Congratulations! Your laptop does the equivalent of using the exit lane to jump ahead in traffic. There's bound to be an empty spot near the end, right?
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You pay for a cup of coffee at Starbucks, standing in line until it was your turn to pay. Then you pay and go sat down and drank some of it, while working on your laptop. You get caught up reading HN, and don't take a sip from your coffee for five minutes. You then want to take a sip.
What Apple is doing is like resuming finishing the coffee without going back to the checkout and trying to pay for it again.
You pay for a cup of coffee at a coffee shop. Nominally you get your own cup, and there isn't a limit on the amount of time you can keep it. However, the store occasionally and unpredictably runs out of cups. Also, at the start of a new day a new barista might occasionally come in, and they might not know which cups should still be considered owned. Because of this, everyone else has for years observed a simple procedure where you look to make sure it's your coffee you're about to sip. It's polite and it's just — what's the phrase — not a big deal. You get your coffee, leave for two days, come back and take a drink from the cup that looks like the one you got previously without as much as a glance inside or around.
Yeah this analogy blows as well. What it comes down to is old world technology spends a ton of time on error correction like this and it's an easy place to increase efficiency & speed for portable devices. It's going to keep happening, get used to it.
This conversation makes me want to block Apple devices from any and all devices I control. Because hey, such anti-social network behaviour is going to keep happening. Because it's not a big deal. Because you're worth it. Good thing the network layer doesn't support such, uh, experience-enhacing features.
I unlock my phone and launch MobileSafari in less than a second, so it matters.
> This conversation makes me want to block Apple devices from any and all devices I control.
So do it then. If it actually enhances your experience, why compromise for users that don't matter to you? That's my point. You don't need to enforce network neutrality on your own AP.
> Because hey, such anti-social network behaviour is going to keep happening.
As long as router manufacturers keep being cheap and expiring DHCP leases after a reset, yes it will.
> Because it's not a big deal. Because you're worth it.
Damn straight.
> Good thing the network layer doesn't support such, uh, experience-enhacing features.
True, they should work on that. While their at it, add the ability to save DHCP tables before a reset and solve the actual problem here.
Even for new network discovery, 10 seconds is unacceptable on a portable device. Reconnects should be as quick as possible, no exceptions.
Sorry if you are offended that companies are actually working on improving this instead of insisting that it's good enough as it is.