I agree with you- that example may not fit everybody's problem. When I switched from a simple phone to a smart phone it was important to me, but now I don't bother (never too far from a charger).

And you are right, of course, in that ios allows most people to do the things they most care about very easily-- that's probably the takeaway. If you do that, then, apparently even if the other stuff is hard, people will probably figure out how to do it when they need it. Somehow.

Yes, absolutely. There is almost no reason to touch wifi and bluetooth settings on iOS devices. I have wifi enabled all the time, and battery life is still excellent.

Android devices on the other hand, need constant fiddling. My Droid would barely last a day with everything turned off, and with wifi, etc. turned on, it would die after only about 6 hours.

I'd hazard a guess your Android experience was a year or two ago. My Nexus 1 lasted barely a day when it arrived, but now lasts 48 hours on Gingerbread (2.3) with everything (including wifi, bluetooth and GPS) on.

Actually, it's probably the mobile network that's killing you. I get about a day of battery life with everyone on, and about a day of battery life with wifi and bluetooth off. But when I turn the cell phone radio off, suddenly my battery life increases to nearly a week. (I found this out by accident. I went to Sweden where my phone doesn't work, so I turned off everything except Wifi. A few days without charging later, I still had about 60% battery!)

Getting on a plane would be a fairly common use case, and independent of the 'power' level of the user.

Disclaimer: I don't own an iOS device, so don't know how intuitive it might or might not be.

Well, for plane use, it has "Airplane Mode" as the first option of the Settings app, so at least for that it's covered.

But airplanes have wifi now, so you can still want the cell radio off and have the wifi on. Yup, it's complicated. The world is a complicated place.

That misses the point of "airplane mode". Airplane mode is for use during take off and landing. Ie, you'd need to turn wifi off too.

The only reason to turn off the cell radio but not the wifi radio is to conserve battery, which again puts you well outside the use case of the typical apple user.

In the US, airlines require that electronic devices be turned completely off during takeoff and landing.

In my experience, this is rarely enforced.

No. For takeoff and landing, no power should be applied to any of the electronics. You have to turn the phone off.

(In fact, I just got off a plane, and the announcement is "electronic devices must be off, not in airplane mode. that's for after we're in the air.")