Indeed, the detailed block of controls does not present the three possible states to the user. In the same zoomed in block, the Airdrop toggle does. Conversely, going to Settings is binary and allows only for On/Off, not that very practical Disconnect state. The difference between Off and Disconnected is a light bar across the icon, which is inconsistently not the case for the Off state of Mobile Data and Airplane mode.
The "dumbed down" UI concerns are valid, yet the intersection between security minded folks that will proactively act to disable WiFi/BT upon a security advisory and the ones who won’t know the difference between the two ways to toggle that is close to zero. To me it looks like people are up in arms without even defining the personas and threat models. Get real, this feature is downright awesome and the slight UI hiccup is certainly no ShellShock.
There are also a few other reasons for disabling wifi - battery life, tracking, debugging connections, and of course security as well (not in response to specific vulnerabilities, but on the principle of less attack surface being safer).
Until the next Broadcom WiFi radio vulnerability.
Before the command center existed people weren’t saying having a WiFi toggle hidden in the settings app is a security vunurability.
Your smartphone screen uses several orders of magnitude more energy lighting up than btle and wifi use while idle.
I was surprised by this, so I just tested it. Tapping the button immediately disconnected from my Apple bluetooth AirPods.
https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT208086
The problems with this change are:
It is surprising - grey buttons usually mean disabled permanently, not disabled except for some uses or for some indeterminate length of time.
It changes established behaviour without a clear warning to the user.
It is inconsistent - disabling bluetooth now disconnects from all devices (except Apple ones!), and it says 'Not Connected' when it is in fact connected to an Apple Watch say.
It is inconsistent - other buttons like airplane mode or mobile data do turn off permanently.
It's not a huge deal and everyone will adapt, but you shouldn't be apologising for Apple here - this was badly done and not well thought out.