago
    A lot of apps have cached experiences that they'll only show you if you have no network connection. If the app detects a very weak LTE connection, it'll try to load data over the network. That means that on a weak connection, I often end up being served nothing, rather than the data that's already cached on device. As a tangent, I feel that a lot of these problems are fundamentally because engineers don't understand how poorly their software performs on unstable networks. Unless you live in a large metropolitan area with a well used underground transit network (in the USA, I suppose NYC would be the only qualifying city... sigh), you'd likely never experience these symptoms on a daily basis.
    - taneq 4y ago
      > Unless you live in a large metropolitan area with a well used underground transit network Or anywhere more than ~50km from the nearest town. I dunno what coverage is like in the U.S. but in parts of Australia it’s not uncommon to lose reception when country driving.
    - hahajk 4y ago
      ...or you live in a dense suburb where they never bothered to put up towers, or a rural area where towers are more scarce, or any where that you have to go in a building without wifi.. I don't honestly believe many developers don't experience this a lot. It's probably just such a transitory experience that it's not worth the rearchitecting required to really solve it.
      - taneq 4y ago
        I’d believe they don’t experience it at their desks at work. And they probably aren’t often thinking about work when they’re at home or visiting rural areas.
    - adamparsons 4y ago
      If I “download” music for offline listening in Spotify, in the highest possible quality, and I attempt to listen to that music on a unstable network, the app will not work. It will wait for me to completely lose the connection before playing the cached files. Have noticed similar bugs existing in other software
  - lmm 4y ago
    I find that my music/video streaming apps work a lot better with no network than with an unstable network.
  - Arrath 4y ago
    In my experience, no not at all, as it causes my phone to drain its battery exceptionally fast while it thrashes the modem in a frantic search for signal.
    - crazygringo 4y ago
      Yes! I don't know why nobody talks about this. If I don't go into airplane mode, half of my daily battery drain is from two half-hour trips in the underground subway. It's insane. By far, my #1 wish for my iPhone would be a mode to basically "detect subway networks constantly changing" and just give up trying. Like, if it observes all cell and wifi networks disappearing entirely together with movement... then totally new ones appearing... every 45 seconds... just stop. And wait passively until there's some kind of heuristic indicating you're above ground, before trying to establish new connections with everything. Obviously make this optional, but I turn on airplane mode every time I enter the subway and turn it off after I leave, just so I don't have to worry about running out of battery during the day otherwise in case I take 3-4 trips.
      - xiwenc 4y ago
        Very good ideas! As hobby I like to automate mundane tasks. I’m applying a similar approach by using iPhone Shortcuts app. See https://twitter.com/xiwenc/status/1578670843584204801?s=46&t=A_7fJNYokcG2Nxl8DwzhiQ https://twitter.com/xiwenc/status/1578670843584204801?s=46&t... for how i did it by automatically turning off/on low power mode, wifi, etc. Perhaps you’re inspired by it.
  - squeaky-clean 4y ago
    It drains the battery really quickly in my experience. On my (admittedly old) iphone a 30 minute subway journey without airplane mode will drain about 10%. Also even if i'm listening to music I have downloaded locally, Apple Music will do a system-wide popup complaining that it lost cellular connection. Sometimes in Safari a webpage that was downloaded at the station will suddenly erase itself and attempt to refresh itself upon losing connection. Those are usually the kinds of ad-ridden sites that are making nonstop ajax calls, but sometimes that's what i'm reading.
- FabHK 4y ago
  In the Hong Kong MTR (subway) mobile phones work just fine. I was shocked when I couldn't get a connection in the London tube.
  - snowwrestler 4y ago
    In DC as well, Verizon strung the tunnels with base stations. I get better cellular data on the subway than I do at home.
SilasX 4y ago
“Do do you know why radio silence on cell phones is called Airplane Mode?” ‘Because of the long historical association of activating that mode on airplane flights?’ “Well, yeah, but, like, it’s actually anachronistic, because it doesn’t really affect the airplane anymore if you’re transmitting.” ‘Okay, but, I mean, it is the mode that, even today, in 2060, most commonly comes up when you’re on a pla—‘ “Look, I was just trying to sound wise. Just let me have this one.”
bonestamp2 4y ago
My iPad is forever in airplane mode. That way I can turn wifi off without iOS automatically turning it back on 24 hours later.
- filoleg 4y ago
  If you turn off wifi from settings instead of the control center (top right corner pull), it will stay turned off. If you turn it off from the control center, it will indeed say "Turning off WiFi until tomorrow".
  - bonestamp2 4y ago
    Yes, but it's much easier to turn it on/off from control center, so I just have to leave it in airplane mode.
    - filoleg 4y ago
      True. As an alternative, I personally just created a one-action shortcut for turning off wifi and assigned it to the double backtap action[0]. So i dont even need to look at the screen anymore or go into any menus. I just do a double backtap, and wifi stays turned off until i need it (same as doing it from the settings). If you want, you can also just add that shortcut to lockscreen as well and do it via a single tap from there (which is also less clicks than even control center). 0. https://support.apple.com/guide/shortcuts/run-shortcuts-tapping-iphone-apd897693606/ios https://support.apple.com/guide/shortcuts/run-shortcuts-tapp...
      - bonestamp2 4y ago
        Nice shortcut, thanks! I do love shortcuts. :)
  - tsimionescu 4y ago
    Can you at least get from Control Center to the corresponding Settings page easily now (long press, hard press, etc), or is Apple dying on that hill?
cookie_monsta 4y ago
Well, maybe. My kids seem to have taken it for granted that clicking on that weird square thing that we know as a floppy disk icon saves their work, somewhere. I don't think they ever asked why that symbol.
kortex 4y ago
It'll be in good company with dialing, film, photograph, watching the tube, etc. Actually photograph was already out of date, because graph had morphed from "to write" to making any kind of image. Which itself I believe meant something akin to inscription /engraving. Actually while photograph may no longer be a graph as in image on a surface, in some ways it's still an image impressed on rocks. Made using lithography. Have we gotten closer to its roots?
- laundermaf 4y ago
  -graph effectively means recording, storing, so photograph is still very much valid and will forever be.
  - hypertele-Xii 4y ago
    Yup, "photograph" is literally "light recording".
- _emacsomancer_ 4y ago
  Yes, both γράφω (>graph) and English write seem to have "scratch, carve" as earliest senses.
- tsimionescu 4y ago
  Don't forget floppy disks being enshrined as the Save icon - that has to be one of the shortest lives devices to give rise to such an anachronism.
  - Ekaros 4y ago
    And the fact that at that point they weren't even floppy anymore. Like 5 or 8 inch were...
    - rsync 4y ago
      "And the fact that at that point they weren't even floppy anymore. Like 5 or 8 inch were..." No, they were all floppy. You are just thinking of the hard plastic case that 3.5" diskettes had. If you crack it open and disassemble it, the actual spinning disk is just as floppy as the 5.25" was. This is as opposed to a "hard" disk which is a hard platter inside a fixed disk.
perryizgr8 4y ago
I remember using a Nokia phone long ago that didn't have an aeroplane mode. It was simply called "offline".

The term airplane mode will persist as an anachronism forever. Some day we will have to explain to our grandchildren why disabling networks has anything to do with airplanes.

imwillofficial 4y ago

“Grandpa, what’s an airplane?” “Well Nancy, before instant interdimensional travel…”

cercatrova 4y ago
Imagine physically traveling through a medium. I only transmit my bits instantaneously and get reconstructed on the other side.

spideymans 4y ago

My most frequent use of the airplane mode, is when I go underground on metro systems, which I find pretty ironic. (Without Airplane Mode, the phone will keep trying to connect to cellular towers, which just makes the network experience unstable) Perhaps "Underground Mode" would be more suitable in a modern context /s

smabie 4y ago
Isn't an unstable network experience better than no network experience?
- rsync 4y ago
  "Isn't an unstable network experience better than no network experience?" Yes, you would think ... but that is not the case. QA and design of modern mobile apps and software - and even devices and appliances - neglects the testing of bad network connectivity. Both my physical Sonos devices and, for instance, the apple-provided podcasts app, can handle being fully offline reasonably well. On the other hand, if you start dropping ~50% of packets they lose their mind and (in the case of Apples podcast app) freeze or crash.
- formerkrogemp 4y ago
  Not if you're conserving battery life I suppose..
- core-utility 4y ago
  Depending on what you're doing. Many apps that reach out to the internet at launch will hang if there's an unstable connection, but will recognize when there's no connection and open in an offline mode.
- stuart78 4y ago
  Not for apps like Audible which (this is my guess based on personal experience) prevents you from doing anything if you seem to have connectivity but can’t get a real response. Offline mode is simply more stable, unless you need to sync status from another device.
  - Arrath 4y ago
    Audible is terrible for this. The parking lot at work is situated juuuust right to the point that when I'm leaving the office, my phone thinks its connected but has no actual connectivity. Audible sits there trying to sync the storefront and whatever else instead of just playing my damn book when I turn on my car to leave for the day.
- spideymans 4y ago
  A lot of apps have cached experiences that they'll only show you if you have no network connection. If the app detects a very weak LTE connection, it'll try to load data over the network. That means that on a weak connection, I often end up being served nothing, rather than the data that's already cached on device. As a tangent, I feel that a lot of these problems are fundamentally because engineers don't understand how poorly their software performs on unstable networks. Unless you live in a large metropolitan area with a well used underground transit network (in the USA, I suppose NYC would be the only qualifying city... sigh), you'd likely never experience these symptoms on a daily basis.
  - taneq 4y ago
    > Unless you live in a large metropolitan area with a well used underground transit network Or anywhere more than ~50km from the nearest town. I dunno what coverage is like in the U.S. but in parts of Australia it’s not uncommon to lose reception when country driving.
  - hahajk 4y ago
    ...or you live in a dense suburb where they never bothered to put up towers, or a rural area where towers are more scarce, or any where that you have to go in a building without wifi.. I don't honestly believe many developers don't experience this a lot. It's probably just such a transitory experience that it's not worth the rearchitecting required to really solve it.
    - taneq 4y ago
      I’d believe they don’t experience it at their desks at work. And they probably aren’t often thinking about work when they’re at home or visiting rural areas.
  - adamparsons 4y ago
    If I “download” music for offline listening in Spotify, in the highest possible quality, and I attempt to listen to that music on a unstable network, the app will not work. It will wait for me to completely lose the connection before playing the cached files. Have noticed similar bugs existing in other software
- lmm 4y ago
  I find that my music/video streaming apps work a lot better with no network than with an unstable network.
- Arrath 4y ago
  In my experience, no not at all, as it causes my phone to drain its battery exceptionally fast while it thrashes the modem in a frantic search for signal.
  - crazygringo 4y ago
    Yes! I don't know why nobody talks about this. If I don't go into airplane mode, half of my daily battery drain is from two half-hour trips in the underground subway. It's insane. By far, my #1 wish for my iPhone would be a mode to basically "detect subway networks constantly changing" and just give up trying. Like, if it observes all cell and wifi networks disappearing entirely together with movement... then totally new ones appearing... every 45 seconds... just stop. And wait passively until there's some kind of heuristic indicating you're above ground, before trying to establish new connections with everything. Obviously make this optional, but I turn on airplane mode every time I enter the subway and turn it off after I leave, just so I don't have to worry about running out of battery during the day otherwise in case I take 3-4 trips.
    - xiwenc 4y ago
      Very good ideas! As hobby I like to automate mundane tasks. I’m applying a similar approach by using iPhone Shortcuts app. See https://twitter.com/xiwenc/status/1578670843584204801?s=46&t=A_7fJNYokcG2Nxl8DwzhiQ https://twitter.com/xiwenc/status/1578670843584204801?s=46&t... for how i did it by automatically turning off/on low power mode, wifi, etc. Perhaps you’re inspired by it.
- squeaky-clean 4y ago
  It drains the battery really quickly in my experience. On my (admittedly old) iphone a 30 minute subway journey without airplane mode will drain about 10%. Also even if i'm listening to music I have downloaded locally, Apple Music will do a system-wide popup complaining that it lost cellular connection. Sometimes in Safari a webpage that was downloaded at the station will suddenly erase itself and attempt to refresh itself upon losing connection. Those are usually the kinds of ad-ridden sites that are making nonstop ajax calls, but sometimes that's what i'm reading.
FabHK 4y ago
In the Hong Kong MTR (subway) mobile phones work just fine. I was shocked when I couldn't get a connection in the London tube.
- snowwrestler 4y ago
  In DC as well, Verizon strung the tunnels with base stations. I get better cellular data on the subway than I do at home.

SilasX 4y ago

“Do do you know why radio silence on cell phones is called Airplane Mode?” ‘Because of the long historical association of activating that mode on airplane flights?’ “Well, yeah, but, like, it’s actually anachronistic, because it doesn’t really affect the airplane anymore if you’re transmitting.” ‘Okay, but, I mean, it is the mode that, even today, in 2060, most commonly comes up when you’re on a pla—‘ “Look, I was just trying to sound wise. Just let me have this one.”

bonestamp2 4y ago

My iPad is forever in airplane mode. That way I can turn wifi off without iOS automatically turning it back on 24 hours later.

filoleg 4y ago
If you turn off wifi from settings instead of the control center (top right corner pull), it will stay turned off. If you turn it off from the control center, it will indeed say "Turning off WiFi until tomorrow".
- bonestamp2 4y ago
  Yes, but it's much easier to turn it on/off from control center, so I just have to leave it in airplane mode.
  - filoleg 4y ago
    True. As an alternative, I personally just created a one-action shortcut for turning off wifi and assigned it to the double backtap action[0]. So i dont even need to look at the screen anymore or go into any menus. I just do a double backtap, and wifi stays turned off until i need it (same as doing it from the settings). If you want, you can also just add that shortcut to lockscreen as well and do it via a single tap from there (which is also less clicks than even control center). 0. https://support.apple.com/guide/shortcuts/run-shortcuts-tapping-iphone-apd897693606/ios https://support.apple.com/guide/shortcuts/run-shortcuts-tapp...
    - bonestamp2 4y ago
      Nice shortcut, thanks! I do love shortcuts. :)
- tsimionescu 4y ago
  Can you at least get from Control Center to the corresponding Settings page easily now (long press, hard press, etc), or is Apple dying on that hill?

cookie_monsta 4y ago

Well, maybe. My kids seem to have taken it for granted that clicking on that weird square thing that we know as a floppy disk icon saves their work, somewhere. I don't think they ever asked why that symbol.

kortex 4y ago

It'll be in good company with dialing, film, photograph, watching the tube, etc. Actually photograph was already out of date, because graph had morphed from "to write" to making any kind of image. Which itself I believe meant something akin to inscription /engraving. Actually while photograph may no longer be a graph as in image on a surface, in some ways it's still an image impressed on rocks. Made using lithography. Have we gotten closer to its roots?

laundermaf 4y ago
-graph effectively means recording, storing, so photograph is still very much valid and will forever be.
- hypertele-Xii 4y ago
  Yup, "photograph" is literally "light recording".
_emacsomancer_ 4y ago
Yes, both γράφω (>graph) and English write seem to have "scratch, carve" as earliest senses.
tsimionescu 4y ago
Don't forget floppy disks being enshrined as the Save icon - that has to be one of the shortest lives devices to give rise to such an anachronism.
- Ekaros 4y ago
  And the fact that at that point they weren't even floppy anymore. Like 5 or 8 inch were...
  - rsync 4y ago
    "And the fact that at that point they weren't even floppy anymore. Like 5 or 8 inch were..." No, they were all floppy. You are just thinking of the hard plastic case that 3.5" diskettes had. If you crack it open and disassemble it, the actual spinning disk is just as floppy as the 5.25" was. This is as opposed to a "hard" disk which is a hard platter inside a fixed disk.

perryizgr8 4y ago

I remember using a Nokia phone long ago that didn't have an aeroplane mode. It was simply called "offline".