Bluetooth reminds me a lot of the F-35: Designed to do everything, does none of it particularly well, hard to build/maintain, and frankly would have been better off as three or four competing standards that did their "thing" well and nothing else.
Might be time to retire it, do a clean sheet audio-only standard, that is easy enough to implement/re-implement with actual tests for all the functionality.
Hard disagree. Bluetooth has an important disadvantage, in that its quality is bad. But it's also got an important advantage: it works, at all.
Basically anything made from early 00s onwards will be able to connect to a modern pair of Bluetooth headphones. Interop is the selling feature.
I wonder if there's any way for them to increase the bandwidth 10x or so. It would increase the use cases a ton.
I.e. I connect my Windows laptop to my Android phone directly through WiFI, in a very simple manner.
In theory, sure. But in practice? Not in my experience.
Yeah, it can probably connect, but will it stay connected and will it reconnect without repairing later? Often not.
LE is a cleanroom specification developed by Nokia and delivered wholesale to the Bluetooth SIG in 2010. It's much more limited in scope, limited in bandwidth and designed to fill a niche around low-power, low-bandwidth devices instead of F-35'ing with WiFi-type capabilities.
It'll get faster in time - each new revision brings with it a faster PHY without compromising on power consumption. It's up to about 2Mbits/sec now, as of 5.0. It's not quite up to where it needs to be to support streaming high-fidelity lossless audio, but it'll be there shortly. It's the right tool for the job - for once - we just need to let it mature a bit.
[edit] Double-checking how AirPods connect, but I'm almost confident it's analogous to LE Audio spec in 5.1
[1] https://www.bluetooth.com/blog/exploring-bluetooth-5-how-fas...
Maybe, just maybe, LE Audio will not actually suck for audio recording. Maybe.
There‘s a good chance I‘m wrong here, but my knowledge is that LE Audio builds on Bluetooth Core 5.2 and no devices have shipped yet.
The F-35 is not one airplane. It's three. The fact that these airplanes share technology and components is a good thing.
The claim that the F-35 is bad because it's a multi-role aircraft is unfounded. Multi role combat aircraft are the standard. Here's a partial list:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multirole_combat_aircraft#Acti...
The claim that the F-35 is inferior to single role aircraft like the F-22 is also unfounded. None of us knows the specifics about the two airplanes but we do know that the F-35 has superior weapon systems, durability, communications, and spatial awareness.
There are planned upgrades to make the F-22 compatible with the max off boresight capability of the AIM-9X, with its future LOAL capabilities, and there are plans to coat it with more durable radar reflective "paint". The F-35 has all of those today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-22_Raptor#Up...
But the most important proof that the F-35 is a good airplane is that there are so many customers lining up to buy it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning...
You lost me there in an otherwise fine comment. The reason is at least as much that the big bully in the schoolyard wants you to buy his product and most don't dare not to. In many countries that did buy it there have been complaints from the other bidders on the contract that the contact was made specifically so no one else could win so they couldn't even bid properly (and lots of evidence says they are absolutely correct in stating this). This doesn't happen if the product was as good as you claim. Then it would have just won fairly. Personally I haven't heard of a single fair win but I don't follow it that close.
France makes its own combat airplanes, some of which like the Mirage 2000 and the Rafale are in operation.
Sweden chose to make the Gripen, the UK, Germany, Spain, and Italy chose to make the Eurofighter Typhoon, and Japan, well that's a weaker argument because their native fighter is based on an American jet fighter.
Edit: Having some knowledge about how the US operates in Europe I am not surprised. I have personally seen lots of examples of exercises in Europe where foreign nations participate and behave very well with the host. I have only ever seen the US navy and the US army just show up using radio frequencies they damn well feel like, unlike every other nation ever. Everyone else reserve frequencies beforehand. The US not so much, no matter what they might interfere with. The US is a bully that behaves like it damn well feels like.