Origin of the Bluetooth Name | Hacker News Reader

Origin of the Bluetooth Name

bluetooth.com

299 pointspiotrgrudzien215 comments

The reason he was known as Harald Blåtann (Bluetooth) was as mentioned that he had a dead tooth. These are normally black, not blue, but old norse did not distinguish between black and blue, thus the name.

As a Norwegian speaking guy, I used to say "blåtann" instead of "bluetooth" as a joke when I was a teenager. Because I found the direct translation funny. Didn't know at the time that I was actually somewhat "correct".

Swedish guy here, can confirm that it was often called "Blåtand" in various circumstances in Sweden at the time (20ish years ago). I have worked with Ericsson-employees who also called it "Blåtand" but nowadays it is less common and "Bluetooth" has taken over as the way to refer to it here.

Among older people I still hear Blåtand now and then. Some of them think they are funny, some knows why :-)

The story I heard some 20ish years ago was that the Blåtand name was so popular inside Ericsson that employees were actively encouraged to use the name Bluetooth and not Blåtand. At the time, "everyone" called it Blåtand, outside of Ericsson too.

I agree that people in Sweden just tend to call it Bluetooth nowadays.

Many ancient languages lacked a word for blue. It doesn't occur very often in nature.

The sky is blue and so is the ocean

It's a fascinating phenomenon, right? Worth noting the "blue" in both those examples comes from physics not pigments.

The reason pigments or anything else is blue is also because of physics.

https://xkcd.com/1818/

A friend of mine once claimed that the sky wasn't blue. I challenged him, expecting some argument about physics and Rayleigh scattering.

Instead he looked at me and, with a straight face, said "it's the spy satellites which are blue. And there are very many."

While true, it might be worth noting that if you grind iridescent blue material it will loose its color. Pigment will not.

Water is "actually" blue, as in due to the chemistry of its electronic configuration. A deep column of water has a blue color in a way that other liquids, such as benzene, do not. There was a cool picture of this demonstration in one of my old chemistry books.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_of_water

Reflection of the sky accounts for much of the color of natural bodies of water, but it's cool to know that it's blue even in the absence of blue reflection.

and a bruise

More specifically, it is believed by historians/biologists that humans didn't evolve the ability to distinguish between shades of blue until relatively recently. The ocean and the sky are 2 of the only examples, and humans didn't spend much time in either place. A few fruits are blue, a few poisonous animals might have some blue, but the vast majority of natural things aren't blue. We have examples of ancient writings comparing the color of the ocean to the color of wine. Even now, our eyes have the fewest cones for detecting blue wavelengths, and the most for distinguishing greens. Graphical artists have to account for this literally all the time. Every digital color space we've made saves some bits by shifting more color resolution to greens and reds because no one will notice the extra blues.

As someone with deuteranomaly I find this so funny because for me blue is the color that pops and doesn't blend together with all the rest.

It's not biological evolution, but linguistic evolution at play. There's a specific evolutionary pattern for color words in language found for the most part (albeit like everything in language and evolution, there's always exceptions to the pattern):

All language known have terms for black and white.

If a language has three color terms, the third is 'red'.

If a language has four color terms, the fourth is either 'green' or 'yellow'.

If a language has five color terms, the fifth is the other of 'green' or 'yellow'.

If a language has six terms, the sixth is 'blue'.

If a language has seven terms, the seventh is 'brown'.

And from there it starts to heavily diverge with purple, pink, orange, grey.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_...

Not sure what you mean by, "It's not biological evolution". The linguistic phenomenon you're referencing doesn't make any sense outside the context of the specific evolutionary history of the human eye. It would be like saying the shape of something has nothing to do with the shadow it casts.

Sure it does, because there's languages in use today that don't separate blue from green, and those native speakers absolutely have blue cones in addition to green and red ones. Language development is fairly universally thought to have happened after we evolved our blue sensing cones, so that doesn't explain the difference. Specifically we evolved blue cones about 30 million years ago, before we were any semblance of human.

The thought is that it's a phenomenon that by giving a name to the concept and training your young, our brains become better at differentiating it at a conscious level. The progression in language is thought to be an artifact of how strongly the differences between naturally occut colors appear to our brains, and an innate way to separate the state space of natural color rather than a purely mirroring of biological evolution of color sensing hardware in the eye.

Brown is just dark orange

https://youtu.be/wh4aWZRtTwU

What do you mean humans did not spend time in that place? Every human being sees the blue sky as at least 30% of what they saw everyday starting at birth.

Blueberries? Alot of flowers?

> Alot of flowers

> Ancient

Why bother with inventing a separate word to distinguish some [rare|rarely or sometimes extreme|ly rarely [used]] flowers from others?

Why the said flower can't be successfully described with other adjectives?

EDIT: also this comment

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30167639

I think the explanation is that it didn't occur very often, until recently, as a dye or pigment. Color terms are more useful to describe things, like shirts, that don't have an inherent color. In a society where everything just has its inherent color, you don't need many color terms. In a society where people can change things' colors, these terms are more useful.

This dead tooth (top right) looks pretty blue to me: https://tracewellness.com/what-does-dead-tooth-look-like/ (careful, you might not like to see these images).

How interesting. Neither did Sanskrit in India. All the darker skinned people in Indian mythology are depicted as blue— Krishna, Ram, Shiva, Valmiki, Ved Vyas etc. Probably some PIE remnant.

I really like Bluetooth.

I just wish it would "just work". My bluetooth devices (high end) don't always connect properly and I have to disconnect them and reconnect them.

It's a minor inconvenience I know, but after 23 years I'd have hoped that those oddities would have been rounded out.

Someone had to link this, guess I’ll go ahead. https://xkcd.com/2055/

This is so accurate. We have two cars. When my wife starts one of the cars the carkit connects to my phone and she spends 10 minutes with the engine running trying to get her phone to connect to the car.

If I'm in a good mood I turn off Bluetooth on my phone to save her time.

This is evidence that Bluetooth is a mischievous entity. The range is terrible unless better range will cause problems.

I just use an aux cord into the headphone jack. Easy peasy.

Finding a phone with a headphone jack that isn't some low end garbage is becoming harder and harder each year.

I'm using a 200 eur Xiaomi Redmi with a 3.5mm jack and I'm very happy with it. Battery lasts me around 5 days. Why is it garbage?

In truth, I use a USB-C/Lightning-to-3.5mm adapter. It lives on the car's aux cord.

does someone sell one of these that survives more than 10 disconnect cycles now?

No. I buy a new handful every couple months. It sucks. My latest batch is from some brand called Insignia and so far has lasted one month without issues, but I'll be surprised if they don't fail soon. Previously tried Apple and Anker, both failed in a small number of months.

I've considered wrapping the thing in heat-shrink tubing to give it some rigidity and protect the nano-scale-wires they're using in there, but haven't got any handy.

I'd love a phone with a real jack, but phones just aren't made for me anymore.

Just buy a cheap phone with an audio jack and use that one dedicated for the car. No need for the latest greatest for playing music on the go...

> some brand called Insignia

Isn't that just Best Buy's store brand?

I've been happy with my Ugreen 3.5mm+charge adapter for about six months now. It looks rather dumb but works perfectly.

You can always use a lightning/usb-c to 3.5mm cable.

Reminds me of an issue I've been dealing with. The bluetooth in our car picks my wife's phone every time. Not a big deal, one might think, but then if I turn off bluetooth on her phone, it turns right back on and reconnects! I tried updating the car's settings not to prefer her phone (both were preferred), still a problem.

I believe at some point when we got our new phones, she accepted a dialog that set the car to a "trusted device" which means it will automatically turn on bluetooth and connect as soon as it's in range. But I couldn't find a way to turn that setting off.

Finally I had to force the car to forget both of our devices and I was able to get my phone to connect to the car while my wife was anywhere within a few feet of our garage.

Just a guess, but location services can use bluetooth scanning for getting a location fix even when bluetooth is off. Sometimes these pings will turn it back on. You might try disabling bluetooth location scanning.

Makes sense. Will try if we run into this again. Thanks!

In one of our cars, the car will just connect to whoever last was connected although sometimes this means it connects to someone's phone that isn't even in the car.

The other car has a preference selection that will try the preferred phone first and then will try whoever else is in range. I like this one best since I'm usually alone in this car. Either option really doesn't work great if you are sharing the car, the car would never really know who it should connect to if both phones are in range. I wish the car would somehow factor in RSSI into the auto connect decision, like don't pick the default or most recent phone if it has significantly less signal strength than the other devices in range.

Agreed - or "simply" a UI that shows "Multiple favorite devices detected - which should I pick?"

That could show for 10 seconds or something and then pick whatever the default would have been.

In this case, I think it's a mix of both the car and the phone picking favorites, and my phone loses the toss every time because of some setting that I couldn't seem to find.

When I turn my car on, no, I don't want Bluetooth to autoconnect, and play music on full volume.

Thank you for sharing this insanity. I have the same situation, I sit in my driveway for 5 minutes while my slow-as-molasses car audio system disconnects from my wife's phone (inside house) and connects to mine (in my pocket)

It actually works better if I just drive off. Once the BT is out of range, it autoconnects to my phone usually within 1/4 mile time.

I don't understand this insanity stuff. We have a $35 chinese brand (Ugreen FWIW) bluetooth adapter in our car. If it connects to my wife's phone when I go start the car (or opposite), all I have to do on Android is to pull down the notification drawer, long-press the bluetooth icon to open the bluetooth settings, then click the name of the desired device in the list that comes up. 10 seconds later it has connected correctly.

This $35 dongle also has pause/play and skip buttons, and you can use those to answer calls as well. The buttons are tactile so you can use them without looking.

Honestly, the only bad thing is the built-in microphone delivers pretty bad audio when you use it as a hands free. But for $35 I cannot complain.

My old car used to have a cable that was connected to an audio tape inserted in the radio. I just needed to connect my MP3-player to it and off I went. It just worked. No 10 seconds waiting for a connection or 10 minutes fiddling with options.

Once I was hovering the car at the gas station and the cable went into the hose and broke off from the audio tape though so not everything old was better... :-)

I had that problem with my old car which had an aftermarket radio with bluetooth. My current car has android auto which uses a USB cable to connect to my phone.

Sure I have to use a cable now, but I deal with none of the hassles of bluetooth. I just plug it in and it works.

Those problems can be a real toothache.

Harald Bluetooth built some amazing fortifications for his period of time:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_ring_fortress

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263286349_A_Palisad...

According to geni.com[1], he is actually my 31st great grandfather.

Anonymized the first part of my line:

You → ******** your father → ******** his mother → ******** her mother → ******** her father → ** Johansen his father → Johan Grove Kristoffersen his father → Ingeborg Catharine Jentoft Henrichsdatter Klæboe his mother → Henrich Johan Hansen Klæboe her father → Maren Hansdatter Glein his mother → Margaretha Johansdatter Grøn her mother → Margrethe Christophersdatter Darre her mother → Kristoffer Bjørnsen Bjørnsen her father → Bjørn Rolfson Darre his father → Maren Bjørnsdatter his mother → Johanne Mattisdatter her mother → Margreta Johannesdatter Kruckow her mother → Anne Ludvigsdatter Barsebek her mother → Magdalena Svare her mother → Adelus Eringsdotter Erlingsdtr Tolstad, Hildugard her mother → Elin Jonsdatter Hildugard Tolstad her mother → Sigrid Erlingsdotter Bjarkøy her mother → Elin Thoresdatter Bjarkøy her mother → Ingebjørg Erlingsdatter Bjarkøy her mother → Erling Alvsson Tornberg her father → Ingeborg Bårdsdotter Rein his mother → Bård Skule Guttormsson Rein her father → Sigrid Torkjellsdotter Fugl his mother → Hallkatla Sveinsdatter Av Aurland her mother → Ingerid Svendsdatter of Denmark, Queen Consort of Norway her mother → Sweyn II Estridson, King of Denmark her father → Princess Estrid Margrethe (Margret), Of Svendsdatter his mother → Sweyn I "Forkbeard", king of Denmark, Norway & England her father → Harald "Blue Tooth", king of Denmark his father

[1] https://www.geni.com/people/Harald-Blue-Tooth-king-of-Denmar...

A huge amount of people have him as their 30th-something great grandfather.

Somewhere in the ballpark of (average # children that grow to adult age per family) ^ 31

2^31 is already 2 billions ... And the average # children has to be higher

This starts to fall apart because of overlap -- for most of those people, he's thousands of their 30th-something great grandfather, not just one ancestor.

> This starts to fall apart because of overlap

AKA pedigree collapse https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedigree_collapse

I guess that’s yet another reason to make a HN account.

I had a bluetooth mouse and keyboard on my PowerBook G4 for two years before I even had wifi. It worked flawlessly. As soon as folks started adding wifi to their homes the mouse became unusable and the keyboard would occasionally miss keys.

The modern solution of vendor specific dongles is more reliable, but I sure wish we didn't need them.

I don't now mich about the evolution of Bluetooth over the years but I am using a modern Bluetooth mouse for 2-3 years now and never issues with connectivity. I might be worth another try.

I never have issues with Bluetooth on my macs, but have endless hassles on windows. I thought it was kind of funny that all Logitech wireless stuff these days has a dongle, except those advertised as "for mac." Those have normal bluetooth.

Relevant Tom Scott video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdmQp9M9jUo

I knew about this information from the same video. Great explanation from great channel (and person).

The article is a nice source to read tho

Naming one of the most inconsistent technologies I've ever used on the festering tooth of a dead king seems about right

Fun fact: last month, a contestant in the Brazilian version of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” was asked the million dollar^Wreais question: what is Bluetooth named after?

https://gshow.globo.com/google/amp/programas/domingao-com-hu...

Spoiler alert: he chose not to answer and walked away with R$500k instead

Smart man. Didn't get tempted. He won.

I find Bluetooth impractical to use due to its slow speed and incompatibility between Android and Apple devices, as well as interference with Wi-Fi.

Everyone I know shares files via a centralized service like WhatsApp, but those are getting iffy also.

I share files locally through a hotspot and LWS:

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/net.basov.lws.fdroid

> Everyone I know shares files via a centralized service like WhatsApp, but those are getting iffy also.

Maybe you can convince them to use Files by Google, Trebleshot or something like that, which doesn't require internet.

For desktop <-> mobile sharing, there's always KDE connect for Linux and Windows.

Speaking of Bluetooth, can anyone ELI5 to me why bidirectional Bluetooth audio (sound/microphone, i.e. headset mode) works so much better on Android than on Linux (PulseAudio/Pipewire)? People keep telling me that bidirectional audio is always bad but on Android it seems way less bad and voices actually sound pretty natural. What magic codec are they using?

Second question: Why is Android able to switch seamlessly between unidirectional and bidirectional modes while on Linux it seems this is not even possible with a USB dongle(?!) Shouldn't a USB dongle be able to just pretend it's a regular sound card and then take care of the mode/codec switching automatically? I.e. without telling the driver (i.e. the Linux system/PulseAudio/Pipewire) that they are actually talking to a Bluetooth system? Meanwhile, on Windows and Mac this seems to work fine…

Overall, I'm just baffled by how bad the situation with Bluetooth audio is on Linux. I mean it's 2022, god dammit.

> Speaking of Bluetooth, can anyone ELI5 to me why bidirectional Bluetooth audio (sound/microphone, i.e. headset mode) works so much better on Android than on Linux (PulseAudio/Pipewire)? People keep telling me that bidirectional audio is always bad but on Android it seems way less bad and voices actually sound pretty natural. What magic codec are they using?

mSBC probably, which I don't believe is enabled by default in Pipewire currently. (I believe it is just a few lines of config to enable though)

I did try mSBC in Pipewire and it doesn't sound as good as on Android for some reason.

I feel Bluetooth is the ever-unstable technology we have been beta testing for 2 decades. I own Quietbose QuietComfort 35 which I paid 350 USD. They are top of the line headphones and yet the bluetooth still sucks. This is not a blame on Quietbose which in fact might be one of the best product ever. After few months of use I just decided it's just less annoying to use them with the cable. BLUETOOTH STILL SUCKS!

I've read all the rants about how the Bluetooth spec is too long and complicated and hence the protocol is impossible to implement properly, but

Honestly I have so much trouble with Wi-Fi as well, it randomly won't see a network, it won't roam to 5 GHz leaving me on slow 2.4 GHz (turning on "band steering" on the router makes it even worse, it just drops completely), you check the forums, people swear that this new OS update made the range worse somehow.

Even Apple's AirDrop on which they own the whole stack is very unreliable if it will see the other device.

Digital wireless just seems like a very very difficult field.

The only digital wireless communication tech that seems rock-solid is the 3GPP stack (GSM/UMTS/LTE/5G). It just always works, flawlessly, 24/7. Even with the random crap Chinese "iFOE" Mediatek knockoff I bought once.

One job I did involved a large provider of public WiFi in the UK. As a result of this, I'm convinced that WiFi is pretty much like tech from the Warhammer 40k universe and simply will not work if the correct benedictions to the Machine God are not uttered in the right order.

I am reminded of old school parallel SCSI: three terminations are needed: one at each end of the bus, plus that of a black rooster at midnight with-in a circle of black candles.

Once you learn the habbit of navigating to neverssl.com as soon as you connect to a public WiFi network to force the captive portal/auth you'll usually not have any issues with it unless the WiFi network itself sucks.

Thank you nice site tip! One after one my goto http sites adds a s.

Haha. Great to see more websites using SSL encryption but it does make it harder to connect to public WiFi if the OS's captive portal detection doesn't trigger properly.

Wow, I’ll have to remember that. I always am fumbling to get to an http site to redirect when I go on the train or somewhere.

I use example.com or example.org, which seems to work just fine also.

I usually use notpurple.com for this (I used to use purple.com until the guy finally sold the domain to the mattress company), but I suppose there's no guarantee the notpurple person won't some day add ssl.

Thanks for the tip.

>Digital wireless just seems like a very very difficult field.

Indeed It is. And not much appreciation about it anywhere either.

>The only digital wireless communication tech that seems rock-solid is the 3GPP stack (GSM/UMTS/LTE/5G).

And that is why they are expensive. Again no one appreciate the work that was done on 3GPP, nor are they willing to pay much for it. Everyone likes to shit post on 3G / 4G / 5G without actually spending any time to understand the insane difficulty of wireless. No one realise we got 10,000x capacity improvement in the last 20 years on mobile network. All while siding with Apple and suggest they should only pay 30cents on patent to Qualcomm or Ericsson.

> Again no one appreciate the work that was done on 3GPP, nor are they willing to pay much for it.

Ideally, you would have governments spend tax money on universities and national standardization bodies to do the R&D and publication of open standards, and then both companies and private efforts can openly use these standards to develop products against, with clearly defined interfaces and interoperability expectations.

I have those headphones and they do indeed rock. The problem is: most cellphones don’t have headphone jacks. My cellphone broke last summer and everything with a headphone jack was backordered. So now when my headphones die on (say) a long flight, I just can’t listen to music anymore, because they don’t work while plugged in. Bluetooth sucks, and not just because it’s unreliable.

I got myself a charging port (iPhone) adapter for headphones - just for such a use case, long flights. But can still face a problem if needing to charge while listening to music / audio book.

I use a wireless charger for this but there are also very cheap adapters that allow you to attach power on one side and headphones on the other and then connect the thing to your lightning port.

>I feel Bluetooth is the ever-unstable technology we have been beta testing for 2 decades.

Meanwhile I just transferred via Bluetooth some old high-school photos from an 2003 NEC flip-phone with Bluetooth v1.1 onto my 2021 OnePlus Android phone with Bluetooth v5.1 seamlessly.

And as a test, both phones managed to connect flawlessly to my shitty 2014 Fiat entertainment system and to my dad's ancient 2005 Audi entertainment system. Even my brand spanking new Sony noise cancelling bluetooth headphones from 2021 worked with that NEC flip phone from 2003. The backwards- and cross- compatibility of bluetooth is nothing but impressive.

The only bluetooth device that gave me issues were some M-Pow headphones off Amazon that I threw away after a couple of weeks due to how terrible they were and a work colleague constantly had issues with his LG Android phone because LG apparently fudged the Bluetooth firmware implementation on that phone.

The connection part is not the main issue I think. It's staying connected after reboot/power save/distance or automatically reconnecting.

Bluetooth(-devices) work okay as long there is only one main host (Laptop, Smartphone) and multiple accessoires involved ONLY for use on that host. As soon as you have several main hosts in constant use (Car, Laptop, Phone) and use the accessoires regularly on different main hosts, it becomes a nightmare. Auto (dis-)connects happening on power on/off, some devices not relinquishing their connection etc. In these configurations I've never seen it work properly, and most often it is more a source of anger than happiness.

That's right. Bluetooth works great in 1-to-1 and 1-to-many relationships, but not in many-to-many.

It becomes even funnier with a dual-boot setup. My headphones think they are connected with my laptop, but either the pairing was with Linux or Windows, in which case I need to disconnect and connect again.

Because of exactly those edge cases I'm reluctant to use wireless BT headphones. I still only buy wired headphones. Especially when on the laptop, the benefit of being wireless is barely there. Not that I wouldn't want wireless, but the drawback of that mode with BT edge cases, empty batteries etc. make me think accepting wires is just more comfortable and less of an annoyance.

That depends on your tolerance for charging for ten mins once every few days or so and reconnecting vs occasionally getting a wire tangled/under the wheel of the chair/forcibly yanked when you forget you are wearing them when you stand up.

It’s pretty 50 50 for me but the physical minimalism and not having the wire/socket wear out swung it in the end.

Actually if you put some effort in, wires become pretty manageable. I use a special technique to roll up my in-ears and a clip to hold them in-place while in my pocket. For my over-the-ear headphones I use cable-management spools to match the cable length to my usually distance on the desk.

Although I admit, I own a FiiO BTR 5 that has BT and I can plug in my in-ear wired headphones - so I occasionally have a need for wireless listening. The battery of the FiiO is 13-15h however, and I also use it for other purposes (wired external headphone preamp). Additionally, in case the battery runs flat, I can always just insert the headphones directly into the device directly as a fallback.

Oh man, so that's why my earbuds act so wonky...

While I haven't personally tried it (and have since given up on BT audio in my setup), there seems to be a way to extract the pairing key from Windows and have the Linux Bluetooth stack use it (see e.g. [0]), effectively making the Windows and Linux host appear identical to the paired device.

[0]: https://brokkr.net/2015/09/26/bluetooth-dual-booting-sharing...

I can attest that this works. I did this for my headphones and keyboard/mouse until I plugged the keyboard into my work mac with the USB cable to charge. I didn’t know that Apple sees this and creates the connection via Bluetooth (Yes used a spare Magic Keyboard). I had no desire to to the whole setup again and now have a cable keyboard and a KVM setup.

I've gotten in the habit of just always putting my devices into pairing mode when I want to use them, which seems to work OK.

Anecdata happened 30mins after typing that answer: I disabled BT on my Macbook while I was using a Bose Soundlink Micro BT speaker which sits at the other end of the room (because I wanted to use the built-in speaker). Now after disabling my BT on the laptop, the Bose Speaker went into nagging mode, playing "Ready to connect" in 30s intervals. Had to get my ass of the chair and manually turn it off.

I mean, what is the logic behind this. Why would I go into nagging mode and tell my user every 30s that "I am ready to connect" just because the BT device disconnected? How about you do nothing, wait 5mins, and if no other device connects you go to standby?

I think it's otherwise confusing for users to know what state the device is in. Like for example take any bluetooth device that has a blinking blue light on it. What does it mean? There's probably a cultural understanding that it means it's waiting for a connection but then again you'll find many other bluetooth devices doing it other ways.

I use my headphones (85h) with both my Android tablet and my Android phone (and it does work 100% of the time), so there is progress, but it's truly glacial. It's limited to two devices and they can't even play simultaneously.

Another data point: I currently use Marshall Major III wireless headphones, which are much cheaper than Bose's QC line, but I never had any problems with them (or with their predecessors, Marshall Major II, which I unfortunately lost). Of course my use case is the simplest there is: pair with phone, leave paired. But it works flawlessly, switch headphones on, headphones connected (except if BT is disabled on the phone of course).

Another data point: I have these same headphones, listening to them now in fact and they are great.

However the problem the original poster has still exists I think, when you use it across multiple devices it's annoying and I get that sound of it disconnecting and reconnecting to other devices while I am listening, so i have to find that device and turn the bluetooth off.

Case in point this afternoon when I went to listen. Connect bluetooth on my iPad, connect the headphones, iPad shows that headphones are connected, listen to music, nothing, no sound... why? Ahh, have to go on my mac, disconnect them from my mac and then boom sound starts.

It's just annoying with multiple devices and we live in a very multi-device world. I should just be able to press the device I want as a sound source and boom. It's silly to still be having this issue.

Funny, same here with M-Pow!

> Meanwhile I just transferred via Bluetooth some old high-school photos from an 2003 NEC flip-phone with Bluetooth v1.1 onto my 2021 OnePlus Android phone with Bluetooth v5.1 seamlessly.

With a speed of 200 kByte, barely faster than IrDA?

Seriously, the data rate of Bluetooth file transfer is atrocious.

Meh, the pictures were in VGA resolution so their size was very small so the transfer speed was not an issue. The value of the memories was more important.

Whether Bluetooth sucks or not I'm not sure. But man they didn't help themselves with the robotic voice "HUA-IP 20 Pro disconnect" followed shortly by "Connected to HUA-IP 20 Pro and GBK-w-006" every time something goes in or out of range.

Ah, yes, I remember that Bose feature, I had a Bose BT speaker a few years ago (actually it's still here somewhere, but I haven't used it in a while). But I don't think it's a synthesized voice - the German version has a distinctly disappointed sound when it has to inform you that something has disconnected. Good to know that the headphones have that too (as a "con" argument for getting QC headphones).

It can be disabled, so it just beeps instead.

Thanks for the hint. In Bose connect the option is "voice alerts". Now just down to a modestly annoying beep.

Yes that sucked. 5 years ago it was already possible to rename the device at least for Windows and macOS: https://adrianba.net/2020/12/18/changing-bluetooth-pc-name/

Anyway even fixing that and having only one device connected I feel that the Bose Quietcomfort would disconnect too easily or were too slow to reconnect after reopening a MacBook. This is noy a critique of Bose Quietcomfort, in fact all other headphones and soundboxes with bluetooth I tried were MUCH WORSE.

It doesn't help that the Bluetooth stack on Windows is still pretty finicky after so many years. I bought some fairly decent Bluetooth headphones for the kids so they wouldn't have to worry about tangling up cords and they are basically worthless because the OS keeps getting in a state where they know that they are there but refuse to associate. I have to go in and manually forget the headphones and re-add them every other time the kids want to use them. If I pair them with my phone they work perfectly every time. The Linux stack is also prone to flaking out randomly in much the same way. The dreaded "resource temporarily unavailable" being an annoyingly common message on my laptop when it forgets about the speakers again.

With the new BLE audio standard, everything will get better™

What are you talking about? BLE is not an audio standard.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluetooth_Low_Energy

I assume they're referring to LE Audio. From Wikipedia:

> Announced in January 2020, LE Audio will allow the protocol to carry sound and add features such as one set of headphones connecting to multiple audio sources or multiple headphones connecting to one source

No, but a BLE extension for audio is being created.

I thought that until I paid attention to the supported codecs. When I had a pair of Sennheisers that had AptX HD support, they sounded great on my Android phone and MacBook, but awful when I moved to an iPhone.

Is there an answer though to the question of how to fix it? Obviously it's designed to operate in a pretty noisy slice of bandwidth, is that the root of their problem? Or is there something fundamentally wrong with their approach that they can't change without breaking backwards compatibility?

The spec is so complicated that it's impossible to implement correctly (or so I hear).

I do think it would help a lot to have 5GHz Bluetooth.

In my experience QC35 works well with pretty much anything except some Apple computers, such as on some Macbooks. Might be chipset dependent.

In my experience QC35 works well on Linux/Windows PCs and laptops, iPhone/iPad and on Android devices.

I have a QC35 connected to linux laptop/android phone/toyota car. The problem is the headphones will randomly decide which one is going to win. Sometimes i turn on the headphones, they say they connect to the phone and the laptop, then I join a meeting and no audio. Usually have to turn the phone bluetooth off to get it working again. In the end i bought separate dedicated headphones to use for the laptop.

Yeah, that dual bluetooth connection "feature" is pretty annoying. It just plays audio from the device that first happened to send any sound, while the other device becomes completely muted. What were they thinking at Bose...

Mine work fine on Apple laptops. I’ve tried with several and even a Mac mini.

Bluetooth has failed in some device combinations for me, though. Seems like luck is required.

Exactly. My phone still once every few days struggles to connect to my headphones or my car, until I reset the phone and it all works fine again

I've actually worked on a bluetooth stack, and even I have no idea why it's so unreliable.

I think that somehow each Bluetooth device has its own kinks.

With my QuietComfort 35 sometimes the A2DP profile is not negotiated and it falls back to HSP/HFP which sounds like a landline in the 90s. Then you have to disconnect/reconnect it and hope it works this time.

Another pair of cheap sports headphones I own just like to pair with everything that is in range if no other device is connected.

And lastly my Sony WF-1000XM3 just never automatically connects to my phone. I always have to manually go into the Bluetooth menu to connect them.

I think there should be some type of conformity certification, not for the implementation of the Bluetooth protocol itself but for how a device has to act in certain scenarios.

> With my QuietComfort 35 sometimes the A2DP profile is not negotiated and it falls back to HSP/HFP which sounds like a landline in the 90s. Then you have to disconnect/reconnect it and hope it works this time.

This happens to my AirPods2. Very annoying, like a $5 pair of headphones.

I feel like they dropped the ball with respect to spec compliance. I have some speakers that allow anybody to pair with them, even if they don't have physical access to the device, and I occasionally have apartment neighbors connect to them and start playing music. That shouldn't be possible...but anybody can just say that their product is Bluetooth compatible and get away with it.

They should have a rigid spec and a publicly available test kit, and a certification process for spec compliance.

"They should have a rigid spec and a publicly available test kit, and a certification process for spec compliance."

They do. One can only put the Bluetooth logo if the product passes compliance tests. For the pairing, Bluetooth allows different modes. Predictably, the least secure one became the most popular.

in the 20 years I'm surprised that some company that makes both sources and headsets (sony, apple) haven't made their own proprietary protocol in parallel

It highly depends on the products.

I never had issues with my BT speaker.

I switch it on, it connects, and the PC automatically switches all output to it.

For all the flaws I find not having my head tethered revelatory. I just can't stand it. I always feel like I have to hold my neck a certain way and make it sore.

Bose probably just sucks at making Bluetooth.

Bose almost certainly buys a Bluetooth chip from another vendor instead of making it themselves.

All other bluetooth headphones and soundboxes I've ever tried were in fact much worse than Bose. Some of them I didn't even manage to connect to in like a 20 minutes attempt at parties before just giving up and finding a cable or just using the laptop's soundboxes.

I have similar experience with bluetooth audio devices. Meanwhile, I have been using bluetooth mice for over a decade and never had any problems. So, is it poor implementation? Or maybe bluetooth audio in particular is bad?

I can't use it for audio but it was a godsend for me for the past 20 years for mice and keyboards.

I personally don't think so. I owned Apple Magic Touchpads and Keyboards Gen 1 and now the new ones and I have them plugged in. You still get that 1-5 seconds delay in connection. In UX even a delay of few milliseconds can degrade the experience.

AFAIU it was basically FTP strapped onto a wireless PHY. It was hacky from the start.

That's one data point. I've been using my QC45 with a MBP and Android device and it works flawlessly. My hearing aid is connected to my Android via BLE and has worked consistently for which I'm really really grateful. I think it's a magnificent piece of technology.

I still have mine (v. 1). I called support once about it. It can get into a mode where it needs to be rebooted. Overall, they work fine. Be sure to download the app and install the latest firmware update.

Also, using the audio cable and charging cable at the same time results in annoying digital noise in the headphones. It may be a ground loop issue that can be broken by charging and listening with different relative ground sources (gnd of USB must be different than the audio gnd).

I feel the main problem is pair UI with vendors cheaping out on a designated pait button.

I loved the QC35 headphones, because their introduction led to the fire sale of the older QC25 series, which I scored new for just under $150.

The QC25 uses a user-replaceable AA battery. And they're still going strong.

Someday I may even buy one of the Bluetooth adapters for them: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01MTQGY69

Being able to pop in a new AA battery is absolutely awesome when traveling - I still reach for my QC25s instead of my QC35s for long-haul flights.

I was looking to buy new headphones and know from experience that I wanted bluetooth, and wired mode with a wired mic. I was surprised to not find a single headphone with all 3 of these features. Apple, Bose and Sony ANC headphones do not have a mic that works in wired mode.

I ended up getting HyperX Cloud Mix (gave up on ANC). It has a built-in mic and a nice detachable boom mic. Both mics work in wired and bluetooth mode. I'll hang on to these until bluetooth v11 or whatever actually upgrades the one feature everyone needs: good audio quality in both directions without quirks.

On a side note, Windows 11 has recently added AAC support (used by Apple) and now makes only one bluetooth device for headphones (used to make multiple confusing profiles). So it is getting better.

More King Harald trivia: a story about King Harald making a boastful soldier shoot an apple off of his son’s head is the original source for the later legend of William Tell in Switzerland

looking forward to a future safety-critical network protocol called appleshot

That’s actually a pretty good name.

"Hold my mead..."

Modern version: We've tied a bomb to your son. It's easy to defuse. Just connect to it via bluetooth and give the "defuse" command.

You have 48 hours. Good luck.

Fun fact, the very first explanation of Bluetooth tech I saw was by Leo Laporte on Tech TV sometime in the 90s. The name was the first thing they discussed iirc.

Woulda been ZDTV in the 90s. Man I miss that channel. It all started going downhill after the first name change.

Yeah, this would have been 98 - 99, so probably was zdtv at that point.

I though everyone (old enough) knew this already, it was a somewhat talked about thing when Bluetooth started getting adopted in consumer technology aeons ago

You weren't trying to make fun of people, but it's a good one: https://xkcd.com/1053/

That's interesting, I always thought it was because it was a competitor to Infrared, hence something new with another color in its name. Interesting how random things in my life are assumptions I never questioned.

Fun fact: Apple and non-Apple devices won't share files via Bluetooth.

Why? What's Apple's reasoning for that? Probably something along the lines of security or privacy but i really don't see it.

Same as Apple's reasoning for their other, er, opportunistic hesitance when it comes to interoperability: "Every time we add friction to the boundary of our ecosystem, it drives people to operate exclusively within our ecosystem".

There's a reason people without iPhones show up a different color in iMessage too (and that group chats with Android users frequently don't function [carrier dependent]), and it has nothing to do with technical constraints.

Really?

Yep. It was already like this when I got an iPhone 5 and as far as I know it's still the same on the iPhone 13.

While these days we have faster technologies, bluetooth is available on most devices. It's like SMS, but for file transfers. Another reason for me not to buy iPhones.

File sharing over BT is insecure, obsolete, and not widely-supported. It's better to deal with reality that BLE-capable apps and cloud apps are universal replacements.

> not widely-supported

Can you mention one main stream phone or tablet released in the past 10 years that doesn't support bluetooth file transfer? Android certainly supports it and I also remember using it on Windows Phone. As far as I know, only iOS (and iPadOS) doesn't... a bit weird as Apple supports it on macOS (just tested by sending a photo from my 2021 M1 MBP → Android phone).

Anyway, is it the best option available today? No. Speeds alone are a good reason to avoid it. But Airdrop only works with Apple devices and Nearby Share is for Android (and apparently Windows in the future[0]), so the alternative is either a cloud app or some cross platform app which both sides need to install (who wants to do that just to transfer a file?).

[0] https://9to5google.com/2022/01/05/google-nearby-share-androi...

Do you mean AirDrop or BT File Sharing?

Edit: In general without Apple, BT File Sharing has never interop'd. It's better to use a third-party app that uses BLE or a cloud or chat app with file sharing.

>In general without Apple, BT File Sharing has never interop'd.

I've used it with Windows, Symbian and Android at least, sending small files to each other without issues. The main problem is that it's just very slow.

Wi-Fi Direct (also used in 'AirDrop') however, doesn't interop. Windows and Android even both call their implementation 'Nearby Sharing' — but they're not compatible.

Just to be clear, it is conjecture that the nickname was due to a dead tooth. It is not exactly clear what the nickname means. The word we translate to "tooth" could also mean "thane", so it could mean something like "the blue price" or "the black prince".

It has been argued that the nickname is unlikely to be because of a bad tooth, since this would have been common enough at the time not to be noteworthy. But of course there might have been some story behind which is lost to time.

Another, perhaps more plausible, theory of why King Harald was nicknamed "Bluetooth" is that it would have been the name of his sword: a sharp "tooth" of blued steel.

“In 1996, three industry leaders, Intel, Ericsson, and Nokia, met“

So Nordicsemi really had nothing to do with it? The world felt more consistent before I read that sentence.

If you’re curious to learn more about how Bluetooth was named, there’s an interview with Jim Kardach on the topic: https://blog.snapeda.com/2019/10/07/how-bluetooth-got-its-na...

An interesting point about the logo, and a test of Unicode:

"The Bluetooth logo is a bind rune merging the Younger Futhark runes (Hagall) (ᚼ) and (Bjarkan) (ᛒ), Harald’s initials."

HN has passed the Unicode test.

When the alien archaeologists dig up our civilization, they'll think we were still putting magic runes on everything.

If you don't think Bluetooth is nigh unto magic, what is? Imagine explaining it to someone from even 30 years ago.

Computer programming in general is akin to magic. It's literally in the realm of "say the magic words in the correct order, and things will happen".

I’m actually surprised there wasn’t similar wireless headphones previously that were just pure analog FM radio. Seems very doable with older technology, save battery size/weight.

There definitely was. You could get them for your home stereo, not phones.

The headphones would probably weigh a ton and only last 1-2 hours from the heavy ni-cad batteries of the 90s.

Those exist and have the major advantage of zero audio latency which is good for interoperability (think a TV headphone port).

The disadvantage (in my cheap ones at least) is poorer sound quality, especially the amount of background hiss, short range and susceptibility to interference (no error correction).

"Believe it or not, despite 30 years and billions of dollars up for grabs, wireless headphones are pretty much gonna be ass."

Related anecdote: The south of Sweden is full of people who think they “invented Bluetooth”. I’ve met a handful.

I find Bluetooth annoying to use since you have to license it. For example if you add an LED to an raspberry pi and you want to sell it to your friend you have to pay $9600 to SIG. (then you also have to pay $xxxx or more to get it certified by the FCC)

Your comment piqued my interest, and I found this discussion from 2017: https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=173142

It seems you can sell a Raspberry Pi-based contraption without paying SIG fees as long as you make it impossible for end users to use the Bluetooth functionality / disable/brick Bluetooth on the device.

I used to give that story, in one of my Bluetooth classes. I ended up removing it, to save time, and also, because I used an Albert Uderzo character, from Asterix, as an illustration, and couldn’t share it online, with that image.

In '99/00, I remember a cartoon on a slide because the lecturer was involved in the BT spec. It took a while, but he was right that it would be ubiquitous.

I do have issues with BT compatibility between some devices with stuttering sound. For example, I have Edifier speakers that don't work properly with Apple devices.

Another issue is audio/video latency. aptX Low Latency isn't widely-supported. Receivers, TVs, computers, and any display device chain muxes or demuxes A/V should support an A/V calibration device discoverable by WiFi and BT containing a microphone and light sensor for automatic synchronization.

Pairing is a PITA. The behaviors of connecting, selecting, forcing, and moving devices are inconsistent and problematic. AirPods are terrible because they repeatedly connect when not wanted.

> Bluetooth was only intended as a placeholder until marketing could come up with something really cool.

And the dead tooth was used as an antenna to communicate with others when his energy levels were low?

Cool. So we can use 2 Unicode characters of the runes to represent the logo!

King Harald is one of the best characters on Vikings

Am I crazy or was it called Blutooth at some point?

You're thinking rays, not teeth...

Fitting

That’s fitting

I still wonder why Apple has not dropped Bluetooth already. Bluetooth sucks, period. It helped shape many creative ideas, but it cannot meet the expectations in 2022 anymore.

Bluetooth was, and still is, the most widely used means of file sharing, esp. between Android devices. When Apple decided not to support file sharing over Bluetooth in iOS, that was a good decision, albeit being an inconvenience to users. But Apple then introduced AirDrop which work’s way better than Bluetooth. Meanwhile, there’s still no reliable way to wirelessly transfer files between Android and Windows devices, and your have to use Bluetooth for that!

Bluetooth also sucks when it comes to wireless headphones and other wireless accessories. I’m seriously surprised that Apple kept using Bluetooth for their AirPods.

Nearby share on Android and Windows and KDE connect

Nearby share on Windows is NOT compatible with Android.

Works fine enough for my headphones. Just wondering, have you used any BT 5.0 devices recently?

I used to have many problems with Bluetooth, but my Bluetooth 5.0 earbuds seem to work quite consistently. I can't see myself ever going back to wired earphones.

I used to deride bluetooth but then I tried a modern BT device and I was hooked.

> AirDrop which work’s way better than Bluetooth

and is proprietary Apple exclusive nonsense. no thanks

That's a feature, like the green bubble, it's a social signal used to coerce bystanders into the sinister cult.

Why do you feel victimized by a green bubble, though?

Meanwhile, there’s still no reliable way to wirelessly transfer files between Android and Windows devices, and your have to use Bluetooth for that!

The issue is there are a hundred different ways to transfer files between Android and Windows, and no two people use the same method. Personally I just use a file manager to copy files onto a network folder on my Windows devices.

File managers might do file sharing just fine, but they’ll never be easy to use by most people.

> When Apple decided not to support file sharing over Bluetooth in iOS, that was a good decision

When Apple decided not to support file sharing over Bluetooth in iOS, that was a bad decision made to push its own not-compatible-with-anything ad-hoc file sharing standard, which in the end wasn't adopted by anybody else.

Nothing innovative in reinventing a wheel. Poor vision, bad execution.

> Meanwhile, there’s still no reliable way to wirelessly transfer files between Android and Windows devices, and your have to use Bluetooth for that!

And it will never be unless both will freaking stop reinventing the wheel, and keep trying EEE with Android Beam, Android Share, Samsung Share, Windows Share, and other misadventurous attempts at standard-making which live no longer than 2-3 years.

Windows XP, and Ericsson R520 had built-in Bluetooth stack, and worked just find from the box.

Win 10, and latest Android had to both individually subvert the OBEX standard in their own ways to become mutually incompatible from the box.

> I’m seriously surprised that Apple kept using Bluetooth for their AirPods

The fact that most people expect earphones to work with more than just their phone and laptop might have something to do with it.

I actually think Bluetooth works ok for wireless accessories. Seems fine on my games controllers and mice. No complaints with Bluetooth for my Apple Watch nor the Pebble that came before it. Audio feel like the worst widespread use of Bluetooth and even there, I think half the problems are the implementations rather than the protocol. For example I have a few Bluetooth speakers that works flawlessly. My old Bose earphones worked flawlessly too. In fact ironically the worst bluetooth audio hardware I've used is actually the AirPods -- but I accept that I do shop around before buying audio hardware so there will be other products out there that are terrible.

I recently read an interview posted here with one of the Apple engineers working on AirPods. In it he mentioned they were working on a wireless interface with more bandwidth than Bluetooth can do.

>> "I still wonder why Apple has not dropped Bluetooth already."

Apple Pencil uses Bluetooth. That's a huge selling point for their bigger devices. Dropping Bluetooth would mean dropping all the third-party styluses people use. Who would ever upgrade what they draw/paint on if they had to buy a $100 device to replace one that already works on what they have?

iOS is the one place where Bluetooth is even semi-reliable. I have endless trouble keeping devices paired to my Windows and Linux machines, but the iPhones pick it up first try every time.

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