Tommy Collison

Recently, an iPhone alarm disrupted a Philharmonic performance.

The unmistakably jarring sound of an iPhone marimba ring interrupted the soft and spiritual final measures of Mahler’s Symphony No. 9 at the New York Philharmonic on Tuesday night. The conductor, Alan Gilbert, did something almost unheard-of in a concert hall: He stopped the performance. But the ringing kept on going, prompting increasingly angry shouts in the audience directed at the malefactor.

The event has sparked a lot of debate about the behavior of the iPhone’s mute switch.

To offer my two cents:

At present, if you mute your iPhone, there are only two functions which will cause it to make noise: the countdown function and the alarm in Clock.app and starting a song or video playing. Calls, texts, Facebook notifications et al. get relegated to just a vibrate.

It’s essentially split into user-generated actions and non-user-generated actions. I told the phone to start quacking at 7am, I told the iPhone to make a noise when 32 minutes had elapsed. The same cannot be said for texts etc., and that’s why they get muted.

Marco Arment sums it up pretty succinctly:

It’s a typical design problem: it can’t be heavy and light and big and small. Neither decision will satisfy everyone all the time or cover every edge case: if Apple implemented Mute in [all cases], millions of people would be just as irritated when their scheduled alarms didn’t wake them up.

I’d also like to briefly disagree with Jim Biancolo’s suggested rectification: “I’d vote for silencing everything when you mute the phone, but pop a warning if you mute the phone with alarms pending” — it would be useless for those of us who flick the mute switch without taking the phone out of our pockets.

I think that the Philharmonic faux-pas is an edge-case, and that the mute switch’s behavior can and should be left as is.

Alarm pro-tip: Don’t set a song that you like as your alarm tone, you will end up hating the song.