When it comes right down to it, I hold my iPad in far more bizarre positions than I hold my iPhone. Sometimes it’s flat on my lap, sometimes it’s held over my head as I read in bed. In every one of those situations, it’s become second-nature to me to flip that orientation lock switch to avoid the dreaded iPad Screen Dance that every iPad owner has encountered. Given the frequency with which iPad owners benefit from orientation-locking, quicker access to the feature is better, and the hardware switch is far faster than the double-tap, swipe, tap software approach. To be honest, I almost never lock my iPhone’s orientation because I find locking it (and unlocking it again) annoying.
(via macworld.com)
It’s pointless to complain about this, because Apple has obviously made up its mind, and as we well know, once that happens almost nothing will change it back. But I have to agree with many of the complainers that changing the orientation lock on the iPad to a mute switch, just for the sake of being consistent with the iPhone, is a bad idea.
The above paragraph expresses perfectly why I feel this way. The tablet form factor requires an easy way to lock orientation while the phone form factor simply doesn’t.
I never think about the orientation of my iPhone. I pretty much keep it locked in portrait 95% of the time, switching it off on the rare occasion when I actually want to use my phone sideways. The iPhone doesn’t want to be a landscape device, except when you are playing games. And most games auto-lock you into landscape, anyway.
On the iPad, I most often want to use it in Landscape, the opposite of the phone. Landscape layouts of apps tend to give you more power for fewer taps, and it’s far more comfortable for me to hold and type in Landscape. However, I can’t just lock the iPad and forget it as easily as I do on the iPhone, because some tasks, such as reading iBooks, do work better in portrait. So I do go back and forth several times a day. This leads to issues with the screen rotating unintentionally, as mentioned above. Especially because the iPad rotates even on the home screen, unlike the iPhone.
At the same time, I almost NEVER need a mute switch on my iPad. Mostly because my iPad doesn’t make noise, anyway. I turn my email and push notification sounds off, because I already receive audio notifications on my phone. And, as the linked article above points out, holding the volume down button for a second mutes the thing, anyway. (It’s worth noting that this doesn’t work when the device is screen locked, as it does with the physical switch, so it’s not quite as convenient as the switch.)
This is why Apple chose to make that switch on the iPad an orientation lock in the first place. It was the functionality more people were likely to want more often. I’m sure that wasn’t a haphazard decision; Apple doesn’t do anything on a whim.
The iPhone is my noise maker device, and I have it with me more often in places where muting is required. So that mute switch is welcome.
I’m sure some would rather have the mute switch than the orientation lock; I’m sure many of us would love to have both. But anyone who knows Apple knows that 1) Apple always wants FEWER physical buttons, not more and 2) Apple does not like hardware buttons to do different things based on user preference. They want anyone with an iPad to know how to use anyone else’s iPad.
I understand that argument, and it has served Apple well in the past. But this time, it seems like they’re making things consistent just for its own sake. And they are changing a behavior about which, as far as I can tell, no one was complaining.
Like I said, there’s almost no way that Apple will change its mind on this one. And there’s almost no way we’ll ever get any sort of preference setting to make it do what we want. So crying about it really won’t help. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t wrong on this one.
I’d say it’s more likely they’ll get rid of the switch on future devices altogether, like on the iPod touch. Then maybe come up with some more clever gesture to switch off the sound and lock the orientation, even when the device is sleeping. Until then, we’ll just have to deal with this change. It’s not the end of the world, by any means. But it’s certainly not ideal.
