I had planned to write about The Case Against Control Center by Stephen Hackett, expressing my complete disagreement with it. I refreshed my feeds a moment ago and noticed that John Gruber has beaten me to it, saying essentially what I was about to say.

I’ll just add that this is a textbook case of modern tech blogger’s tunnel vision. The gist of Hackett’s piece seems to be: “Apple should adjust/rethink Control Centre’s UI to better suit my needs and get rid of UI elements I have deemed of little use.”

I love the top row and screen brightness settings, but as I get closer to the bottom of the screen, the usefulness of Control Center lessens. With the exception of maybe the flashlight button, I’d be fine if the bottom row went away, Calculator and that creepy new Night Mode button included.

The usefulness of Control Centre actually varies from user to user. I personally have little use for the AirDrop/AirPlay row, but I know people for whom it’s a godsend, given how frequently they need such features. I think Control Centre as a whole is indeed one of the best features on iOS today. Apple did a great job in improving it cosmetically from the original iOS 7 implementation, and considering the varied needs of iPhone/iPad users out there, what Apple chose to include in Control Centre is a nice selection of shortcuts. You can’t make everybody happy, but with Control Centre as it is today, Apple has made sure that every iOS user can find a certain degree of usefulness. Not an easy balance to achieve.