Comment by lemming | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lemming | Hacker News Reader

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Apple really nails the "it just works".

I'm all-in on Apple, and I don't see that changing. And generally, the above has been my experience too. But I recently bought a wireless magic keyboard and trackpad for a standing workstation with a monitor in the corner of our living room. I'd expected to be able to switch between our two laptops seamlessly so that whoever happened to need it could use it, but no - you have to explicitly unpair the keyboard and trackpad from one computer before re-pairing it to the other. That means finding it wherever my wife left it, turning it on or at a minimum logging in and all the rest of the dance, every single time. It drives me insane.

I have a shitty $50 brand x bluetooth speaker that does it better than this. I want to listen to some music, I pair with it. My wife wants to listen to some music later? She just pairs to it and she's done. It doesn't seem that hard to get right.

Could be bad design, or could be good shared-space / privacy-focused design. Letting someone else yoink a connected input device in a hypothetical coffee shop or office with 50 people nearby is a recipe for annoyance or even for privacy-invasion. (Even if it only lets you grab devices you've previously been paired to, that's still an easy thing in an office where a lot of the equipment is more communal.)

My recollection is that the magic keyboard / trackpad insta-pair if you connect them via wire. Would plugging them each in to a lightning cable for a second to switch their allegiance work better for you than manually unpairing? Obviously it's still a hassle.

My recollection is that the magic keyboard / trackpad insta-pair if you connect them via wire.

I didn't know that, thanks - I'll try that. It's still a pain, but less so than having to track my wife's computer down.

It does beg the question of why I'm going wireless at all, of course.

I have a Logitech k380 which in my opinion does this in an intuitive way.

There’s 3 dedicated buttons for paired Bluetooth devices (fn + 1,2,3) and hitting them just pairs to the device. And you can reassign a button to another device by holding fn+1,2,3.

When you turn it on it pairs to the last device it was paired to.

New Logitech master mouse I bought does it really well. One button under to switch between three computers. That said... I really hope we can move away from Bluetooth, it’s the least reliable and most errorprone thing on todays computers.

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