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Comment by FussyZeus | Hacker News Reader

Everyone says this, yet I use bluetooth products (all Apple hardware) literally every day. Apple has really polished bluetooth to the point where I don't even remember I'm using it, and never have to deal with pair requests, signal loss, etc.

In most everything I own, bluetooth is frustrating crap. Apple's somehow gotten it (mostly) right, so why can't anyone else?

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To provide an alternative data point, everything works flawlessly with my Bluetooth wireless speaker except my MacBook. It constantly skips.

This and the random disconnections of my BT trackpad and keyboard are really annoying.

I believe more people here will have encountered this behaviour when all of your paired devices suddenly disconnect from the MacBook, what have helped me is to turn my Wi-Fi radio off, wait for the devices to reconnect and then turn it on again. This has happened to me for at least the past 3 or 4 major versions of OS X/macOS.

That's interesting, I've never had any issues at all with my Bluetooth. (MBP late 2014, mid-2012 prior to that one). I use the keyboard, trackpad and mouse and never have used anything else.

This, I have the same experience with my BT bose speaker, forever having issues. Sometimes it'll need to be re-joined, other times it works, but then starts skipping. Granted I've had pretty good experience with Apple to Apple BT. Like Apple BT mouse or trackpad, where as the Logitech BT mouse is jumpy/sluggish.

I've been having a shitty experience with 2.4GHz WiFi combined with Bluetooth on my late 2013 MacBook Pro Retina for ages. The Wifi performance goes to shit with multiple devices connected and the bluetooth devices stutter and disconnect. It was completely unusable in Yosemite but slightly better in some version after that. It's currently "usable" unless I do heavy downloads over 2.4GHz with a bunch of bluetooth devices connected. With 5GHz Wifi everythings fine and dandy.

It's not an issue when running Windows on the machine and it's not due to congestion regarding 2.4GHz wifi networks. And it's not AP related. It's macOS related. I am also not alone in experiencing it. Not the worlds biggest issue but frustrating as hell.

Personally I've always had skipping problems with -ANY- Bluetooth speaker, be it with my Macbook, iPhone, Android handsets, etc. And I've got everything from a bluetooth enabled car stereo to a Bose Soundlink II, just doesn't seem to ever get better.

I can't understand why AirDrop is as unreliable as it is. It's abysmal and only Apple is to blame.

Yep. I took to emailing pictures to myself to transfer them because it was so flakey. The tricky part was that because it was supposed to Just Work there's not much configuration or anything you can twiddle to refresh or anything, so when it Just Doesn't you're completely out of luck.

Now that is 100% true. Is AirDrop bluetooth or Wifi though?

Seems there is a bit of both, depending on what generation of hardware and software involved.

That's probably why it's on the flaky side.

I can't even get the Apple Wireless keyboard working on my Mac :( Keeps disconnecting every odd minute

Close to a hotspot or a noisy microwave nearby?

It's pretty much transparent to me using Android and my Windows PC too. I didn't realize it was supposed to be "unreliable."

Oh I've definitely found it unreliable elsewhere, especially in the cheaper Android handsets I used to get.

I guess it's a matter of getting what you pay for. It works quite well with my Nexus 6P.

You can't have a bluetooth serial adapter on the iphone, because it only supports a few bluetooth profiles. This cuts a lot of complexity.

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