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Comment by abtinf | Hacker News Reader

> "if only there was one universal audio port they both could use"

Bluetooth?

I've never plugged my headphones into a jack and had them fail to work (ok, on my old cassette Walkman, I sometimes had to jiggle the plug around to get the headphones to work, but modern devices seem to have solved that problem (through gold plated connectors? I dunno)).

But around once every 8 times I get into my car, I need to turn off/on Bluetooth on my car, my phone, or both to get it to connect. More rarely, I have to reboot my phone. I haven't used a Bluetooth headset with my phone in several years, but I had the same problem then.

So I don't think Bluetooth is that reliable "works every time" standard.

Cars are a special type of awful.

As much as I prefer headphone jacks, I'll readily admit that my $15 BT headphones from Amazon connect every time I turn them on.

Car BT implementations are actually an interesting world in of themselves, I've seen car BTs wreck havok with other BT peripherals attached to a phone. The level of "how?" was truly amazing.

>Cars are a special type of awful

Bluetooth pairing always seems a bit unclear. Do I start the scan on my phone or the device? Cars seem to be particularly bad in making this clear or otherwise don't work reliably per instructions.

If you want a really bad Bluetooth experience, see Acura. Calls can require active "transfer" to Bluetooth devices when you're streaming, and there is otherwise clunkiness and competition for the car's audio system, for instance if you try to use car nav.

And, woe be unto you if you have multiple in-range devices. There's a pretty good chance it'll vomit and you'll end up with mixed pairing profiles that essentially require you to restart the car and/or disable Bluetooth on one device.

Not sure how they managed to get Bluetooth so wrong, but it's a solid contributor to an overall poor infotainment center design.

It’s becauese they are all copy-pasting the sample code middleware. A few minor changes are made, like advertising name and what not, but I’ve seen literal dupes supplied by the same Taiwanese vendor. And like most sample code, the error handling is non-existent.

Source: Previously worked on head unit FW.

Equally annoying is if two people are both previously paired with the car (or speaker!) and it’s connects but not to the one you want.

Yeah Bluetooth almost never works reliably for me. If it isn't connection problems, it's dead batteries. I refuse to buy or use wireless keyboards, mice, microphones, speakers, or headphones.

If I had a dollar for every time bluetooth failed between two devices...

Bluetooth has been better for me 80% of the time and then that last 20% is a huge pain where as AUX is consistently a little bit worse but it never totally lets you down.

I think I can count the number of times that I've managed to get bluetooth to actually work on the fingers of one hand. It's just trash. Give me a wired connection every day of the week, and it better be something universal like USB-A, micro-usb, HDMI or 3.5mm.

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