If you force touch the UI, it does say "Not Connected" when you hit the button, not "Disabled."
I can understand the confusion, because they have re-used an old UI element for a new purpose, but there's no reason the button should mean "Disable Radio" rather than "Disconnect." And as cptide mentions, the button now has three states: blue for connected, grey for disconnected, grey with a line through for disabled. Once you know this, I think it makes a lot of sense.
If you want the old behavior, it's still there in settings, where the on-off toggle will turn off the radio itself.
Personally, I much prefer the new system (I far more often just want to disconnect from the current network/devices than disable it entirely), and think the new control center is much improved over the old one.
Additionally, it should be noted that leaving Bluetooth always on just add another attack surface to my phone and consumes unnecessary energy since I don’t own any Bluetooth accessories. Really wondering what the heck Apple was thinking here not making this a setting and enabling it by default.
Looking at this popup control though, the only indication that, for example, wifi is merely no longer connected versus turned off is the text under the icon, which, had I not been aware of this issue, I would probably not have bothered to read.
However, even reading the text under the button, "Not Connected" is ambiguous given the previous behavior of the button. In other words, without additional context, "Not Connected" probably means "Turned Off" to the majority of users. It's only when you get pedantic about things that it becomes clear that tapping the wifi icon in the Control Center in iOS 11 and seeing the text "Not Connected" means my wifi is still on and that I'm just no longer connected to a wifi network.
^^ Furthermore, I'd be 100% OK with this change if I'd at least been made aware of it. However, the more I think about the way this was handled by Apple, the more it really just seems like UX arrogance: Someone decided that my phone's Bluetooth and wifi should always be on, and they changed existing functionality accordingly and with no indication to me as the user that things are different now.
Not sure how else this can be taken??
Could a setting to revert the behavior not have been provided? Instead of forcing an entirely new behavior on existing users? Now I'm trying to figure out how to ensure my phone doesn't auto update to 11.
The set-up process for a new iPhone is also reaching crazy levels, with so many decisions for new users to make.
Don't really know what the solution to this is to be honest -- Linux-style config files maybe? :P
The other thing you can do is install a tvOS beta configuration profile. This will make your phone look for tvOS updates rather than iOS updates, which it will not install because they're not for ios. I won't post a link here, but it should be fairly straightforward to find.
Isn't the Apple approach that you just don't have to understand because the OS and their inventors know what's good for you? The main argument I hear from Apple users is that they don't have to care about anything and it works.
If you would really want to understand your mobiles OS, you would surely look towards other OSes.
I know i will
This is not fantastic, my phone is lying to me. I was wondering what the bug was because I turned off Bluetooth and it kept turning back on every damn time I got near my car. I want it on when I want it on and not anytime else.
Icons and OSes that lie to user make it tougher to understand what's going on. I expect the control center to tell the truth and do what I want. There is no indication that the settings and control center are different. This is a user hostile decision.
Cruddy work, Apple... now I get to answer questions about this psychotic crud.