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Comment by drzaiusapelord | Hacker News Reader

Is it so hard to sync up bluetooth headphones? I've done it once per headset I bought on my phone and it was a simple process. Children do it everyday. I suspect Doppler Labs failed to thrive for other reasons.

I just stopped by their site and saw their farewell message. I could 50+ people in the photo. That's 50 salaries this startup had to absorb every month. If we assume 100k real cost per head (recruiting, pay, benefits, etc) then we're at $5m per month on salary alone. If it took 2 year from idea to product, then you're in the hole $120m. If you sell these headphones with a markup and post-everything margin of $30 per set, which seems reasonable, then you need 4m in sales to break even. That's a serious amount of sales to push through.

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From my experience with bluetooth, yeah it is.

Syncing is usually relatively painless but reliably and "instantly" reconnecting is a long ways off. I have maybe a 50% success rate without going to Settings>Bluetooth and clicking on the device. That inexplicably fails about a quarter of the time and I have to powercycle the speaker and toggle bluetooth off/on a few times until it decides to work again.

That rate drops to basically 0 if the speaker is paired to multiple phones, or there are multiple speakers in range of my phone.

If I had to deal with that multiple times per day like with headphones I'd just give up and return it.

I have one absolutely reliable connection (turntable>bluetooth transmitter>stereo) but even that one takes about 15 seconds to establish after turning everything on.

My Logitech H-800 takes about a second from cold start to connected. That's certainly good enough.

I have airpods and although the _initial_ sync is magical, it's just like every other set of bluetooth headphones when you've got more than 1 device to choose from. If I have my macbook and phone side by side and put in my airpods, they always connect to the phone. I have to go to the mac's bluetooth menu to choose airpods if I want to listen from my mac (icloud sync doesn't seem to work).

Many other Bluetooth headphones have a variation of a feature called 'multipoint' which allows you to be connected to both devices at once so you don't have to choose and switch choices each time

You can choose the AirPods from the volume icon on the menu bar, or are you saying the AirPods don’t show up there? I switch between iPhone and Mac audio a few times a day.

he's saying you shouldn't have to manually choose when switching

I see. I think I would like it if they could play all audio from all devices at once. Similarly, it would be nice to control phone audio with the Mac volume and pause keys while using AirPods. I didn’t expect any of that, though.

They don't show up there. I've deleted them and re-paired, but they never have. I also have Beats with the W1 chip, and they don't show up there either.

There's a substantive difference between "simple" and "just happens". It's why my BT headphones sit in a drawer, while I gladly anticipate paying 16x as much for AirPods (and no, the money isn't freely available). The error mode for "simple" is "hard", while the error mode for "just happens" is "simple".

Recent NFC-enabled BT headphones do quite well the pairing with an NFC-enabled phone.

Apple doesn't allow NFC pairing on their devices. That's why Airpods feel so "magical" if you use an iPhone

$5m per year, not month.

Thanks, pre-caffiene thinking at work here.

The numbers look more reasonable now, but ultimately its a hard sell especially when Apple doesn't actually need to make a profit for its accessories, but you do. Even then, what's the market look like for this without an Apple. I suspect not very large and its Apple's own marketing efforts that have gotten people interested in these tiny wireless earbuds anyway.

>Apple doesn't actually need to make a profit for its accessories, but you do.

Do you have data to support that claim?

Amazon might sell hardware at cost or a loss, but Apple most certainly only sells hardware when two conditions are met: a) they can make a better device and b) they can make money

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