When turned off using control center. You can still completely disable it within settings. (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208086)

When you "turn off" WiFi or Bluetooth via the control center you're simply disconnecting from any remote devices. To actually turn the radio off you need to go into the WiFi or Bluetooth settings – this lasts until you turn the radios back on.

Annoyingly, I've found that it doesn't even disconnect from all currently-connected devices. For example, my AirPods are often hijacked by my iPad when I'm setting it up for my kids to watch something. To pre-empt this, I will turn off BT via Control Center, but even having done that, the AirPods often switch over. Super annoying.

On Mac there is a "control center" that is not the system's settings? What is it for?

Fast access to frequently used controls from across the system in one “pane of glass”.

Once you understand that the control center changes are temporary, it’s not proven to be an issue. It’s meant I have not accidentally left Wi-Fi disabled for weeks at a time as I forget I made the change once due to a bad router.

Not if you go into the actual settings.

The problem is that Apple is too stupid to respect the setting you make there. If you turn off Bluetooth in your system settings, they should treat the control panel's Bluetooth switch as a true on/off. But no; it's always temporary.

Sometimes Apple can't figure out how to solve simple UI problems. When they even bother to try, their "solution" is an overly complicated, unreliable mess.

Apple is smart enough to recognise that people want to turn off things for different reasons, and give you different options - to permanently turn off the transceiver hardware, or to disable various services.

For example: When I leave my home to walk to the shops or something, I will often put YouTube on and listen to something, when I get to the top of the road and the phone can still see the WiFi network but can't use it reliably playback will often stop before it has chance to to fully swap to cellular (And Background Play on iOS YouTube often will need a kick to start playing again after a network error).

So I have got into the habbit of "turning off" WiFi via control center as I'm setting up what to listen to as I'm leaving the house and the playback pause issue is gone. With the current behaviour of control center it will "re-enable" WiFi by the time I get home so I don't forget to swap back to WiFi and eat up my cell data.

EDIT: When I want to turn WiFi completely off, I have a shortcut to do just that which I added to to the Assistive Touch menu.

Not in this case. The person who drills down into his settings to REALLY turn something off really wants to turn it off. So Apple should respect that, and treat the control-panel on/off as persistent in that case.

That would serve everyone's preferences and reasons: People who only turn the stuff off from the control panel would get the temporary behavior of those controls. People who turn them off at the system level would get the persistent behavior.

> The person who drills down into his settings to REALLY turn something off really wants to turn it off. So Apple should respect that

They do. Go into setting and turn it off - that’s what happens

And then Apple countermands that from the "Control Panel."

Fair point. Same for wifi and offline tracking on shutdown.

If you turn it off in Settings it's off. The toggle in control center turns it off until tomorrow.