Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades | Hacker News Reader

Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades

cnn.com

633 pointscpeterso581 comments

My car (Lexus) and my iPhone X:

The car detects iPhone presence, like, 50% of the time. If it does detect it, it shows me a couple of half-naked shaved guys hugging each other and begins playing "Songs of Innocence" the moment I turn the ignition on. I tried deleting this song from the iPhone, but it auto-magically restores itself somehow, as if it is in the telephone's firmware. The image of men hugging in shade is baked into my mind forever at this point.

As I want to set my plans in silence, I press stop on the dashboard. I set my Google Maps navigation, turn the knob to increase the volume so I could hear instructions, and this triggers "Songs of Innocence" to continue playing and the second burst of outrage in my cardiovascular system. I press the stop the second time, and at this point can continue on my journey - but should I try to increase the volume again, I have to remember the hugging men are always there.

Once (or twice), the phone just went berserk and couldn't stop playing them. I tried everything, but the Songs were playing, and the men were hugging while I was doing 70 mph on the motorway. I had to reboot the phone, but after the reboot, the car was unable to pair with it.

I don't know if it's a Lexus problem, or an Apple problem, but what I know is that I really fucking hate U2.

The image you're taking about is the cover art for that album, right?

Yes...

A likely story. This is a safe place pal, we’re all friends here..

It's album art for an album he never wanted though. Apple did a stunt some years back where they celebrated the launch of a new U2 album by automatically putting that album on everyone's iPhones. For many people, it's the only music they have in the stock Music app, so it's what gets played when nothing else is currently playing.

FWIW, the men are father and son; the lower man is U2's drummer Larry Mullen Jr.

I don't know if it's for much better or much worse, but this allows me some freedom of thought now. Thank you, sir.

There used to be a link to remove the album[1] but it seems like they shut it down. So the only way for you to remove the album from your account is to contact apple support.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-29208540#:~:text=Apple%2....

I also have an alarm set up I cannot delete. It says "pick up Matt from school." It migrated all the way from iPhone 7 to this X. But he has grown up since and I don't need to pick him up anymore. I'll include this in my request.

You have a gift for writing humorously.

Sorry, what was the humorous writing there? Seemed like a pretty direct statement of the facts of their case. The fact that underlying events are funny doesn't say anything about the style of writing, and I don't see any stylistic choices that were going for "deliberately humorous writing", let alone ones that show a gift (though of course the poster might show it in other contexts!).

Woah. This comment is hilarious, but it's not the writing.

But to explain the humorous aspects of the poster's story, it's the naked men that he sprinkles throughout the story. Mentioning it multiple times is what makes it funny among funny bits.

> Woah. This comment is hilarious, but it's not the writing.

Hence my confusion at the compliment. And now, at people who find it, in any way objectionable, to express such confusion.

I think it's a good question.

> Seemed like a pretty direct statement of the facts of their case

That's exactly what tickled me. He could have just said "My car keeps playing the same album when I adjust the console" but chose to focus on elements of the story that are vivid. He let the funny aspects of the situation shine through specifically _because_ he picked interesting elements to state directly.

Anyway, I don't like to pick apart what is humorous to me about something because it spoils the magic :)

Are we taking about the same comment? We’re taking about one that mentions an alarm, not an album.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32163781

And yes, I get that it rutina the fun to break down the logic too much, but you specifically complimented a style, and claimed the persona generally “had a gift” when there was no obVious style that made the comment funny, just the fact of the alarm being long obsolete for its intended purpose.

You have a gift for writing pedantically

Yeah, his story cracked me up.

Sir, have you tried picking Matt up and putting him down, narrating your actions for Siri?

I’ve had a similar saga with my Apple ID profile picture. I snapped it in a poorly lit kitchen with my new laptop’s built-in webcam in December 2008, and in spite of occasional efforts to remove it, it has propagated itself back and forth between devices and services for so long it now looks like a “needs more jpeg” meme. Over the years several people have exclaimed from behind me as I open my laptop “where the hell did that picture come from!?”.

There is a "Free Airport Wifi" WAP saved on my phone from Mexico City since my iPhone 6. It is long deleted, but it has migrated through the years to my current iPhone 13.

Its residue is left on my phone in only this way: Whenever I connect to a new wifi point, after typing in the password, my phone will say it cannot connect to "Free Airport Wifi". I have to type the password in again (usually one someone just read to me) and connect again.

I have a similar phenomenon with an exchange account. It's connected to Outlook and everything is working. But sometimes my iPhone X randomly asks me for credentials, doesn't let me input credentials, and then goes away and everything keeps working.

Yeah, something like that happens to me a few times per year. Makes me wonder if I'm being pwned, but only after my pavlov response fills in my creds.

Related story about the origins of the infamous "Free Public Wifi" viral hotspot: https://readwrite.com/the_story_behind_free_public_wifi_-_it...

what the hell did I just read... but yes Apple's implementation of Bluetooth is quite subpar compared to most peers, even though not sure if Lexus is 100% innocent here

If you consider Apples to be sub par. What’s your standard for decent?

I’ve never had any BT issues with Apple stuff. And most of the other things I own have terrible BT implementations. But maybe because I can’t tell how to check for a good implementation?

Devil's advocate: Couldn't Apple's BT implementation be bad but still work well with itself?

I think the blame has to lie with Lexus. My current phone is an iPhone and my previous phone was a Pixel and both work perfectly in my Subaru, although the head unit was replaced 3 times because it was triggering some type of SOS signal to Subaru.

Frankly, I've had fewer BT issues with my iPhone than I had with my Android phone, but the Android was from three years ago and I think things have probably improved since then.

I haven't driven for a few years but my iPhone 4 always used to connect and work with my Peugeot 307 perfectly.

Everyone in this thread who is complaining has either a Lexus or a Toyota (who owns Lexus) so it’s obviously a problem with some version of their infotainment system. The U2 thing was obviously an Apple issue.

Not sure why they don’t use CarPlay but maybe some people prefer Bluetooth.

I think CarPlay (both wired and wireless versions) requires Bluetooth.

I’ve never used a wireless version of CarPlay, I always plugged it in which worked reliably in every modern budget car I’ve rented (Toyota included).

I was in a Volkswagen rental last week and the Carplay integration was a disaster. 50% of the time, attempting to play a song on spotify would crash Carplay. It would refuse to work again (or hey, crash again) until you'd left the car off for a lengthy amount of time. Presumably the car turns off the infotainment system at some point, so this is a reboot, but there was no way to reboot manually... So it would remain broken for the drive.

Seems like manufacturers aren't integrating particularly robust systems on the average

I've owned a VW for 6 years and Carplay has always worked flawlessly.

It's definitely a Lexus problem. The BT connection on my Citroen is absolutely 100% flawless. Works every time reliably. But it's literally just a dumb audio and telephony connection. Anything more complicated than that is guaranteed to be absolutely a universally huge fucking shit show.

Its funny as I have the toyota rav4 2021 hybrid, (toyota owns lexus) and have none of these problems. My money is on the shitty 'interpretation' of 'resume last song' between the car and the phone.

Reading your comment made me feel like someone had been spying on me in my car. I go through this same thing in my Lexus every time I drive it as well. It is such a relief to know I am not the only one.

Amen, brother.

I have exactly he same issue with U2 on Apple Music. Exactly the same song. I think it’s because you get it for free.

Haha, sorry, reminds me - my wife hates U2 with violent passion.

Eventually I asked her what caused such burning rage, and she said her car starts playing a specific U2 song every time she turns it on. For years!

Eventually I traced it to a promotional album U2 and apple and iTunes pushed to her devices without her knowledge.

Man can these things backfire!

But yeah we have a 2019 Honda and iPhones xr (not my choice; iPhone is work mandated) and there's just no telling what'll happen any given time when we start the car. Especially annoying since modern infotainment units make you wait 3 to 5 seconds to display crucial legal information before you can mute the darn thing. And let's not start if you have more than one Bluetooth headphone and more than one device at home :(

(Yes I'm now the grouch that misses 3.5mm on modern phones and uses my old Note 8 and wired Sennheiser to listen to music hassle free :D)

We should start a club!

My son just bought a 3.5 mm adapter for the phone. Turns out the younger generation prefers wired too.

I sometimes wonder what the world would be like without FAANG. I'm lead to believe the world would be a better place if all companies would have a max company size of Bose, or Sennheiser. Then no stupid decisions could be pushed through by force, like the removal of the 3.5 mm jack. If the market really wants it, they will eventually vote with their wallet. Same goes with social media, fb killed off local country-specific social media, which sometimes had much better features and less agressivity/conspiracy theories/scams.

The market wants what the other segment of the market has, that's the purpose of marketing. Phones with no jacks, like laptops with no i/o, is something impractical that people self-justify because of the logo and the clout it affords. You're part of the in group, you made it, you have achieved sameness, you have an iPhone.

Airpods are just about the worst headphones money can buy and people fight over them, despite there being headphones sold for <$100 that blow them out of the water. I have in-ear-monitors that cost a fraction of what an airpod does, has detachable cords AND bluetooth to each ear, and they sound much better and balanced.

Whoever took away the audio port on modern phones should be dragged outside and beaten like an unruly fax machine.

>> You're part of the in group, you made it, you have achieved sameness, you have an iPhone.

I assumed I was just a grouchy old man (because I am:) but I recently found out what level of social stratification happens for teenagers without iPhone. Immediate judgement, plus the continued dreaded green text box. It is brutal

I thought I was exaggerating the iPhone as a status symbol as opposed to actually convenient / technical solution, turns out I was naive.

(there ARE things that Apple does very well, when it comes to integrating within ecosystem, though some of them are CREEPY - like being prompted to share my wifi password with another person who happens to be looking for wifi around me; just because they happen to have an iPhone doesn't make them my best friend... or does it :P )

Imagine how I feel, I don't carry or use phones, period. The level of outright indignation I experience is pretty high. People resort to levels of disgust when met with someone who openly rejects carrying around a little bother-box in their pocket as if I'm some type of unwashed knave.

I don't think I can fully imagine; I prefer my ergonomic keyboard and massive monitor to be sure, so I dislike phone-first solutions (GRRR Whatsapp GRRR), or phone-priority design, and computers are definitely my hammer of choice.

But between Winnipeg winter storms and kids and experience of civil war and strife in a previous lifetime, mobile phones as a safety lifeline were a strong priority for me early in my life in late 90's; and then I was one of those nerdy guys with Palm Pilot (I used to read entire books... many many books... on a 320x320px screen - which is why I find it hilarious when people so righteously proclaim "Retina or bust" :), then Palm Treo then HTC G1 then Galaxy S2 and so on. I am too self-absorbed or something to worry about social media (I genuinely don't care what anybody else had for lunch or the cute picture of their cat or the latest copy pasted platitude that's 5 words but 3MB overcompressed JPEG grr!), so scrolling Facebook or twitter notification etc are not a real threat vector in a portable phone for me. Which is to say, I don't care one iota if anybody else has a portable phone or not, but I personally find it much too convenient; and I can see it impacting me if somebody else doesn't have a phone, not from status perspective but from practical perspective - there's a change of plans, but oh, Bob is still going to the CoolCafe and we can't tell him to meet us at the NiceRestaurant; or my tire is blown, how am I going to call anybody; etc. How do you handle stuff like that?

Yeah that sucks. I graduated collage in 2008 and I refused to get a phone before that point. The amount of people complaining how it is inconvenient that they have to call your room phone instead of texting, how they can't make plans(in reality, it is a crutch for lack of planning), etc.

For a while, it was the same with Facebook.

If it may be a helpful perspective - I don't care if I phone one's room phone or cell phone; but texting/messaging is a completely different mode of communication than a phone call to begin with.

Texting, like messaging and email, are async whereas phone is sync. For 99% of my communication, I don't need to talk to somebody right now (and they don't need to talk to me right now :). I don't care if other party has a cell phone or not, but written comms is preferred to voice comm for large number of my requirements.

Similarly, email/messaging/text can trivially be a group conversation, and plans can be narrowed down or many people can be informed quickly; again, don't care if other party has cell phone or not, but in many circumstances I'd prefer to send one quick message/email/text, than to call 7 people.

(lest you think I lack empathy, I am of course on the other side of the equation too! My family is all on Whatsapp, which for me is the worst messaging system that an evil mind could possibly invent, so I feel the pressure :)

Not that I don't understand the difference between the communication modes, mostly just empathizing with the parent.

Personally I hate text because most people will reply with one or 2 word answers and it takes much longer to get a decision vs a minute phone call.

In collage my reasoning was purely financial and this was the beginning of the mass adoption wave. I can only guess that the pressure to conform is so much greater and the scorn/ridicule for not is as well.

I also wonder if we will see a counter wave similar to the "I don't watch TV" that happened. Phones are great but they are also insediously great time wasters.

Agreed; with text, and possibly since the days of BBM, there's also the personal pet peeve when a simple answer is spread across 7 individual messaged :D

I think some counter movements are already seen; and more mainstream, people are trying to learn how to limit / constrain their phone interactions. Part of the problem is that our labeling is horrible outdated - it's not actually the "Phone" part of the rectangular device that's usually the problem, it's the "massively powerful computer and media consumption device" part :D

I'd never look down on anybody without a phone. In fact, I'd really respect it.

But I would be frustrated if it was somebody close to me, if (if!) there was no other way to contact them.

It's almost a requirement out in the world. Recently the following come to mind:

- A food truck sends a text when your food is ready

- The menu at the restaurant is only available via a QR code which sends you to a website

- You have to take a picture of your license plate for some parking requirement

The thing I never liked about Airpods is, instead of having one thing that is hard to lose, we now have three easy to lose things.

I am extremely puzzled by true wireless bluetooth headphones to a point where it's hard to find high-end wired bluetooth headphones.

True wireless have so many drawbacks: - lower battery life yet people got convinced that they last long thanks to powerbank, I meant ,,case" which you need to carry.

- bulkier so they stick out of ear one way or another. They fall down easily when changing t-shirts, huddies .. - easy to lose

I use them at the gym because I hate having things on my face/head while I'm sweaty. I don't have a use case for wired bluetooth headphones that isn't better served by something with a 3.5mm jack.

> it's hard to find high-end wired bluetooth headphones

pre-covid we had an open floorplan office, typical valley startup layout, no noise dampening etc

Everyone had the bose 35 quiet comfort i or ii noise canceling headphones. I was one of the new guys so started off with a $60 panasonic noise canceling headphone, and later when released got the sony ...mx4000? noise canceling headphones because they had USB-C in ~2016 and I brought them with me on my most recent trip here in 2022

I don't know anyone who has ever complained about their bose or sony bluetooth noise canceling headphones. They just work, all the time, every time. Except that one time I forgot to charge them and let them run down to 0% (and it even warned me about an hour before)

> I don't know anyone who has ever complained about their bose or sony bluetooth noise canceling headphones.

My Sony XM4 cans often give me trouble with bluetooth. Once in a while, there is no sound from the device. The device says "connected", the phone app says it's connected, the computer says it's connected. The way to fix it is to plugin the 3.5mm jack, and take it off. The device powers off. The next time it is powered on, it works properly. Lots of other people have had this trouble too. I did not discover this "fix" myself, but was written online somewhere.

Yeah those headphones are great, but they are not true wireless.

The airpods do one thing much better than anything else I've tried: work with an iPhone.

I went through a few other pairs of bluetooth "true wireless" ear buds and every single one of them would exhibit the normal bluetooth problems. Sometimes one wouldn't connect. Sometimes both wouldn't connect. Sometimes trying to resolve this I'd "forget" them and then not be able to pair them again necessitating pulling out the manual and figuring out how to do a hard reset on some ear buds. And then ending up with only one paired. Etc, etc.

I pretty much exclusively use in-ear headphones to listen to something to fall asleep to, so this is generally happening as I've already wound down and gotten into bed and... now it's tech support time!

I paired the airpods to my phone the first time and have never had them fail to connect immediately since.

This. I am honestly bewildered when I see the tech press comparing true wireless earbuds to AirPods and not mentioning the enormous ergonomic differences.

Bluetooth experiences will be largely software-dependent. Comparing Airpods on a Macbook to a Windows laptop and some Sony earbuds? It's no contest, Airpods will win every time. If we're, say, testing the Airpods on Windows and the Sony buds on Linux (where they have LDAC support), the tables will be completely turned. All of these headphones are context-sensitive, and will behave differently on different hardware. You're not exactly writing a novel thesis here.

Airpods are still just Bluetooth with an extra chip for NFC pairing. All of the "magic" your Airpods provide are software-based, not part of the actual hardware you're buying. I think Tech Press is totally justified to ignore software that isn't part of the headphones itself.

Isn't all that it just works software "driver quality"? If we were talking about a graphics card that couldn't detect monitor resolution and keep connected, we wouldn't give the card a pass just because it is a driver issue.

I mean, there are plenty of perfectly functional graphics cards that are given a pass because their drivers don't work with Wayland or refuse to implement resizable BAR. These are pretty solidly driver issues (ones that have persisted over decades, at that), and nobody really ever brings it up because it's not necessarily Nvidia's responsibility to address it.

The larger factor (in my eyes) is implementation. Bluetooth quality is all over the place: mobile Bluetooth stacks used to be abysmal until ~5 years ago, and desktop OSes still don't have it ironed out yet. It makes perfect sense that reviewers would focus on the hardware, as opposed to enumerating how each device works on each operating system, and so on.

> All of the "magic" your AirPods provide are software-based

This is actually not true. AirPods contain custom silicon from Apple for the controller that speaks bluetooth, whereas most true wireless headphones use a Qualcomm chip, and therefore suffer the exact same ergonomic issues almost regardless of price. The most obvious way this is shown is that you can be on a call with the right airpod in, then seamlessly add the left to the call and put the right back in the case all without dropping the call, developing sync issues, or making the switch obvious to the other party. It's especially useful if your airpods are low on power. Airpods also better than average (in my experience) at switching devices when clicking the connect button from a device they are not currently connected to. This is most obviously good with apple devices (where there is auto pairing based on apple id), but in my experience it works better than the average even on non-apple devices. I am comparing the experience to Sony WF-100XM3 as well as cheaper devices like soundcore liberty neo.

Of course you are correct that there are additional software derived things that make airpods nice on apple products. When they work well, they can be pretty great, but I still find those hit or miss. For me, the way the controller can switch easily between the right and left as well as easy pairing are what makes airpods great.

The only feature the wideband chip provides is the device switching and pairing, which is largely redundant with multipoint Bluetooth spec and NFC, respectively. I'll appreciate what Apple did ergonomically, but I found the "smartness" of Airpods to be less reliable than using my XM4s connected to both the devices I was using. I understand the layman's struggle here, but I honestly think most people's bad experiences with Bluetooth were in the < v3 era, where things like multipoint hadn't been introduced and reliability/pairing were... shaky.

Nowadays, I think any phone running Android 10+ or Linux device using Pipewire has the best wireless audio experience I can think of. You can have high-bitrate audio codecs with excellent latency and a connection that's as good as the antennae you have plugged in. AAC and the funnel of buying U1 chip devices doesn't really put up enough of a fight, especially for a company that's long prided itself on delivering quality audio experiences.

I've gone through a few different high-end bluetooth buds from Jabra to Sony.

I keep coming back to my Airpods, something that was gifted to me a year ago, when the other ones break. Most recently, one of my Jabra Elite buds plays audio at 50% volume from one ear 50% of the time.

Not a fan of the tap interface nor the shape of the things nor the need to use a rubber condom (that doesn't fit in the case so I have to remove/add every time), but my Airpods are the ones that I can count on, so I have to give them that.

Just a note: I had faltering volume on my Jabra Elite earbuds and I found an unauthorized repair [0] that brought it back to life. It requires some delicate cleaning of build up in the vent hole.

[1] <https://crt.the-mori.com/2020-09-25-solve-jabra-elite-active...>

Thanks, I will try that. I wouldn't be surprised if my ear gunk liquefied into them and then crystallized deep inside the inner sanctums.

This is why AirPods are popular. While this drives audiophiles and geeks who obsess over performance of their technology (not knocking them, I’m one of them for many devices) up the wall, the reality is most people are not audiophiles and can barely tell the difference. What they want are reasonably comfortable headphones that just work, and Bluetooth is so famously bad at this that AirPods stand out.

> the reality is most people are not audiophiles and can barely tell the difference.

That hasn't been my experience at all. The differences, even to a lay person, or not subtle.

Now, I can believe that many don't care, I can't believe that they can't tell.

The work every time...and my hearing is shot so the last 5% worth of fidelity is lost on me.

And my wife experienced their noise cancelling once on a flight and bought a set the next day.

And we can share the audio between two airpod things when watching a movie, but not with non-Apple products.

I see the same happening with a certain new EV that I won't name. It has a nice design, but often gets people stranded, outright bricked through OTA. To the point where dealers advise users not to perform OTA updates. Literal pieces falling off the car while driving. The need to call the tow truck after 2k miles is very common. In normal car terms, it's junk. But people fight tooth and nail to defend it. Exactly because of the 'tribal' thinking you mention. It's our 'tribe', so we close in.

Sounds dire. What car is this, and where can I read about these cars that very commonly fail after 2k miles?

When I was a kid, I mowed the lawn for a neighbor who was a mechanic. He exclusively worked on Porsches. He claimed most luxury cars would break down if you bought one and tried to drive it across the country. He rattled off some known issues that were baked into the manufacturing process, but rich people didn't care since it's mostly a status symbol.

This was in the late 1900's....

> You're part of the in group, you made it, you have achieved sameness, you have an iPhone.

Orrrrr we tolerate repeated mistakes on Apple's part because every time we poke our heads up and look around at the rest of the market (or even try switching for a while!) it's clear we'd just be trading every one problem for three others.

I sincerely wish any other tech companies would at least credibly pretend to actually be competing with Apple head-on, rather than just avoiding them and trying to fill other niches.

> you have achieved sameness, you have an iPhone.

You mean "....you have iPhone". Gotta get the weird marketing right if you want to be in the club.

I hope the community will find it in their hearts to be swayed by my humble appeal, I mean no harm. Who will help the widow's son?

Of course the true FAANG solution would be to include a 3.5mm jack but disable it in software, requiring £4.99 per month to enable it with a rent-seeking subscription service.

Seems like that’s more the BMW solution (ref. heated seats subscription)

Can I get an audiophile 'Hi-def' tier for $9.99 that's almost but not quite 1982 CD quality?

3.5mm can go to hell for a phone. I’d prefer the waterproofing we have with iPhones nowadays. If you need an adapter they are available.

Phones exist that have both waterproofing and a headphone jack. I’m sure it’s a challenge, but it’s not technically an either or decision.

Interesting; is there some connection between waterproofing and 3.5mm I'm missing?

There's plenty of phones and devices waterproofed to any given standard with 3.5mm. To my ignorant mind, a USB C or Lightning port is not fundamentally different exposure / difficulty than 3.5mm when it comes to this - this is far from my area of expertise, but a cursory google search, and plentiful of counter-examples, indicates this is just a post-hoc justification for Apple's removal, not a real critical path.

Understanding that "if you need something, get an adapter / live the dongle life" is the core Apple philosophy, and agreeing that most standards should eventually die (parallel port, Firewire, etc), 3.5mm still seems a uniquely standardized, useful, and time proof feature that's is sorely missed with no adequate replacement (dongle, of course, is not it, for many reasons - expense, inconvenience, losing them, and if you want to charge your phone while being on a call things get very wonky very quickly - does Apple even offer a 1st-party solution for this common office-worker use-case?)

Sony solved open headphone jack while being water proof nearly a decade ago. The idea the phone can't have a headphone jack and be waterproof was a lie pushed by Apple to save money on not having to put in a headphone jack.

I've been using Sony phones in the shower and at the beach for years now and only briefly switched to a different company when they tried to pull that headphone jack removal of crap briefly when I needed a new phone.

My understanding was that it’s always been about the physical size and the impact it has on the stack-up of iPhone components. Looking at a standard mini-jack vs. my iPhone 13, the connector itself is close to 40% of the thickness of the phone. Add the additional size for the jack’s structure and you quickly get to a point where the phone has to be thicker.

Now, has Apple gotten too obsessive about thin phones? Maybe - but that’s a different discussion.

If that is the case, I have a hard time believing it's still true on any model past iPhone X. There's plenty of space to fit a 3.5mm jack in there, I would happily trade any/all of the FaceID hardware or Lidar components for a headphone connector.

I don't see how that could be true. The thinnest ever iPhone was the 6, and it had a headphone jack. The phones since then have been 3-20% thicker.

Some searching suggests that 5mm is about the point where it won't fit, and iPhones are comfortably 7+. One of these phones is 5.6mm thick with a headphone jack and has near-zero bezels.

Is there? Last time I checked there doesn’t seem to be a dongle that both outputs and charges my iPhone in the car. Or the non Apple ones have terrible reviews that they set off the persons coffee maker scalding the persons dog or something.

so you're saying that a 3.5mm port cannot be waterproof, yet the stupid Apple proprietary power/data port can?

Lightning is anything but stupid. It’s small, has no breakable bits in the phone side of the port, and is pretty ubiquitous. I don’t have to worry about whether this cable and charger support the Lightning 2-a (IIV) Gold standard ala USB-C.

USB-C just felt terrible to me when I had a Nexus 5x. Port wasn’t as secure, cable was huge. Not a fan.

Some people wreck the 1st-party cables abnormally quickly; they should buy one of those armored cables from Amazon.

It's stupid in that it has exposed pins. It's stupid in that its proprietary. It's stupid in a lot of ways. It's not not stupid because you like it.

I have some Bluetooth speakers from Teufel. They are pretty big and heavy and supposedly good (actually way too bassy for me, hard to listen to podcasts on). And they have a battery, so they are mobile.

They heave this “feature” where they turn off after 10 min of silence. And they’re Bluetooth, so once they turn off, u have to walk to the damn speaker (no remote), push the power button that’s hidden on the back for several seconds (less used buttons are visible on top), then go to your playback device and reconnect the Bluetooth.

People on the forums have been complaining about this for years, and the support still says this feature can’t be turned off.

For a company that supposedly makes very carefully designed, great Audio equipment made in Germany, this user interface is infuriating, pointless and feels never actually tested. (Also, Nowadays nobody reviews products anymore so bad user interfaces are not caught). Btw, I have some Bluetooth speakers with a tiny battery that will stay on for a day and not turn off, idling takes nearly no battery power.

So yeah, this is like the laziest product I have owned, that just dares u to stop a movie for a bathroom or snack break lest it goes back to sleep, and it wasn’t designed by some big monolithic FANG but a supposedly user centric design focused hiish end shop.

It's patently ridiculous how much better the microphone on $15 wired headphones is than the ones on a $50 set of wireless earbuds.

A 25 dollar logitech wired headset with a boom is brilliant. I have people with $200+ airpods on the call and I hear their cat dog air conditioner wind spouse keyboard car and everything. But they cannot be told this - they have expensive earbuds and they can hear ME fine, so it's all great!

Boom mic is always the superior choice.

Yes. All the software / DSP processing can't help if the physics is against you.

By placing the microphone close to the mouth noises you make, you are increasing, by many orders of magnitude, the signal-to-noise ratio.

Cars and other large BT devices (like an Amazon Echo) can use multiple microphones and some fancy processing to really isolate the voice signal coming from a specific direction (relative to the device) and also cancel out surrounding noise sources.

With ear-bud systems, you can't fit in many microphones, nor can you spatially separate them enough for the software to do the job.

In an absolute sound quality sense, yes.

But they also pick up peoples' gross mouth noises. You hear them chewing food, wheezing when they have a cold, or even eating food in waaaaay too much detail.

Obviously mute buttons exist but... I've had multiple remote coworkers with boom mics and even if they rememeber to mute 90% of the time over the course of a year that other 10% really adds up lol

The solution to that problem is not a better microphone, the solution to it is noise-canceling software. It filters out something like 95% of gross mouth noises, and 99% of stupid background noises (Cars, fans, ACs, etc.)

But you're starting with the wrong assumption: that people focus on having the best option in each situation. The people buying Airpods probably know they're not the best headphones or microphone. They are the best jack of all trades even if master of none. They are the best package. And you rarely choose what's best for others, others probably do the same.

So when you WhatsApp from your mobile someone else has to see you type slowly, full of autocorrect errors and typos. You don't switch to the web Whatsapp from a computer, or a model M attached to the phone despite knowing they are faster because you get their messages fast and correct so it's all great.

Most cheap wireless headsets are cutting the bandwidth down to like 4k for voice when you're talking.

It's also not surprising when you realize no one buying these things is testing the mic before the purchase. They probably aren't even testing how it sounds. It's hard to sell better things when most customers will never know how bad they sound, and even the ones who do probably won't care. And worst of all they'll blame zoom, or the telephone network, or their internet, anything but the cheap piece of crap mic and half bandwidth connection they're using.

Sorry for the rant. The economics of consumer audio are why I personally quit the industry. Some of these things are easy fixes but no one cares enough to make them.

I prefer wired because, for some reason, car audio via Bluetooth has adaptive volume, i.e. I start coasting in the car and the music becomes almost inaudible. I speed up and it returns to normal.

There's an app by Apple that allows you to remove the U2 songs

Looks like that might be retired going by https://discussions.apple.com/thread/251184844

> Customers are no longer able to remove the album on their own. You will need to reach out to Apple Support directly to have the album removed

I guess this is the essence, of why I never wanted an apple device. And I bookmark this comment, in case I forget ..

I would need to ask my apple masters, if they please remove U2 from my device? No thank you.

I remember raging about this back when it happened and my coworkers couldn't understand why I just wouldn't like a free album, and am I bothered by two half-naked men embracing each other?

Boulder people are strange.

You can remove the album from your device just fine; This is about removing it from your account, which is contingent on the provider you have the account with no matter what company you're dealing with.

I feel you man...

The Miracle (Of Joey Ramone) must be our most listened Song of all time.

For me it was The Jackson 5's ABC that would play as soon as I plugged my phone into my car. That opening "A buh-buh buh buh" is ingrained in my memory forever.

Highly likely I'm misremembering, but a decade (at least) or so, there was an iTunes promo where Itunes literally pushed a free U2 album to everyone who had an iTunes account for free.

I specifically remember the internet hate that received at the time haha.

Here's a link: https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/09/09/the-free-u2-album...

That's literally what the parent comment is describing

It bears repeating. I've tried to remove that f*cking album from my library so many times, on so many devices. It's effectively unkillable; and I'm no stranger to computers.

Why that tax-dodging blowhard felt he had the right to squeeze his turd of an album onto each and every apple product I buy for, presumably, the rest of my life is unfathomable.

It’s really weird how much love Apple has for U2. That whole episode was just so cringe and tone deaf. Knowing the internal politics around it would be fascinating as surely someone tried to stop it.

I totally agree with that, I didn't like U2 back then but I know actively hate them since that episode.

It's as simple as Jobs thinking people would like a free album, but they had no mechanism to "offer" an album, so they just added the entitlement to everyone's accounts. Then they had no mechanism to "remove" an entitlement, because why would anyone want to remove content that they "bought"?

Jobs died 3 years prior to this.

Yup. And the hate and negative backlash is still here - I'm not kidding, my wife can NOT hear U2 without a visceral reaction! It followed her through like 3 cars, until she finally married a guy nerdy and persistent enough :-D

Same. Happened twice, really. Once on the ipod and then the iphone. Made U2 haters out of my wife and myself. I wonder how many people hate U2 music now because this.

This....

I have exactly the same problem with the U2 album. In general, I like U2, but that album is a pain. It starts up every now and then in my car with carplay. Especially if I have my phone on with no app in the foreground when I plug it in.

For what is worth, the same is for android. Whoever thought that changing volume should trigger "play" didn't actually test it.

I thought Audible was a virus, I can't shut it down or stop it and whatever I do, it starts playing

That’s not actually Android, or iOS. It’s the car audio system sending the Play command.

Oh I see, that's terrible

In the Audible settings (and i think in your OS) "continue playback after connecting headphones". Or just uninstall the app if you dont use it.

Oh, I am sure they did test it alright. With a Grinch smile.

Thank God that I have a car from 1981.

Similar thing would happen in my Toyota, the song 'Afraid' by Yellowcard would play every time I turned on the car. Realized it was playing the first song in my library. In Apple Music there is a song called 'A a a a a Very Good Song (Silent Track)' by artist Samir Mezrahi, that contains 10 minutes of silence. I added that to my library and now that song plays when I turn on my car (although this autoplay only happens occasionally since some Toyota update). The album art simply says: 'have a wonderful day.'

The song: https://music.apple.com/us/album/a-a-a-a-a-very-good-song-si...

I created a one-hour long silent MP3 and named it similarly and added it to my phone. I've sent it to a friend who uses it as well.

I have a script (simple ffmpeg wrapper) to generate silent mp3 files:

https://github.com/marbu/scriptpile/blob/master/silence.sh

I'm not quite sure what I needed that for anymore, but I find it interesting that there are such weird use cases for this.

Call it Subliminal productivity silence and you can make a fortune.

Modern problems require modern solutions. Nice work.

Modem problems require AT solutions, but I guess I need a font problem solution.

My Toyota only plays my iPhone bluetooth if (a) my car is in bluetooth "mode" and not radio and (b) I have my music app open.

I've never experienced what you (two) describe. 2020 Toy and iPhone 11.

I have a 2017 Toyota and never has that problem. Though for awhile I did have an issue where audible kept starting randomly but it seems to have fixed itself.

I had a Mercedes lease for three years with the same problem of automatically playing the first song as sorted alphabetically. In my case, it was "A Boy Named Sue" by Johnny Cash. That song loses its humor after you hear it a few hundred times.

Same thing with my husband's car, his phone, and the song "A-Punk" by Vampire Weekend. I now jokingly play it as the first song any time we head off on a long road trip, much to his immense frustration.

Sort happens by album artist over here, the first one being Take On Me by a-ha, triggering all sorts of physical pavlovian reactions now.

Trigger seems to be iOS thinking it's being helpful so that when I "plug" headphones (either physically, bluetoothically, or carplayly) I presumably want to play music.

Also, double click on Library in Music.app nee iTunes on macOS. Plays the whole library, linearly, which, like, who does that?

> Also, double click on Library in Music.app nee iTunes on macOS. Plays the whole library, linearly, which, like, who does that?

Often, when I see a feature like that, one that makes you ask "who would want to do that with the whole dataset?" — the answer is usually "developers regression-testing their feature branch of the program, where their 'whole dataset' is a test fixture consisting of a bunch of data samples where each one exercises a weird edge-case path in the code."

Sure, you could just make a playlist for this. But iTunes has a directory it watches within the library, where putting stuff in it will cause iTunes to automatically move those songs into your library. And if I were an iTunes dev, my scripted "Test" action would consist of creating a new library directory structure; plonking a copy of my regtest fixture dataset into its auto-import dir; starting up the new build targeting that dir; and then sending it the Automator action "Library → Play All." A playlist would only complicate that.

> iOS thinking it's being helpful so that when I "plug" headphones (either physically, bluetoothically, or carplayly) I presumably want to play music

There’s gotta be something else going on because I’ve never had this happen over the last decade. I’m pretty sure the car is sending a play command to the phone every time it connects.

Except it happens randomly with headsets, whether bluetooth (Bose QC35) or wired (EarPods)

I’ve had tons of cars and only seen this behaviour in one - think was Citroen.

Mercedes does this. A Ford that I rented last year did so as well.

My car's song of choice is About a Girl (Live Acoustic) from Nirvana's MTV Unplugged in New York live album

Haha, I can hum that opening riff instantaneously because it's the first song on my wife's phone. Do di do di do di do di do di do di. Bum, bum, bum bum bum bum!

Heh, decades ago a Phil Collins tape was stuck in my car's cassette player (yes, that was a thing) and there was no way to switch to radio when there is a tape inside. I guess I listened to that album few hundred times until I decided to do something (probably spray some WD-40) about it.

But why the hell is it autoplaying in the first place? Does apple really hate their customers/users so much that they can't make this an option?

That's completely insane. The more I learn about apple, the more I see extremely hostile UI decisions for literally no reason

I've always assumed this is a bug. Why isn't it just resuming from whatever you were last listening to? And why is this still an issue after so long?

This is one of those things that Steve Jobs would have fired people on the spot for.

Perhaps I am lucky but my Subaru does resume whatever I was last listening to. Although it seems to prioritize the itunes app over podcasts for some reason so even if I had been listening to a podcast there is a chance it will play whatever was last up in itunes. :/

Same. I have an Acura and it plays whatever the last thing that was playing out the speakers or headphones of the phone was. If that was Apple Music, that's what plays. If it was Podcasts, that's what plays. For many years, I used a 3rd party podcast app, and it would play that.

It does, however, have the same connection problems described in the root of this thread. Sometimes just doesn't see the car (or vice-versa). Sometimes connects and starts playing within a minute of starting the car. Sometimes (frequently) stops playing after like 1 minute of playing. Sometimes auto-reconnects a minute later, sometimes doesn't. It's very irritating.

If you are listening to Spotify and accidentally engage with a video on Facebook, after the video plays, your device will be completely silent. “Now Playing” will be blank. If you press Play it will resume from whatever was last playing … in Music.app!

If you have a HomePod playing your family member’s music, say “Hey Siri, pause” because a phone call came in, and then “Hey Siri, play,” it will start playing wherever _your_ music.app last left off.

User intention is a really tricky problem! But a cynical thought would be “why would Apple fix a bug that causes people to use Music.app more?”

i seem to recall that this is what the spec calls for, and toyota follows the spec. it drives me up the wall.

Engagement is eating the world, maybe engagement is now driving these decisions, too. People who listen more, buy more, so optimize for time spent listening.

My car and phone achieve a level of randomness that makes me wonder at the complexity of the software behind it. Usually it starts playing Music, but sometimes it's another app, especially if the last thing playing on my phone was YouTube. But sometimes it's YouTube even if the last app that played audio was something else. Sometimes I get the pause music from a game that's been running in the background for days.

I can't even predict whether Music will start in shuffle mode and pick a random song or if it will start playing an album I was recently listening to in sequential mode.

The result is that I've started to look at my phone the way I used to look at cable TV, as an invader in my home that works for people who want to manipulate me.

This is one reason I'll only run customized android builds without gapps until something better comes along. Linux phone devices are becoming more and more appealing

So there's actually three different components involved with this. Someone else has already mentioned the possibility of cars that just lie to your phone and say you pressed the play button because "well the user connected their phone they must want music".

The OS itself is also responsible for managing where that "play" command goes, and because this is a mobile device it also manages what apps are in memory, which one owns media playback, etc. If nothing is currently playing, it has to pick something, because you pressed the play button and you're currently driving down an overextended highway at unconscionably American speeds and can't be arsed to care about what app's play button needs to be pressed.

Individual apps can also grab or drop the media playback role at any time. Maybe that game has some background sync nonsense to send you a bunch of notifications, and whenever it gets woken up to do that the game engine it was written on immediately tries to start media playback because nobody tested it for background use.

Music's inconsistent behavior sounds like someone didn't implement state resumption correctly.

The underlying problem is that nobody owns the whole experience and this all is supposed to happen without projecting selection UI to the user. The phone just hears "PLAY MUSIC DAMN YOU" and makes a shitty guess as to what you meant.

I assume it's something to do with the devices not quite recognizing themselves as being identical to last time (perhaps any single change to anything on the iPhone causes it to download all the playlists again, etc).

I just use a stupid adapter with a mini jack input. Ain't got time for wireless wierdness.

IME, this doesn't happen in any of my Subaru vehicles. It picks up where I am in Spotify with no issues. Whether via carplay or connecting via Apple's Car integration.

That said, I have had this issue when connecting an iPhone to a '11 truck via USB. It tries to treat it like an iPod, and consume its default playlist (all songs in Music, sans shuffle).

So this is probably the bluetooth equivalent being done by the cars - treat it like an iPod that the entertainment center should be in charge of.

I believe what’s happening is that certain car stereos are programmed to basically send the “play” command as soon as a device is connected. From the phone’s perspective, it’s as if you had connected Bluetooth headphones and then pressed the “play/pause” button.

I say this because my iPhone never autoplays when connecting to any Bluetooth audio device except for my car stereo.

I agree it’s aggressive and should be able to be turned off, but it’s the car’s software, not the phone’s, that’s the problem.

Agree that a "play" command is being sent from vehicle. This autostarts Apple Music if nothing else is using the speaker.

This drives me crazy as I don't use Apple Music and I don't want to keep playing handful of songs I bought 15 years ago on iTunes. I've yet to find out how to disable this.

Delete the Apple Music app from your phone.

I don't have an iPhone. But at least on OSX I didn't find a clean way to remove Apple Music.

Every time I accidentally tap play on my bluetooth headset it opens Apple Music and asks me accept the ToS, which I happily reject. It's a daily thing for me because it's almost impossible to put my headphones on without triggering a play due to bad button placement.

You can try remapping the button. Not sure if it would work, but try: https://superuser.com/questions/554489/how-can-i-remap-a-pla...

Yep, I have it disabled. My main music apps are “Picky” and Bandcamp, and it works pretty well.

When they do start autoplaying in the car (Picky does it), it’s at least whatever I album I was last playing on the app.

Couldn't the phone provide an option to disable this on a per-device basis?

Sending the play command itself would be less of a problem if iOS wasn’t so completely opaque as to what “currently playing” or “default music app” means, but that distinction itself would require more clarity as to whether apps can be run in the background or not.

Why do you assume this was decided by Apple?

Because they're the ones programming iOS? Who else would decide it, it's not like iOS is an open source project

It's obviously the car. Otherwise you would have heard of this problem well before now.

Hmmm, what about these 10 or so comments of iPhone users with various cars?

It's quite clear that all those cars are sending a play command.

Yet, no negative opinions from android users.

The car may send the request to play, but the OS decides to play the same song again and again and again...

As others have already explained, the autoplay is because the car sends a "play" command as soon as the bluetooth connects.

From the auto manufacturer's perspective, this kinda "makes sense". Because that was the legacy behavior, pre-bluetooth. If you turn off your car with the radio playing, then the radio will start playing again the next time you crank up the car. If drivers didn't want that, then hey... they would have turned off the stereo before turning off their car. So it would be less confusing to carry forward that legacy behavior into this new thing.

The problem is, it's 10 years later now. The culture and the consumer expectations have shifted. Maybe (?) the radio-like behavior makes sense for older consumers in their 60's and up, who lived with radio for many years more than they've lived with bluetooth. But for the younger bluetooth-native consumers, it's generally pretty infuriating.

It's LONG past time for auto makers to stop this legacy behavior with bluetooth connections. Or at the very least, offer the option to disable it somewhere in a dashboard menu.

> If drivers didn't want that, then hey... they would have turned off the stereo before turning off their car.

There was a time of honey and milk where we could visualy inspect the power/volume nob before ignition and see if the radio was on or off. Maybe even turn the nob with a reassuring little feedback click.

I think the design is actually for us under 60, who got into the car listening to a podcast on earbuds, and want to continue listening as we drive off.

What I can't get over is that I can be driving the car for 3 minutes before the podcast I was just listening to will play in my car (which does not have this play command quirk).

Semi-related: I tried out Microsoft/Ford's SYNC system (voice commands for your car) in '08 and was upset that it didn't seem to support an option for "continue listening to podcast series X where I left off" ... like, the thing you would want to do all the time. (Item 5.)

http://blog.tyrannyofthemouse.com/2008/07/setting-sync-strai...

I wonder how much this person makes in royalties for a silent track.

Was (and maybe still is?) top of the charts

https://www.engadget.com/2017-08-10-silent-10-minute-song-it...

My car does this too! Except the first song in my library is A Christmas Festival by Boston Pops Orchestra.

The song has a dramatic opening, to say the least.

I use a jailbreak tweak for this: http://cydia.saurik.com/package/com.itortrix.stopplayin12/

Samir is brilliant. Talk about identifying a need and then solving it in the most efficient way possible.

That is the best workaround for a software problem, I've ever heard.

My dad added the song to the library, but it didn’t work, because he has a song called “A” [1] in his library and that one takes priority. It’s a family in-joke now.

[1] https://music.apple.com/gb/album/a/1316144097?i=1316144100

Same thing happens in my GFs Prius... So annoying we refer to it as an "aural assault". I can't help but think U2's release strategy was really negative publicity for them in the long run.

The general idea I think is that once you start the car, it just send a play command the moment it detects the connection.

And in theory it _can_ provide a really nice experience. For example I'm walking to my car listening to an audio book, the moment I start the car, BT is connecting to the phone and moves the audio playback from my AirPods to my car speaker without skipping a beat, its really impressive.

Additionally since I'm an Apple Music user, whenever I start the car, it just defaults to whatever's I've been listening to there, unless there was a book / podcast or even YouTube video playing before. Which is very often quite nice.

Now why apple just defaults to Apple Music, and not "your music player of choice a.k.a. Spotify" is questionable, and why the automatic play is also not configurable is beyond me.

Just wanted to give my 2c how this can lead to a good XP.

My car (mazda 3) does this where it just sends the play command as soon as the phone (pixel) connects. But it just continues playing whatever I was last listening to, so it's always something different. Kinda nice.

My fathers android does the same thing with YouTube music

> Now why apple just defaults to Apple Music, and not "your music player of choice

I think this should be obvious, they want you further into the ecosystem.

If every morning when you get into your car your iPhone starts playing Apple Music, you're more likely to switch to Apple Music for all of your listening than to get another phone.

> …since I'm an Apple Music user, whenever I start the car, it just defaults to whatever's I've been listening to there… […] Now why apple just defaults to Apple Music, and not "your music player of choice a.k.a. Spotify" is questionable…

As you noted, it continues playing whatever you were playing in whatever app you were using, with no preference for Apple Music (I'm also a Music subscriber). If you were playing something with Spotify, that's what will continue to play.

I do wish it were configurable with contextual defaults. Too often, I start my car and my sleep sounds app continues to play "Airplane Interior".

Too often I start my car and it begins playing a podcast where I left off. With my kids in the car. I listen to a decent amount of stuff that isn't necessarily appropriate for kids. Makes for a fun scramble to hit that pause button.

And that pause button is never visible by default in CarPlay. Ya gotta hit the menu button in the bottom left a couple times.

you can set up shortcuts to automatically start playing something. I've got one that changes to music and maxes the audio volume when it connects to my car.

Doesn’t it also mean that whatever you were listening to yourself, and potentially stopped as you got company, is now playing in the speakers for everyone in the car just as you’re turning it the engine on and can also reach the stop button so fast?

I have experienced this with NWA's "Gangsta Gangsta". Another delightful thing is that the volume is system volume * speaker volume, so that if you turned up the system volume because you were, e.g., using a quiet pair of headphones, this is now blairing at a total unreasonable volume, perhaps even destroying your car's speakers.

This can include that porn you were watching in your mobile browser the night before. Ya know, theoretically.

I also had similar problems with iPhone and BT. Before it worked very good with an Android. What I've learned over time is that apple seems ti sabotage anything that is not apple. I had connection problems with my car, with my Sony BT headphones, with portable speaker. Alk that went away as I switched back to android.

I guess you're right. My bluetooth experience is Macbook, iPhone, Apple keyboard, Apple mouse and Apple headphones. Everything works extremely well. The thing that I like most is power indicator integrated with iOS and macOS. Allows me to charge those things before they run out of power. As long as you stay in the garden, things are smooth.

That's just... the BLE battery level service? AFAICT Windows does the same thing when you connect a BLE device that reports a battery.

I have no idea, I've read reviews from some bluetooth mouse and reviewer mentioned that macOS does not display its battery level. I thought that it's proprietary.

It is kinda funny, it was this behavior among others that made me switch from android to an iphone. I got so tired of BT shenanigans.

I do feel sympathy for the people still having trouble, but mine has been flawless. I do not, however, drive a Lexus.

My cars are all older, but my Android pairs up with a Kia Sportage almost immediately after starting the car. My wife's iPhone 11 sometimes takes several minutes. She ended up getting an adapter to connect audio to the 3.5mm jack.

Similar happens in my Mazda. No matter what I do, unless the source was actively changed to something like the radio before I shut my car off, as soon as I turn on the ignition it starts force playing a random song on my iPhone , Usually at a painfully high volume. Apple has bloomed Mazda and Mazda have found Apple.

It always tends to be a race between the Bluetooth connection in my ability to turn the volume down before it plays; even when it’s stopped, the moment I take a phone call it starts playing at maximum volume again after ending the call.

Not sure which version of the entertainment system you have but on my 2016 Mazda 3, it will try and play the last song you had playing on your phone. If it can't get the song to play it will then default to the other last audio device i.e. radio, XM, CD.

You should have separate volumes for music, navigation and hands-free in the entertainment system. Also, you can mute the sound using the volume knob while the warning text is displayed during key on.

My current solution is to make sure my CD player is the other last used device so that if the BT connection fails, I get sweet sweet Baroque music instead of FM blaring.

I have an iPhone SE (1st gen) and a 50 dollar bluetooth enabled radio in my car. It works flawlessly every time, I turn on ignition, the radio connects with my phone and I can hit play. When I turn off ignition the current song is paused and the radio disconnects.

That's an iPhone problem. All our Androids (OnePlus, Google, Samsung, LG) have been connecting perfectly well to my TomTom navigator. Only my iPhone Xs refuses to connect. It's a well documented problem with iPhones and TomTom for many years. Similar story with my AirPods which won't connect to my Thinkpad running Linux - while all other BT headphones (Bose, Sony, Anker) do connect.

Also the article seems to primarily refer to Apple products.

My iPhone doesn't have these problems with my nearly-a-decade-old Honda Odyssey's BT stereo system. Neither does my wife's iPhone, nor the couple others we've owned while owning this van. That thing (the stereo / "smart" entertainment system) has got plenty of "how the shit did this pass QC?" quirks, but none relating to its interaction with my phone.

It's the car's fault.

Apple's entire interfacing be those digital or physical are intentionally designed for incompatibility with devices from the not-Apple universe.

I... have not found that to be the case at all (my van's certainly not made by Apple, nor is its stock entertainment system—my BT headphones aren't Apple, my BT keyboards and mice aren't Apple, my monitor and electric piano aren't apple, et c.) but it could be I've just been lucky.

It's possible it's neither:

> but what I know is that I really fucking hate U2.

Back around 2010/2011, AT&T pushed a U2 album to Android phones in an OTA update as a system install, it couldn't be deleted.

You’ve been able to delete the Music app for a while. If the U2 album is the first thing to play, it sounds like you may not use the Music app anyway.

Just delete it and problem solved (though agree with the general rage caused by this promotion).

My girlfriend's phone automatically resumes in the middle of a podcast. Same spot, same podcast, every time. I had no idea how lucky we are.

Right? I thought it was annoying that No Such Thing as a Fish kicked on into the exact same spot every time I went for a drive. But that's a million times better than anything by U2 or whatever Songs of Innocence is.

James Keelaghan will take priority over U2. Ever time I step into my 2014 Hyundai Elantra I am greeted with Canadian folk music. Definitely a step up.

Would love if CarPlay would just work constantly. On my Ford remote start results in it not working 50% of the time. Regular start fails 10% of the time.

Solution is turn car off for 10 minutes or so. I assume some capacitor has to drain fully.

This is apparently just a known bug.

Not quite as bad, but my Subaru is similar. If I'm in the car with my phone when it turns on it connects immediately almost every time.

If I remote start the car and then go out to it it probably connects about 1/5 times. Another 1/5 I can go into the bluetooth settings and manually initiate the connection and it'll work. But a full 60% of the time I have to turn the entire car off and on again for the bluetooth to finally sort its shit out. Thankfully no 10 minute wait necessary.

My mom's Subaru... has that god awful 15 inch monitor in the middle of the dash. Every time a phone call comes in, the music starts playing WHILE ON THE PHONE CALL.

And I thought, wow, this huge-ass monitor will be awesome for Android Auto and CarPlay. NOPE, only like 1/3 of the screen gets used for CarPlay. This little tiny 7 inch section of the screen. Total joke these infotainment systems are. Give me back my goddamn double-din hole in the dashboard!

I have a Honda and if I plug my iPhone into it's USB port it will auto-play the first song in my Apple Music/iTunes library which for a long time was "A-YO" by Lady Gaga. The opening lyric of "heeerreee we gooo" was amusing and appropriate for a while until it got incredibly annoying once I switched to Spotify.

I think the issue lies somewhere between Honda's implementation of the iPod standard and some weird backwards compatibility the iPhone is providing. When in this "iPod-like" mode I lost functionality like queuing songs via the Play Next option. It just disappeared from the long-press menu on songs.

Anyways I just bought a Bluetooth adapter from Amazon and plugged that into the aux input. Waaaay better

You may enjoy this episode of Reply All: https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/76hel39

I thought your anecdote was satire until the very last word. That was a great ride.

That’s a hilarious writeup.

My car starts blasting the FM radio if I don’t plug my iPhone in. I have never and will never willingly listen to FM radio, and yet, Ford has decided that it must be played at full volume an uncertain interval after the car is started. It’s caused me enough anxiety that I’ll be buying a different car next time.

It's definitely a Lexus problem. In a ford I think it just continues playing whatever the last played song was.

I also put songs on my iphone instead of using apple music, so I suppose it could be an issue with that service although idk why it would behave way differently from playing local files.

Only in fords with sync 3 or later. sync 2 is garbage

My car does this too when I plug my phone into USB, it starts playing the first song alphabetically no matter what. I became so sick of this I just have a long empty track with tildes in the name in my library. I would assume bluetooth would do the same but my car's bluetooth has been off since it came out of the facotory and I will never turn it on.

Another obnoxious design is if i want to start a playlist I can't just start playing it - It gives me the playlist sorted alphatically. Once i start playing a track it then sorts them by playlist order. Literally the point of a playlist is the order which you choose your songs to be in. Same solution works, put a short empty file with a tilde, 0 or underscore. So when I pick a playlist I just have to press enter twice and not deal with the alphabetically sorted list.

This trick also works when i try to navigate with google maps and my phone is plugged into usb. I wont get the navigation voice if a music track is NOT playing - again I go to my silent track and play it in order to get the navigation voice when my phone plugged into USB

> it shows me a couple of half-naked shaved guys hugging each other

Well, since nobody has ever read the spec in its entirety, it's completely possible that those guys are actually part of the specification, somewhere around page 5000 or so.

This is a weird one. I also have a Lexus, but from the year before they put carplay in. I did an aftermarket carplay upgrade, and I've never had any sort of issue like this with Bluetooth on my wife's iphone before...

That sucks. For what it's worth, "old-school" Toyota headunits with Bluetooth seem to work quite well (for Bluetooth). The ones that came with graphics/more complex CPUs seem to have gone downhill.

You can try to install an older model OEM headunit in your car to see if that fixes your Bluetooth. Certain models had really decent sound, are cheap when found used online, and should have the same connectors in the back (depending on speaker options). Here's an example of replacing your headunit: https://thetrackahead.com/projects/2003-toyota-4runner/the-u...

Also, I think Auto-play is a setting in the headunit, in mine anyway. If not, your phone may have a setting for it.

I'm not sure if comedy was the intent here, but I laughed a lot.

I guess you've gotta ask yourself... cui Bono?

this EXACT thing happens on my toyota but it's even more annoying because i'll be using my phone and we stop for gas and then when we turn the car back on U2 starts playing from my wife's phone

Oh my gosh, I didn't know where this was going with the half-naked shaved guys until you said, "Songs of Innocence"... and immediately it became a shared experience. If I could somehow tell my phone, "NEVER play Apple Music, always defer to Spotify if you have to auto-play anything", I'd do it in a heartbeat.

This is the real issue. Apple Music being a firm default. The U2 thing can be deleted from Apple Music. It exists because it was released that way a decade or so ago. It got pushed into everyone’s playlist as a purchased album, but can be deleted. I have no music at all in Apple Music for this reason. I prefer silence over this.

My problem is that I have to turn off BT on my phone for various reasons. Yet, no matter what, when I start my car it turns back on my phones BT setting and reconnects. (Eg. If my wife is playing her phone, then we stop for an errand, and get back in it always goes back to my phone.)

You can delete Apple Music from your phone, but that can break BT Audio playback on some devices.

Nice, thanks! I'm going to try that. I feel like I tried once and it used to be undeletable; probably long time ago.

It's why I have NO music on iTunes.

Did you hear that, Apple? I will never give you money for music, ever ever, as long as connecting to a car == play iTunes.

You can uninstall Apple Music. At least there's that saving grace.

An Apple problem. Their car connectivity follows the idea that configuration is evil and there's only one way to do a thing.

This isn't correct. Apple Car Play does not play anything automatically on start. It's the Lexus that is telling the device to begin playing music.

If you don't use Apple Music, it'll pick the only album you have -- which for many people is the U2 album Apple added to everyone's library for free many years ago.

I stand corrected but also want to note that I've seen many car models do this.

Apple has done this for years and my take is they are tying to increase usage and relevance of Apple Music.

For example I only use Spotify in my car but it will not connect correctly unless I download and have Apple Music installed.

Just bad move by apple in my opinion. Just connect by bluetooth and let me use any app want.

Super dumb that you have to put a song labeled A in your song library that is just silence to get around this.

It’s the car that auto plays the first thing. My old car used to do the same thing. New car no longer does this.

The first song in my library was a song by Killswitch Engage. A very loud song with lots of screaming. Ultimately I deleted the Music app from my iPhone to solve the auto play problem. I used Spotify for music at the time (now VLC). Deleting the app to solve the problem definitely feels like an extreme solution to a problem which shouldn’t be a problem at all!

But I have worse Bluetooth problems. My favorite Bluetooth headphones never want to connect the first few times. Trying to connect in this error state turns them off, for some reason. So I have this horrible dance where I turn them on and attempt to connect. My connecting device spins for a while. The headphones have silently turned off. I turn them back in and repeat. After about four times, they will usually connect. But sometimes I have to delete the connection and re-pair. Sometimes I have to turn off Bluetooth on other nearby devices to get it to work. And sometimes when connected, even near my source, the connection just goes silent.

I wish Bluetooth could behave a bit more like FM radio. A source is streaming out audio and my headphones can tune to that secure channel and get the stream. Headphones can tune between channels easily. This would solve my connection woes.

Unfortunately, deleting Music app turns off iPod integration, and now I’m unable to use other media players on my car over USB

Oh no! Didn’t happen to me in my Honda with my iPhone 7, but I guess every car is different.

If you use Apple Music, it has the additional benefit of wasting all of your data and battery every time you turn your car on since it streams your entire library on shuffle.

I thought I was clever and could fix this problem by using the iPhone’s “Shortcuts” app “Automation” feature to pause after connecting to the car’s Bluetooth. But for some reason the thing called “automation” requires manual fucking interaction every time. Yes, that’s right you have to click on a prompt to run the “automation” shortcut.

Turns out it’s a limitation of the “on connect to Bluetooth” trigger for “security” yet this isn’t explained anywhere. Because if someone stole my phone and car they might be able to... pause the music? Thanks Apple.

That's so hilarious considering you've probably been putting up with that for years and years while there's a ton of solutions. Here's a fun fact about U2: If Bono himself is in his own car driving around and it comes on he has to change the channel. Doesn't like hearing his own voice (Not macho enough), nor the band name. [1] I also heard the same thing about Phil Collins.

[1] https://www.thedailybeast.com/bono-says-he-switches-the-radi...

I generally hate Bluetooth. But, your post is golden. I'm sorry you are dealing with it.

    I don't know if it's a Lexus problem, or an Apple problem, 
    but what I know is that I really fucking hate U2.

My best understanding is that this is a Lexus problem, because on the occasions I have connected wireless speakers to my iPhones this has never happened.

CarPlay solves some of these problems and is maybe not perfect, but generally a far saner UX experience than what car companies have managed to cook up over the years.

I would assume similar things are true for Android Auto. Like, not perfect, but far saner than whatever the heck the UX wizards at Toyota brewed up.

The iPhone forces Apple Music to self-start if nothing else is using the speaker when you auto-connect with a car Bluetooth system.

Kind of like how Windows 10 forces you to use Microsoft Edge as a pdf viewer no matter how many times you switch to Adobe or how many settings you change.

Apple doesn't want you to forget about Apple Music.

> auto-magically restores itself somehow iCloud. Apple Music needs something to play.

This continues to happen in our 2012 Toyota Prius. U2 song “California” from the Sounds of Innocence soundtrack. Don’t remember ever downloading it.

Tip: remove the Apple Music app from your iPhone and it won't play anything.

On my old car, deleting the music app prevented the shitty radio from detecting that my “iPod” (aka iPhone) was even connected, so I had to have the Music app installed even if I wanted to play Spotify.

>but what I know is that I really fucking hate U2.

We can agree on that!

This is primarily a problem with car manufacturers designing terrible user interfaces.

Audi does a reasonably good job. I wouldn’t buy a Toyota or Ford because they tend to be terrible.

At this point, if a car doesn’t let me default to Car Play automatically, I’m not buying it. And if every time I turn on the car it lectures me about driving safely, I’m really not buying it.

infotainment systems built by car manufacturers are just absolutely dreadful from an end user perspective. I have had a similar experience in the past (albeit much less of an annoyance) but was fixed 3 years later in a firmware update while randomly visiting the dealership for warranty items.

android auto/apple car play are an absolute dream to use on the other hand. If I buy another car, it will be a must have (rather than an aftermarket accessory)

It‘s nearly as good as my story. I‘m walking with airpods past my car. The car detects my keys and turns on bluetooth, iPhone connects and thinks it's better to send audio to my car instead of the airpods in my ears. A long and painful connection loss is the result while I walk away and hope that my airpods reconnect. There is no way to set a presedence or similar. These days it‘s even better, the iPhone also switches to car mode and forces me to disable it first.

Can you turn BT off and connect via a chord?

That's what I do with my car. Sure it's a little annoying to use a chord rather than using BT but at least you wouldn't have it auto-playing when you start the car.

I have an Android and when we had the BT on the radio on, it would auto-connect to my phone and start playing whatever the last thing I was listening to on Spotify. If I stopped Spotify, my phone's audio output would still remain connected to the radio, even if my gf was connected with her iPhone and the system had switched to iOS CarPlay (the radio had both Android Auto and iOS CarPlay)

We finally figured out we could disable BT via the radio's setting and that solved our problem. We actually prefer connecting via a cable anyways.

I have never, not once ever, wanted something to autoplay when a bluetooth device connected.

Nowadays you can delete (really, hide), the U2 album. If you delete all remaining music in iTunes, then the U2 album gets restored, and you have to re-delete it.

Other problems:

  - the darned thing is eager to connect
  
    My wife gets in the car to go somewhere,
    turns it on, my phone connects, and I lose
    audio / she steals my audio.
  
  - the darned thing connects even if the car's
    audio is off
  
    get in, use a maps app, can't hear anything,
    ohhh, right!
  
  - carplay uses wifi, iphone fails to route
    properly
  
    can't use carplay
  
  - anyways, carplay is super sensitive to EM
    noise
  
    be me, be driving w/ navigation on, go through
    high-traffic, EM noisy area, lose navigation
    -- distracting!  dangerous!

Solution:

  - refuse to connect to the car's wifi
  
  - that means no carplay
  
  - that means no distractions
  
  - delete the U2 album
  
  - delete it harder
  
  - turn off bluetooth every morning
  
  - that means no more stolen audio when
    someone drives the family cars

> but what I know is that I really fucking hate U2.

I can't imagine not hating U2.

> but what I know is that I really fucking hate U2.

I bet your comment has hundreds of upvotes already.

I ended up uninstalling Apple Music because it would similarly play the same song (I forget what it was) at surprising times.

Spotify doesn't give me the same problem.

I had to laugh so hard at this as I’m literally sitting in my Tesla listening to Songs of Innocence that autoplayed on my iPhone without my explicit consent for exactly the reason you mention. I swear I have Stockholm Syndrome because the album that Apple forced my to download is slowly growing on me.

We had the same problem in our 2016 Outback until the head unit died. The only thing we really miss about it is the backup camera; but we can live without that, and apparently the stereo, as a fair price for being free of bluetooth audio hell.

Not sure if it matters, but many aftermarket head units can have the reversing camera connected to restore factory functionality, I believe the average HN reader could do this.

Edit: https://motoristcare.com/how-to-connect-backup-camera-to-hea...

Is a pretty good example on how to complete this.

Thanks for the tip!

This happens to me every time I enter my car while on a Zoom call; the bluetooth or even the hardwired headset would switch to the car speakers and the call gets unmuted. I need to scramble to mute the call while my daughter is screaming at the back. Can't get it to work.

This is one of those stories you read where you thought it was just you but then realize it’s happening to a bunch of people

I ended up just uninstalling Apple Music so that music wouldn't autoplay in my Prius. Absolutely ridiculous that that was the only way.

My android didn’t have this problem. When i switched to iPhone it did. A quick Google search will give you similar results.

I believe this is in Apple problem.

I have a 2010 Toyota Prius, and I've intermittently had the exact same problem. Except my song was "Oogum Boogum" - fortunately it was the Alex Chilton version which I still like.

My latest struggle is that my phone now plays audio at 50% speed through my cars bluetooth. Spotify, Youtube, etc - it doesn't matter. It seems to play 50% speed super low pitch for about a second and then skip forward in the audio stream about a second. The only thing that remedies this is to reboot my car.

Wow definitely bringing back repressed memories for me - my audi s8 for whatever reason would refuse to stream via a2dp unless I had some music actually on the phone, in which case it would auto play said music after some random delay. So my brilliant solution was a 5 second silent mp3 loaded on my phone - it would keep the bt gods happy and i could switch to a2dp at my leisure. This was perfect, until someone decided to force deploy the same half naked men on my phone.

Buy or load a $0.99 silent song that starts with the letter A and you won’t have this problem any more.

I tried to learn why BT is still somehow painful to use, and the article basically does not have an answer.

My take from comments here and my experience:

- Makers of BT devices can't agree on many important common things (easy discovery / pairing mode, priority, etc), and have little incentive to seek agreement. It's like phone chargers before USB.

- Makers of BT devices tend to cut corners and/or add not-entirely-standard features. They "save" on writing a good driver. They care little if devices made by their competition don't work reliably or at all in the mix. (And even sometimes their own!)

- RF noise makes radio interfaces like BT inherently not always reliable. But the user never notices when a small EM storm rages nearby, for the user it's just "damn bluetooth glitches for no reason at all".

They do agree on an awful lot of stuff, but the tools provided by the Bluetooth guys aged very poorly (i.e. their tools for generating GATT interfaces as C code is absolute garbage, full of holes and has a built-in buffer overflow capability).

The one thing nobody seems to do is stick to the standards provided, because they simply aren't broad enough for the creative stuff that people do with Bluetooth and Bluetooth LE. Most of us working in this space have some cack-handed way to advertise data without connecting because (for example) most of the connections to Bluetooth LE devices involve you having to do device discovery, even if you are connecting to 500 of the same damn device.

Also, the bluetooth library in Android started out terrible and didn't improve despite being replaced, the Bluetooth chips in most cheap phones are also rubbish and fail when you exceed their undocumented number of connections, often requiring a reboot of the device etc.

In short: You can sheet a lot of the problems back to an ill thought out spec and bluetooth chips in things like phones that just plain suck.

Things like RF interference - I just don't know. Sometimes there is just a heap more bluetooth traffic around than anybody knows about. Packet sniffers are relatively cheap, it's interesting to fire one up in a busy office and see how many bluetooth packet collisions there are (hint: it's a lot). Blame RF storms or whatever but it's more likely to be something advertising a lot and spamming the spectrum.

Something I’ve noticed is that Bluetooth breaks down around major construction sites, like infrastructure projects. It’s very strange, I wonder if they have some kind of high power BT transmitters for some reason.

Any high power 2.4ghz transmitter will destroy Bluetooth communication, this is all in the same 2.45ghz ISM band. I guess they use some devices communicating on that band.

They certainly do - walkie-talkies!

Edit: Yes, they do exist - you can google this. But on reflection, a commenter below is probably right that it's more likely wireless security cameras, given typical site requirements (range, penetration depth)

Handhelds are usually UHF - in the 446MHz range. Do you know of personal radios that operate in the 2.4GHz unlicensed spectrum?

Drones (FPV), baby monitors to name two. I’m sure there’s more.

I don't think they use the 2.4 GHz band.

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

On construction sites, I'd suspect that the problem is an awful lot of EM noise from machinery that should have been replaced or at least maintained decades ago, like mechanic spark generators/distributors from simple combustion motors or brushed electric motors (e.g. in drills).

Additionally, remote controls for cranes, concrete pumps and other machinery may be the cause, depending on the frequency bands these use. Here in Germany, it's all 433/869 MHz from what I remember from sites I worked at, but no idea about the US.

It may be motor noise but anecdotal evidence suggests that it happens even when the machines are off, eg on national holidays. Some kind of transmitter seems likely though. I know one construction site had analog video signals in the 2.4 Ghz range for their surveillance cameras. I accidentally found out when I did a range sweep on a video receiver for other reasons.

PS I am in northern Europe, not the US.

> The one thing nobody seems to do is stick to the standards provided, because they simply aren't broad enough for the creative stuff that people do with Bluetooth and Bluetooth LE.

Yeah, I've been working with BLE now for clients for 3 years, it seems like most people think of their devices as little CRUD servers (unless you're doing genuine pairing with constant data streams). BLE would be much better using a simple REST model than the GATT table model.

> Also, the bluetooth library in Android started out terrible and didn't improve despite being replaced

One thing I'll give Apple credit for is having a very solid bluetooth stack. We've had only a handful of BLE connection failures on our testers apples devices over the past 3 years, whereas on android test devices we get at least one connection failure DAILY that interrupts test cases from running. Furthermore Android devices just reach a point of critical failure where you need to just restart the device to resume BLE.

Bluetooth devices will "frequency hop" in a schedule to which they both agree. Noisy frequencies that result in lost data will be removed from their scheduled shifts.

There are only a maximum of 79 channels switched 1600/second, and if there is more noise than not, then the data rate will suffer, although updated modulation standards might compensate, if implemented.

> It's like phone chargers before USB.

No, it's like phone chargers before EU regulators stepped in.

Everyone except Apple was already on USB.

And even in the pre-smartphone days, phone chargers always worked reliably. Phone charging is and was the complete opposite of what bluetooth is today.

They most certainly were not: https://www.engadget.com/2009-06-29-nokia-apple-rim-and-othe...

Ok, so since 2009 everyone except Apple was on USB.

No, because there were many other manufacturers.

2009 is when the EU stepped in. They didn't have to set it into law because the industry agreed to it voluntarily except for Apple.

"industry agreed to it voluntarily" China before eu(~1-2y) forces usb chargers. and industry had choice, make special version for them or not.

Thankfully that EU initiative failed. They wanted the industry to adopt micro-usb as the standard, which would have sucked and would be worse than the situation today

How was getting all manufacturers to agree a "failure"?

The EU charger mandate required USB if USB was sufficient, IIRC apple managed to continue using lightning connectors b arguing that USB standards of the time where not enough for the iPhone.

Is the situation today not 'everything is micro-usb, usb-c, or apple'?

> Everyone except Apple was already on USB.

My old box of chargers begs to differ

That was my first association as well. This seems like a much much harder thing to regulate though...

For USB chargers industry had come up with a good solution but market failure meant there was no incentive to adopt it. That's text book regulation stuff. Here there doesn't seem to be a good proven solution out there that you could mandate...

there's no need to mandate it, but the EU could spend a few ebucks on consumer appliances interoperability testing, and simply shaming those that suck. (or at least put out a statement about the problem, which could be simply lack of incentives for cooperation on solving the issues. or maybe too much backward compatibility preventing the whole ecosystem to move to more robust BT standards, etc.)

for example just a few days (week) ago there was a thread about how Logitech wireless stuff and wireless headphones interfere.

sure, it's hard to point to a singular root cause (Logitech emits too much, or headphones are ill-designed and BT is simply not the right tool for this because this or that)

but there are clear software (firmware, drivers, kernel) failures, that stem from simply releasing absolute garbage. (and every layer just coding for the happy path.)

Logitech bluetooth wireless and apple airpods specifically. Logitech over their own wireless protocol, or any other set of wireless headphones is fine.

I have three sets of bluetooth headphones that I use on a rotating basis daily with my logitech bluetooth mouse and keyboard, and they are all dead reliable... well dead reliable for bluetooth devices

>No, it's like phone chargers before EU regulators stepped in.

When did this happen ?

2009

More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_external_power_supply

I for one will be very happy when the EU forces my US iPhone to drop lightning.

/Opinion: "Makers of BT devices can't agree on many important common things (easy discovery / pairing mode, priority, etc)." => I think it is not the creators of the devices (peripherals), it is in my expierence the SmartPhones (Apple/Google) => iOS won't let you discover BLE Devices which have only generic or costum services/characteristics => iOS will hide parts of advertisment/discovery data from app developers => iOS won't let you know if a device is bonded/paired via API => on iOS if you want to initiate bonding, you have to initiate it from the peripheral => Android sometimes "forgets" keys of paired devices => Android sometimes scrambles data from characteristic notify() => Android sometimes "misses" characteristic writes (ratio 1:1000000) This is just what I could come up with in a minute. I develop both FW for peripherals and Apps, so my 2 cents => It's almost never the peripheral/fw and most time the Smartphone => RF noise is (almost) never an issue, glitchses come from phones

Why is this written with slashes and fat arrows?

> user never notices when a small EM storm rages nearby

What's the easiest way to detect this? Is this something an average smartphone can detect with the right app? Or would I need to buy specific hardware to detect it?

We just learned that any Bluetooth device can detect it easily.

Trying to understand bluetooth's awfulness is a dead-end. I tried. I thought, "yea, you're nerdy enough to read the tech specs, it will be boring but after an hour you'll understand and your bluetooth keyboard will pair every time instead of 85% of times". Nope.

Also, head units generally don't get updates and the lifespan of a car is quite long. The phones that we are using now didn't always exist when the head unit was made.

BT device makers are also coming in a slightly less explored field and have to make UX decisions that might not have clear answers yet.

For instance some BT headset have only a few buttons, and the play/pause button does also redial the last connected phone number depending on the phone’s state. I’m sure someone thought this feature made a ton of sense and really helps them in their day to day life, while I hate with the heat of a thousand suns.

I’d expect it takes us a few more years to come to a consensus on how to cleanly solve this kind of diverging views.

Config files/settings.

This is of course part of the puzzle, and that behavior having no config is probably a sign it's still not mature enough.

I'll add that the specs are so bad that it's not commercially viable to try to fully understand them before building and launching BT products and middleware.

Most of it is the Bluetooth SIGs fault. It has got away from them. It reminds me of SMTP or HTTP, it is so useful that people couldn't wait for things and just implemented and added whatever they wanted. No certification is required just a registration for the logo so it has made it the wild wild west. Additionally being stuck in the "free" frequencies means that it has no ability to deliver quality in a noisy room.

The specs (there are multiple) are enormous and you honestly have zero hope of fully implementing one from scratch. It's thousands and thousands of pages covering everything from the physical layer all the way up to deep application-layer integration. Manufacturers rely on support libraries and hardware that does most of the work, and until only the last few years most of those on the whole have been total garbage (again because the specs are so massive it just costs too much time and effort to implement them). I don't expect anything less than a team of 10 people all with a mix of senior hardware and software/firmware experience could fully implement bluetooth & bluetooth LE from scratch in less than a year.

Let me pass on to you some ancient Chinese... er, German engineering wisdom: He who understands wireless communication uses cables.

Just turn on the emotors and watch all those connections scramble.

Any time a relative asks me which printer they should buy, I tell them to get the cheapest Brother laser printer they can find without wifi. I mostly do this to save myself support calls, but it's also the printer I use in my own house.

Brother printers have regressed as well. See this post: Brother printers now locking out non-OEM paraphernalia

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131

I bought a wireless HP printer.

Besides the fact that I never printed anything from my phone.

It literally required reinstallation (not restart!) to print again, every time, on Windows.

It needed an HP account to be able to scan. Locally.

I just chucked it out and got a USB Brother.

> It needed an HP account to be able to scan.

You can use Windows apps to do the scanning without creating an HP account.

Yeah my mom has HP wireless printers and I always uninstalled the HP software and it works every time without having to install anything else.

Maybe because I’m used to the MacOS world but that should be the default first thing you try is do nothing and let the OS handle it.

Some new HP printers lock scanning on the printer side unless you sign in with an account, any printer with an e at the end of the model number won't even let you print to 9100 without an account.

A (very) recent HP inkjet firmware update just broke all inkjet cartridges older than about 18 months. Including cartridges from HP.

Neither the on-device or OS mediated error messages explained this. I only figured it out from other angry users on reddit.

How was my mom supposed to have figured this out? She didn't know that her printer had updated itself a few days earlier. She doesn't even know what a firmware update is.

In a world of class action suites over batteries, chargers, keyboards, etc., why isn't HP being sued?

I have the wifi laser printer from Brother - works fine wirelessly with Ubuntu.

A few years ago this is what I did. Got the cheapest Brother laser printer. Happened to have wifi, but managed to disable it. It's been working solid via cables for years.

I bought the cheapest Brother laser printer in the early 2010s because someone on a forum gave me this same advice. It has worked without issue ever since.

A few years ago I plugged it into a Raspberry Pi so that I could share it via CUPS to all the family's PCs. This has also worked almost without problems (the exception being it had to be reconfigured a few times on my wife's Apple laptop). A year or so later I realised that while connected to wifi I can print from my Android phone. The phone found the CUPS server and the printer without me doing anything at all and it has never gone wrong.

I kinda did this. Cheapest Brother printer, but with WiFi. Which is exclusively how we use it. Been flawless, printing from windows laptops, macbooks, iphones...

I have one and connected via USB. Works well.

That’s too much trouble. I like being able to print from any laptop, my phones or iPad.

Sadly, apple started a 3.5mm free future and others were happy to jump on that horrible wagon (as well as soapbar sexy designs which you cannot hold without a case, but that's another lovable rant :).

But yeah. My computers have Ethernet whenever they can. That alone saves what little hair I have left.

Maybe Apple had a sinister plan here... First, they make all of their own Apple gear's bluetooth work really well with other Apple gear (which they generally do). Then get rid of the cables, and everyone else will copy Apple because that seems to be what other companies do. But everyone else's bluetooth implementations suck (which they generally do), so people think that Android/Samsung/etc aren't as good as Apple which Just Works(TM), thus slowly exacting their revenge on the copycats and/or steering more sales towards Apple.

> which they generally do Every delayed zoom meeting I’ve been in due to AirPods not pairing correctly would disagree with that sentiment.

I dunno, people here report having problems with iPhones pairing to their cars. I never had a problem with Android phones pairing with my car. Or with my soundcores. As matter of fact, it works so much better, that even though my phone still has a 3.5mm, never thought I would have to use it and would be quite ok if my next phone came without. Back before I had my first soundcores I would always be annoyed with the cord rubbing against my cloths whenever I move, creating noise. And not having to deal with the cord when I put them on/off, etc. It is such a quality of live improvement, easily one of the biggest improvements in recent years.

I think Bluetooth is a different experience for different people.

Couple of questions that may help bridge the gap:

Do you have other people with cell phones who regularly pair to your car? (this is my pain point - I am getting ready to take kids to school, but minivan pairs to my wife's phone at home; or conversely, my wife is going out for groceries, but instead of pairing to her phone that's in the car, minivan pairs up with my phone 30ft and one floor up, and TAKES OVER my own bluetooth headset, so now she's hearing my work call in the car as she drives away, and everybody on the call is hearing my screaming kids, while I'm wondering why everybody has turned silent :P ).

Do other people pair with your soundcores; do you have multitude of headphones you pair with? (I have multiple content devices - work iPhone, personal galaxy note, and couple of tablets; conversely, I have a work boom headset as well as entertainment headphones; and then we throw my wife into the mix. Neither Android nor iPhone make us feel easily in control of what's happening).

What's your experience pairing with friends' cars, and home entertainment devices via bluetooth, or a net-new device? (it's a whole other fun party drinking game trying to join to another person's home devices! Devices may have meaningless names that are not indicative of what they are, or they may need to be in some special mode to be discoverable, some may require pins some don't, it's hard to confirm which side should initiate, some will show as an address until you click them at which point they'll become a name but you realize you took over neighbour's movie, etc etc etc! :)

If there's a way to create a priority list, a automatic connect or manual connect list, or create any kind of sophisticated rules for Bluetooth, I'm not aware of it.

Oh, I've got problems pairing my Android phone to my car.

Well, not "pairing", but like 4 out of 5 times, the phone thinks it's outputting to the car's bluetooth, but is actually playing out of the phone speaker, and doesn't start outputting to the car until I switch the output from bluetooth to phone speaker and back again. And for some reason the Spotify app never implemented the thingie that lets you switch outputs, so I have to switch to a podcast app, do this little dance (treating my wife and kid to a little snippet of podcast), and then go to Spotify and play music.

My point is that Apple products work (almost) perfectly with other Apple products. Apple don't make cars (yet); the market there that they probably care about is probably handled by CarPlay.

I'm honestly shocked how good of a job Apple did on their AirPods. When they first came out I thought it was an expensive gimmick, but when they released the Pro's I bought in and they became my favorite Apple product of all time.

At least for me, the reliability of the connection as well as being able to do a quick "handoff" from my iPhone to my Mac to take a call is a gamechanger. Also the spacial audio feature is probably one of the best overlooked features of the AirPods, the depth of sound you get with it enabled is truly incredible given what you are listening on. When I discovered that feature I pretty much re-listened to my entire Spotify library, listening to songs I've heard hundreds of times before, I picked up sounds I never heard previously.

For $200, what a freaking package.

I've heard consistent excellent things about AirPods in terms of connectivity and listening experience for the owner :)

Let me be the annoying one to say that they can negatively contribute to a team meeting experience (which fair enough, isn't what they're designed for - but what many people use them for, not just in a pinch but as primary day-long mechanism).

There's only so much software can do to mitigate the fact it's an omnidirectional microphone far away from one's mouth, as opposed to focused microphone 2cm from mouth. E.g. literally yesterday, we thought our colleague was in a hurricane in Nova Scotia. Turns out, after we eventually asked and we were all nerdy enough to pause and troubleshoot :P, he was at home during a heat wave; his line was quiet when he didn't speak, but when he spoke, the A/C noise came overwhelmingly from his line; making it appear he's experiencing massive intermittent gusts. With airpods (or any other non-boom microphone - Airpods indeed are best of the breed, this is not their issue), we always know if person is walking/moving (wind noise going over microphone while they're speaking), or in a car, or eating, or around kids, etc. With the Plantronics boom headset (which is our team's go-to set, there's another good Jabra one I think a few of us use), nobody has any idea if we are in the car, or walking, or quietly in the office. That boom microphone makes a massive, massive hardware physical difference that software struggles to overcome without penalty somewhere in the chain.

The worst technology I've encountered in recent years is: Other People's AirPod.

When paired with a windows PC or older Mac, Airpods use an older or lower quality audio codec that sounds pretty poor for those hearing you speak.

Caveat: I don't know what I'm talking about, technically.

This is basically all bluetooth headsets though. Try using any of them to play games on Windows while using in-game chat. The audio drops down to tape recorder quality because there isn't enough bandwidth.

I agree with the mic issue and it's not ideal, though it eventually just gets down to what you can and can't do with the hardware. I will say for me at least this is non-issue since all calls are taken in my quiet apartment.

Agreed; this is the tradeoff inherent in that hardware design; by all accounts, Airpods are the superior offering in that space.

I keep a cheap set of wired headphones to use when I call people. I've used them when calling tech support on site somewhere. I probably looked dumb in the airpods age, but they work so much better than anything else. I'd use headphones from the $5 store before real airpods.

Friend has airpods, they have problems during phone calls pretty frequently. Maybe better than vanilla bluetooth, but still there are issues.

I worked on a wireless network management product for ~5 years, integrating with multiple vendors, and I'm putting fiber in my walls later this year

"If you can get a wired, use a wire.." Tech support advice I've given for at least a decade. It's amazing how often people end up being concerts to my way of thinking after a little bit. Wires don't have interference, they don't randomly not work (or much less, I have seen that). They have way more individual bandwidth. They are better in every way.

I thought android auto was going to be cool. I've gotten to use it with my flagship phones and several late model rentals. Every single time, it will disconnect upon occasion while driving (and using nav) forcing me to unplug replug. I haven't waited long enough to see if it could recover ina minute or so.

When I enable it by plugging my phone into the car, it tells me it is going to enable Bluetooth.

That is like getting high speed internet only to have the modem do dialup.

Does anyone know why a forced wired protocol requires substandard wireless connectivity?

Bluetooth is absolute garbage, I hate it with a passion even if overall it works in 90% of cases.

Just the other day I was connecting my phone to a mobile speaker in the garden. The phone is an inch away from it. Still doesn't connect, just a spinner that times out after a minute with "connection failed".

Why does it fail? Who knows. It might work tomorrow. Or on another phone. Or when the weather is different. What on earth are two devices directly next to each other doing for 60 seconds?

I also have a few BT controlled LEDs where from an app I control brightness and color temperature. My phone is always in range, but the BT connection just doesn't sustain itself. It intermittently drops after which I need to redo the setup again on every single light.

I'm sure the reason is "low power" or "interference" but that doesn't mean anything. It's not actionable. It's fragile and unreliable tech.

I feel the same way - it's so interesting how the lack of a mental model causes such frustration! There's perfectly well-understood metaphors for network availability ("how many bars" and so on). I wonder why Bluetooth doesn't use them or create its own, and instead just fails to work.

> perfectly well-understood metaphors for network availability ("how many bars" ...

ACKHSHUALLY, "how many bars" is well known to be very bad indication of network connectivity. Yes, if you have one bar it's probably worse than five, but for example "my phone show five bars and yours only three" is very wrong way to judge -- there's no relative measure.

That's true, but at least the mental model roughly holds. Somebody who is barely technologically literate will understand that "more bars" is better, and that's exactly what the abstraction should do. Communicate something simply at the cost of precision.

We could have the segments of the ᛒ turn on or off based on signal strength

Often it's a problem with firmware/driver implementation in one of those devices (like speaker), resulting from poor development processes.

Complexity of Bluetooth protocol, multiplied by the speaker price (assuming you have not the really expensive ones) does not help as well.

You could actually have the devices too close (overdriving the RF receiver). Or the two antennas are oriented with their null directions facing each other.

My go-to method to get difficult BT gear to pair is to place both devices in the microwave and shut the door. The microwave is a faraday cage for 2.4Ghz, so it removes interference as a potential problem. If it still fails, you can turn on the microwave and enjoy a light show at least.

People seem to complain a lot about Bluetooth, yet I owned dozens of devices of all vintages and they all played nicely with each other, except for a cheapo pair of MPow earbuds off Amazon.

I even managed to transfer old school photos off my ancient 2003 NEC flip phone to my current Android phone even though the former uses Bluetooth 1.1 and the latter 5.1. I also fondly remember using Bluetooth in school to transfer ringtones and wallpapers to that phone from my Windows XP PC, or to and from other kids' phones and it always worked.

Maybe I was really lucky, but for all its apparent faults Bluetooth has always served me well and I personally can't really fault it for its intended purpose.

As former SDR developer who dived into Bluetooth firmware at some point, I can only attribute the connectivity issues some Bluetooth devices have to just poor firmware design with insuficient testing, or most commonly, bad antenna design with insufficient real world testing from the device manufacturer (experienced RF graybeard engineers are expensive $$$, and most HW companies are sweatshops who pay their engineers peanuts, so there's the main problem that leads to the infamous Bluetooth connectivity issues IMHO), and not to issues with Bluetooth tech itself, fact confirmed after lengthy discussions with our HW guru in the lab. From my experience Sony, Bose and Panasonic put great thought into antenna design while Samsung and LG can be pretty hit or miss. I have not looked into Apple's though, so I can't say, but from the rest of their HW design and the talent they usually have in the HW department, I can assume it's top notch as well.

The 2.4GHz spectrum is way more crowded today than it was in 1999 when the first Bluetooth version came out, so getting uninterrupted real-time audio streams reliably on it is hard, but not impossible.

One thing I can fault the Bluetooth SIG is that the spec is very complex and full of optional bits which could lead to many pitfalls for the uninitiated engineers and worse, gives developers too much freedom in implementation, meaning your widget might not play well with another widget because each took their allowed freedom in different directions, though Bluetooth chips from reputable manufacturers who know what they're doing, like CSR, TI, SiLabs and Nordic are nearly bulletproof in this regard, provided you also do a good job on your antenna design.

I've had pretty good luck with phones and most things (audio has various codec mismatches if you're going for high quality, but that's all at least visible on boxes), but not computers and [nearly anything except HID]. HID works great everywhere, and battery life is amazing, I love bluetooth for HID.

Bluetooth headsets and computers seems like a special kind of flaky-hell. I tried ~8 modern high-end headsets on 4 laptops (2 windows and 2 macs, both pairs ~3-4 years apart age wise) while trying to pick one, and NONE of the headsets connected to every laptop without issues. EVERY headset had periodic audio drops at least after a couple minutes with at least 2 machines, if not all 4, and many had much more severe issues (disconnects, disconnects that wouldn't reconnect, not connecting at all, etc).

^ All of those headsets connected fine to two different phones, and used the codecs I'd expect... usually anyway. Good enough for the most part, and only 2 had periodic audio drops.

Since you seem to know the field somewhat, what the heck is going on with computer bluetooth audio stacks? Are phones just buying all the good chips and bluetooth-OS-integrating-engineers?

That's weird. I've had pretty much the reverse experience. My Sony and Shure headphones have always worked perfectly (even on Linux!), but I've had issues with a keyboard and mouse not reconnecting after they went to sleep (computer stayed fully on), or at least taking forever.

However, I was surprised by how little lag the mouse had compared to its regular wireless (Logitech unifying).

I wonder if it's due to trying to use the newer Bluetooth profiles? Which of course OSX and Windows don't let you select, nor do the vast majority of headsets.

Every headset I've used with SBC selected has worked perfectly, including some ancient cheap ones, and I'm pretty sure that's how things are connecting to my car (which always works).

---

For mice, I dunno. I've had consistently good results, and I primarily use logitechs. My wife recently swapped out an ancient one that worked perfectly with a AA that lasted 3+ months for a modern one that... also works perfectly with an AA that lasts for 1-3 months. Similar results for keyboards, I primarily use a chonky wired one and I can't feel any difference when I use bluetooth ones.

If I did feel lag, it'd be an weird and I'd probably immediately return it. So I do tend to stick with one for a long time, and haven't tried many.

I've never done objective latency tests, but they feel fine to me. No noticeable lag compared to wired, which is plenty good for me. RF dongles do at least make pairing a non-issue though, just plug and go (which I LOVE about Apple laptops + keyboard/trackpad, plugging it in sets up the bluetooth pairing).

I very rarely use Windows, but on Linux my headphones use either LDAC (Sony) or aptX HD (or something like that) for the Shure. On my mac and iPhone they use AAC. Never had any issue with any combination.

Regarding the keyboard, I do feel a slight lag compared to wired, but not enough to bother me. The mouse also seems to have a tiny bit more lag compared to its own dongle; however sometimes it seems very laggy for a moment. This never happens with the dongle. I mostly use these in the countryside, in a detached house with not many wireless or microwave devices around, so I don't think it's interference related. The headphones don't skip a beat, either in the same environment or in my apartment building or office in the city, with plenty of wifis, microwaves, wireless mice, phones, etc around.

> One thing I can fault the Bluetooth SIG is that the spec is very complex and full of optional bits which could lead to many pitfalls for the uninitiated engineers, though Bluetooth chips from reputable manufacturers who know what they're doing, like CSR, TI, SiLabs and Nordic are nearly bulletproof in this regard.

Earlier spec versions aren't just incredibly complex - they're contradictory.

That's what led to so many manufacturers doing their own thing in very slightly incompatible ways. You can pick up two certified bluetooth devices and find them to have different behaviour in the exact same circumstances. In fact, some of the best devices are ones that aren't certified, because they ignore the spec and act more reasonable than it demands.

Apple famously skips several of the mandatory verification handshakes to reduce latency in their AirPods. Not optional, mandatory. Because the spec doesn't work that well in the real world.

Yet every month my Apple AirPods stop connecting with my Apple iPhone, until I hard reboot the iPhone. And a $70 Bluetooth headset that wouldn’t connect to a brand new Apple laptop until I restarted it 4 times, rebooted the Mac twice, and toggled the pairing mode about 8 times. And Bose headsets that don’t connect to iPhone for 2-3 attempts.

That sounds more like an Apple Bluetooth stack issue at their OS level rather than something wrong with the Bluetooth chip/tech itself. It's where you should complain to Apple or ask for refunds/replacements.

Granted, Apple is not alone here since both Google and Microsoft really botched their Bluetooth stacks on their OSs. Especially Google who hasn't learned you can't treat your C driver/embedded SW like front-end JS code.

Apple have really, really weird BT stack issues.

Legit everyone does. I one time had to convince a VW dealership to read a TSB issued for my 2012 Golf Cheater Edition, bluetooth only played the left channel of audio, but it played on both sides, so you needed music that was different enough on each channel to really notice. Dealership didn't want to believe me until I showed them left/right channel tests on youtube on both android and iphones and told them to use their own phones to test. It took about an hour to flash the repaired firmware on.

Android is on its like 3rd bluetooth stack now? Gabeldorsche, since the meme is rewriting in rust. Every device can support a different number of codecs, everything works on the fallback (or should) but the high definition codecs are a crapshoot.

I remember getting the first gen iphone SE and having a radar open with Apple as all bluetooth audio sounded like it was playing through tin foil speakers, they did fix it but here was the original thread on it: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7521352

Props on getting a response from apple. I've had significantly worse fun getting their security team around that time to respond.

On my Macbook Pro, when bluetooth is on, the bluetooth process uses 100% CPU. So I turn off bluetooth, process goes away, but every once in a while it turns itself on without me asking, bye battery life -_-

I find that my Apple Macbooks (I have a couple) tend to try to pair with my headphones more "aggressively" than any other device, even when my Macbook has its lid closed and in my backpack, it immediately jumps in and pairs with things that I'm trying to pair with something else (my phone usually). Very annoying

'It's not Bluetooth's fault, everyone is just using it wrong' does not sound good.

I mean, if I give you a hammer, and you use it to drive nails by hitting them with the handle, then it's not really the hammer's fault, is it?

What makes complex tech components like Bluetooth any different?

Also, Bluetooth isn't a single product made by a single company that dictates the standard and has the golden implementation.

To have Bluetooth audio between your phone and you PC for example, you can have different Bluetooth chips on each device, each with its own different firmware, then the OS on your PC and phone has a different driver and stack that interfaces to the Bluetooth chip and then there's the antenna design which links the two Bluetooth chips via the air. All these pieces need to come together in perfect harmony for you to enjoy seamless audio between two device.

If any of the manufacturers fucked up the antenna design, or the firmware on the chip, or the driver/stack on the OS, then your entire experience can fall apart and testing/debugging these thousands of permutations of various different pieces is nearly impossible. That's why Apple usually goes their own route towards proprietary tech they can fully control over the entire stack.

> What makes complex tech components like Bluetooth any different?

A hammer will be reliable if the user uses it correctly, which it's possible to do.

With bluetooth I have the most popular, widely sold smartphone and the most popular, widely sold sports watch. They both claim to be compatible. I'm using both precisely as instructed. And sometimes they just.... don't see one another.

This isn't user error.

Sorry but you completely misunderstood my argument. In this example you are not the customer of the hammer, as you're not the one buying the Bluetooth chips and SW/FW for them, but the phone/widget manufacturer is buying the hammer(chips) and he's responsible for using it correctly (FW and antenna design) to build a product where Bluetooth works well.

But like I said in the comment above, if the phone/widget manufacturer fucks up the Bluetooth implementation (misuses the hammer) because they cheap out and buy the cheapest no-name Bluetooth chips they can find on the market instead of buying from established companies, and then farm out the FW and antenna design to the cheapest sweatshop in Shenzhen, Bangalore or Eastern Europe since cost cutting and crunch in the consumer hardware industry is rampant and everything gets nickel and dimed to fractions of a cent while being rushed out the door to meet Christmas sales season or some other arbitrary product release deadline, then the phone/widget manufacturer who sold you the device is to blame for the rushed and buggy implementation, not Bluetooth itself.

So to conclude, if your bluetooth phone and watch are buggy, then blame their manufacturers for improper Bluetooth implementation and validation and ask for fixes/replacements/refunds, as a correct Bluetooth implementation is possible to do if you hire skilled engineers ($$$) and give them time to perform validation tests (more $$$), but instead, most of the widget manufacturers(including car companies) cheap out, like I said before, and cut dozens of corners to get their product out the door quickly and cheaply so they can skim more of the profits.

I hope it's clear now.

Source: Former FW engineer for Bluetooth widgets

Particularly with watches! So many of them are hot garbage at connectivity.

I miss my Pebble :( Though the Bangle.js and other "just uses bluetooth LE" devices have been essentially perfect connectivity as well. LE seems pretty reliable.

'It's not Bluetooth's fault, Apple is just using it wrong'

And Microsoft. And Google. According to the parent.

Well, fortunately these are not the only companies in the world. I have always had only great experience with Sony and Samsung Bluetooth devices (phones, headsets, other hardware).

I'm curious if you found a way to connect a Sony Bluetooth headset to a Mac and have both audio playing and microphone active, basically have a conversation. If you know please share, I never got such functioning, always either I can play audio, or I can record audio, but never both at the same time.

Yeah, I have Sony WH1000-XM2 and XM5 and both work perfectly for Zoom and other video calls with my MacBook Air (M1) as well as my MacBook Pro (Intel 2019), I'm using it daily for work. Zero configuration, just pair and go. Sorry I can't help you with setting it up but I really didn't have to do anything, it worked immediately all by itself.

Thank you, I have the XM3 so somehow now I know that it's possible.

Have the XM3 as well but I use Windows. This is an annoying issue with current Bluetooth headphones. Basically your choice is high quality audio but no microphone, or low quality audio with microphone. When you have the headphones connected it should offer 2 different sound outputs. One for stereo and one for hands free audio. If the stereo output is active then the microphone won't work at all.

Edit: Here's a post that explains the issue better than I can. https://www.reddit.com/r/sony/comments/fqf71z/wh1000xm3_can_...

For those with bluetooth woes:

I've had better luck in all operating systems with a stand-alone USB bluetooth audio dongle: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B089PYFLBN

It's not perfect, but the combination of "you can select the codec" and "the bluetooth stack is 100% out of the hands of the OS" gave me dramatically better results on almost every headset I tried.

My $350 sony headphones regularly have trouble connecting to my macbook. While speaking, about once every 10 hours of use, I sound like a robot and have to power cycle them to make the mic work correctly.

If they're connected to my android phone while also connected to any other device (dual connection is a feature they tout), they play a tick sound every minute like a terrible metronome.

I'm incredibly sympathetic to Apple deciding everything about bluetooth is hot garbage and building an alternative for audio.

It sounds like something specific to that person's piece of hardware. I use my AirPods multiple times a day, every day, swapping back and forth between my MBP and my iPhone. Occasionally it's slow to realize which device I wanted it to connect to, but I've not once had to reboot the phone.

I sometimes wonder if it's almost deliberate incompetence on Apple's side, to make it seem even more lucrative to buy everything from them. My GF and I sometimes switch/borrow each other earphones and other gear, and she has loads of problems connecting to her Mac or iPhone. Like the Sony MX3000 something she has to reconnect every half an hour or they will be out of sync with the show she's watching on her laptop by a second or so. But for me never issues like that on Android/Dell.

Judging from other comments, there are still lots of bluetooth problems even if all if your devices are Apple ones.

Oh yes. Colleague has latest iphone 13 pro max, and latest airpods pro. Even this basic apple-apple setup is failing him numerous times, and you would expect this pair to be tweaked to perfection for that price. Conf calls where he had to give up pairing attempts and had to do it via phone. I could understand busy office space interference, but he has same issues at home.

I have Samsung S22 ultra and Sennheiser momentum 2 buds. Pairing works 100% anywhere immediately with aptx (unfortunately they don't support HD variant of codecs). But if I do press play, first 1-2 seconds the music is some ugly skipping. I would rather prefer it to be quiet for longer.

Judging from all the comments, this is situational. I have a pair of MX4000s that I use when I want noise canceling, and aside from being finicky and slow to reconnect sometimes, once they're connected they're fine. No random disconnects.

But I can also walk halfway across my house and bluetooth doesn't drop until just about the time I reach my refrigerator, so I may have an exceptionally low noise floor where I live.

This is one of the reason why I prefer to use a usb-c bluetooth audio dongle to use my bluetooth headphones. I have multiple bluetooth headphones and multiple devices that can use them, so switching the headphones between those devices got old very quickly. Now I just plug the bluetooth audio dongle to the device I currently use (pc, laptop, or phone) and turn on the bluetooth headphone I want to use, and it's done. I basically turned the bluetooth headphones into a virtually wired headphones now.

I have over a dozen Bluetooth audio devices & near no complaints. across my various personal & work laptops & phones, everything works reliably & great. some of my oldest headsets have some dropouts while exercising and that's about it. it's very confusing reading anti-bluetooth articles & posts. i don't feel like we're using the same technologies.

My $400 Bose headphones have worse range than my cheap MPow headphones. Perhaps whatever great thought Bose puts in doesn't result in great products....

Or the improved sound quality comes at a cost?

Better connection through research would also be expected, since wireless headphones without connection can't sound great /s

Bose and improved sound quality in one sentence?

Like it or not, we aren't talking hifi and you may not love their specific coloration but the audio quality per form factor and price of bose bluetooth speakers is quite great compared to alternatives. I mean there are certainly better ones obviously but my soundlink revolve and my soundlink micro are much better than the models from other brands they replaced. Reliability however may be a different thing but I have not treated them very kindly to say the least.

I also bought a Bose noise cancelling headset 2y ago and I would say it is quite good, I think the only great alternatives in the same price range are from Sony, the Yamaha, Apple ones are much more expensive. Maybe other decent alternatives would be from technics or sennheiser?

In my opinion Bose performs only slightly better than the cheapest crap and only has a moderately better build quality, yet at a (near) premium price range. I think their products are barely worth half the money they ask for it.

But this is my opinion on Bose in general and not this specific product range. Personally I cant stand Bluetooth audio for anything else but background noise. I'm still amazed how a 192kbs mp3 can sound better with 5 euro earplugs compared to a 200+ euro Bluetooth headset with aptX support.

Eventually it doesn't matter at all, if you are happy with their product(s) and consider it money well spend, then who am I to judge.

Edit:

amiga-workbench 51 minutes ago

The most grating "feature" of Bluetooth is having headphones that support fancy AAC/AptX codecs, but as soon as you want to make use of its microphone it dumps the connection right back to A2DP.

I'm no longer amazed.

We’re also comparing it to cheap MPow. That’s already a bargain brand, I can’t imagine what cheap means in that context.

The bluetooth controller may well be the most expensive part of the headset.

MPow does a surprisingly good job, at least for headsets. Most of this stuff doesn't cost a lot of money, just thoughtful engineering.

Using a bluetooth audio dongle can significantly extends the range. My Bose would starts stuttering at ~4m range, but after using a bluetooth audio dongle, it basically cover the whole house now (>10m radius).

Your experience is NOT typical. I have had random connectivity issues with every single Bluetooth device I have ever used.

My biggest complaint is bluetooth gamepads. They simply never work right for me... always registering phantom presses or just none at all. I always have to hold it above my head for it to work right which is unusable.

Xbox one wireless gamepad and ps4/5 gamepads are the most used out there and they seem to work fine, but I suspect these might not be using Bluetooth when connected to a console

I only use the xbone pad with a PC using Bluetooth.

I use the xbone on PC but it's connected using the microsoft official USB wifi adapter, I don't think that's bluetooth

> the spec is very complex

I once printed out the BT5 spec (just the core), for Ss and Gs (on my employer's dime).

I had a stack of 3-inch (large) 3-ring binders on my desk, reaching 2ft high (0.6m).

It was well over 2,000 pages. It would have been five times that, if I had printed out the various profiles, and whatnot.

BT is crazy. The difference between "Classic" and BLE is frustrating.

I suspect that soon, all BT devices will be cribbing from the BLE playbook. It is a lot more usable than BR/EDR, but the data rate sucks. I think that changes to that, are on the horizon.

> I once printed out the BT5 spec (just the core), for Ss and Gs (on my employer's dime).

I've never dealt with Bluetooth myself, but once heard/read that a company could follow that spec perfectly and their device wouldn't work with large swaths of devices. The claim was that companies implement something that's Bluetooth adjacent but there are some non-conformances that everybody "just does" to make it work the majority of the time.

I'm curious if your (and others) experience align with this?

Well, the equipment that my company made was really quite primitive, BT-wise. They also only supported Classic (BR/EDR), and only then, for control stuff (shutter release, aperture adjust, etc.). Image data was sent over WiFi, and BT was used to help set up said WiFi.

Apple is probably the biggest offender, when it comes to custom implementations, but BT explicitly allows vendors to do custom implementations, so they aren't actually breaking any rules.

The BT spec defines 5 overly complicated ways to do any given thing but most devices only support 1 or 2. Multiply by the number of things that need to be done. In practice the compatibility situation is "test all pairs" and just as bad as if there were no standard at all.

The litmus test: can you and a friend listen to a single music stream with two BT headphones at the same time?

Bluetooth barely has the bandwidth for stereo audio to begin with. Doubling it up means ok-ish mono audio for each of you, or really crummy stereo.

Why does it need to send the audio twice? Surely both phones can listen to the same broadcast signal?

Bluetooth connections frequency hop among 79 bands to avoid interference. That way, you don't have to pick one channel and hope it stays clear, you just switch frequencies constantly and deal with the occasional hiccup. That means that when you pair devices, they share a key that synchronizes the pseudo-random choices for what frequencies the connection will use over time. So each connected device needs its own broadcast, because other devices won't be listening on the same frequency at the same time.

That is a detail and they could easily change that if they didn't already.

The biggest relevation I had with bluetooth was seeing an actual pairing sequence and data transmission on an RF spectrum analyser.

It really is low-power. Once you realize it is a rat's fart above the noise floor you have a whole new appreciation for the fact that it even works in the first place.

No, you had a bad test setup. BT is 10dB below wifi, I can't see how what you are saying makes sense. Also it uses simple encodings that save on processing power but require more rf power to be decoded successfully.

> No, you had a bad test setup.

I was not in a test chamber at all and I had all sorts of real world background noise. Not sure what you mean, if bad setup means real-world with all sorts of automobile RF noise then yes, it was a bad setup?

For those who don't know, every 3db the energy is halved/doubled.

So at -10db the energy has been halved over 3 times.

And for those who don't know, that's not actually a particularly big difference.

The inverse square law means this is just the difference between 1 meter and 3 meters. And your WiFi has no problems at 3 meters from the AP.

No, that's not it.

That's not why my bluetooth disconnects every single time I unsuspend my chromebook, about 2 minutes after connecting bluetooth it'll disconnect again, and will be permanently on the second time.

That's not why I have to reboot my phone sometimes, or reboot my headphones, to get it to "unstuck". And the fact that it works to "turn it off and on again".

It's reliably broken, not just by random patterns.

If it were signal strength then we'd be seeing dropped packets. I get some dropped packets when on the other side of the house, on a different floor, from the transmitter. Yet sometimes I can still not get anything through at all when the devices are right next to each other, until I reboot them.

And power goes down with distance squared. "Right next to each other" is at that point almost (but not quite) "so loud it could damage each other's receiver".

Bluetooth horror story time?

I was trying to get a system working to record the motions of vampire bats (long story). Previous people had decided on a small backpack mounted to the bats with a LiPo battery, the sensors, and a Bluetooth transmitter to a laptop for data recording.

Everytime someone would walk by the room within 3 floors, the sensors would try to pair with their phone instead of keeping the connection to the laptop. If that sounds like nonsense, yes, I agree. Since this was in a research hospital there were no 'good' hours as patients and MDs and nurses walked by all the time. RF noise and the like is deep-dark-magic in normal times, combine with Bluetooth and you get a Rogaine subscription.

I did get it working, with Bluetooth even, but only after spending a weekend building a crummy Faraday cage with screendoor mesh, a ton of soldering, duct tape, and dodgy ground loops into the wall outlets.

Bluetooth, never again

The most grating "feature" of Bluetooth is having headphones that support fancy AAC/AptX codecs, but as soon as you want to make use of its microphone it dumps the connection right back to A2DP.

I guess during the many years developing AptX, they thought that obviously nobody would ever want to hear high-quality audio and use the microphone at the same time!

Or worse, buying a touchscreen car stereo unit from China, that's basically an Android tablet running on bottom-of-the-barrel hardware, and its Bluetooth headset mode switches to fucking 64 kbit/s CVSD which sounds like an 8 KHz phone line plus added "clipping" sounds from slope overload distortion.

A2DP doesn't support microphones. You're thinking of Headset Profile (HSP). That's the low-latency profile with mic support.

Neither the article nor the comments provide a theory as to why it is such a train wreck.

Unlike most networking technologies (like Ethernet and WiFi) the Bluetooth spec specifies application level protocols (like audio encodings, metadata, etc).

You could imagine that could work in theory, but in practice, it means that each device's firmware reimplements all sorts of high level stuff.

Imagine you had to use an unpatchable web browser that was bundled with (and ran inside of) a $20 USB -> Ethernet dongle.

The annoying thing I have with bluetooth, is with my headphones, I connect them up, set them as the sound source and just..... nothing.

I have to go round all of my devices and disable the bluetooth on them, because some other device is connected too and although that is not playing any sound at all, somehow has priority and doesn't allow any sound to be played by any other device.

This annoys me to no end, too, but I'd say the issue isn't as much Bluetooth itself as the implementation of multiple sources on the headphones.

I have the exact same issue with a pair of Jabra headphones that have multiple wired inputs. They'll switch between them for frivolous reasons.

> I have to go round all of my devices and disable the bluetooth on them, because some other device is connected too

Sigh. If only there was some kind of mechanism to indicate physically which of the devices you want the sound to come from. A thin string of sorts, that you could attach easily to both devices to indicate that these two are to be connected. But we can only dream...

As long as you don't have to keep the string connected to use the device after pairing, I think that's a good idea.

Isn't that essentially NFC pairing? I've had considerably better luck with NFC technology as a whole than with bluetooth.

This is my biggest issue. I use my AirPods to connect to my two laptops, tv, Bose portable speaker, iPad, and iPhone and sometimes have to spend several minutes disabling devices to actually connect to the device I want.

Worse, when I’m connected to one device like a laptop but I get a call that I want to answer on my iPhone, it’s nearly impossible to actually transfer or reconnect the AirPods to the iPhone.

I tried to get two pairs of AirPods to resolve this and keep one connected/dedicated to my iPhone, but even that doesn’t work because once you’re logged in with your Apple ID it will keep re-syncing to your other Bluetooth devices. It’s insanity.

Same issue. I find Apple devices are the most aggressive to try to pair themselves, even when the devices are in sleep mode! Most of the time I just relegate myself to holding the pair button on the headphones and re-pairing from scratch.

One option is to use your bluetooth headphone exclusively with a usb bluetooth audio dongle (which is detected as a usb headphone when you plug it). Unpair the headphone from all your devices, and plug the bluetooth audio dongle to the device you want to use the headphone with. This is faster than scrambling to find whichever device currently grab your headphone and disable it.

The worst is when it connects to my laptop with the lid shut and not logged in.

That's one of the core annoyances of Bluetooth: it's 1:1, not many:many.

I've got a desktop, a laptop, and a phone. I've got a Bluetooth earbuds (with microphone) and a Bluetooth speaker (no mic).

So obviously it should be simple to play audio from any of those devices to both the earbuds and the speaker at the same time. With wired headphones & speakers, that took a $2 splitter. But with Bluetooth, at best you can get one application per output.

It'd be really nice if you could play audio from multiple sources to the different speakers at the same time. But that can't be done. You have to disconnect from one device, connect to the other, each time. I've never even seen a Bluetooth mixer (not a wired mixer that can use Bluetooth, but a device that can manage multiple Bluetooth connections for different audio streams at once).

The same stuff all applies to Bluetooth microphones.

Bluetooth needs many:many audio streams to get parity with wired sound.

> Bluetooth is said to borrow its name from [...] Early programmers adopted "Bluetooth" as a code name for their wireless tech [...]

Maybe the author should have at least glanced at Wikipedia to find out by whom this "is said" and who these "early programmers" are.

Honestly, I constantly criticize journalists for not going any deeper than Wikipedia, but this author is staying well out of even the shallow end of the pool.

My biggest problem with Bluetooth is never having a good way to figure out why something's not working right. For example, one time I wanted to transfer photos from a phone to a tablet with no internet. With one on BT 3 and one on BT 4, the theoretical speed should've been 20mbps. Instead it was around 50KB/s. Why? Who knows. My crappy eight year old bluetooth receiver, while not having quite the audio quality of my newer headphones, has zero perceptible latency. My newer headphones are practically useless for gaming but if I try to use the headset profile the quality is so low as to be worthless for anything but phone calls. How is the old one doing it better? I have no idea.

> With one on BT 3 and one on BT 4, the theoretical speed should've been 20mbps

Um, no... I have no idea where you got that number.

Since EDR (BT 2.1) added 3Mbps, no faster modulations were added. And that is raw rate without framing or protocol.

BT3.0 added ability to offload actual xfer to another protocol (like wifi) but nobody implements this

BT4.0 just added LE (another modulation, another set of protocols) at 1 Mbps

BT4.2 added a faster rate of 2Mbps for LE

Source: a full-blown case of PTSD from working on BT for years

BT was actually fucking with me badly. I have a Sony soundbar and someone was connecting to it periodically and playing music really loud at 2AM. I had the BT mode on it turned off and the discovery stuff turned off. But still getting connections.

Got fed up with it, opened it up and cut the BT antenna foil off the board in the end. Silence is bliss.

Last time I checked the Bluetooth and BLE specs were massive documents. That's always a red flag for me. Low level tech like this should be clear, simple, concise and unambiguous. You can add complexity to the layers on top, if you must, if your application demands it. But as it stands the designers of the spec let the complexity escape everywhere.

I worked for a company developing 802.15.3 over a decade ago. It gave me some insight into how these specs are developed. It's a complete shit-show. The company would pay non-technical folks, like relatives of employees or whatever, to attend IEEE meetings so they'd have more votes to skew the process. Technical merits have little to do with what ends up in the spec.

There is nothing in this article actually answering the question posed in the title.

Unless the answer is this paraphrasing "No clear agreement on how it should function was ever reached".

If I can add few cents to the discussion. Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology for us, because:

- There is no decent support on web so we need to rely on the mercy of Apple/iOS (RIP to Web Bluetooth API).

- Some Android devices don't work well with Bluetooth (e.g. Motorola, OnePlus). Data packages are gibberish, connectivity is lost on random occasions, etc.

And from customer perspective: device manufacturers can't agree which pairing strategy is best, so they are keep experimenting leading to massive confusion. That's frustrating.

I dare you to try sending anything between an Apple device and ANY Android phone.

In my experience, the Android phones work between each other, and the iPhones work between each other, but I can't cross the Apple fence.

Something tells me this is on purpose.

A lot of pain points in Bluetooth can be easily addressed by simple UX research: Phones and computers try to decide when to connect to a Bluetooth device. Just giving users an option like: "Connect to this device automatically" and unchecking it by default goes a long way.

I had a Bluetooth speaker. An unknown neighbour was connected to it and there was no way for me to use this speaker, remotely, until I moved to another place.

At night, I play sleep music on my Sonos wireless speaker. If I restart my Linux laptop, it connects to the speaker's Bluetooth interface, playing an annoying sound for my sleeping wife. I should remember to disconnect from it, or my music will be played to her.

If you have a Bluetooth speaker, every time you turn it on, you have to find the phone/laptop that has connected to it, disconnect, and then connect the one that you want to use at the moment.

Makes me wonder: do designers of these products use their products in any capacity?

In my Mazda, every time I get into my car my Android phone alerts me there is a Blutooth pairing request from the car.

Whether I authorize it or not, Bluetooth doesn't work.

Then this occurs a second time about 1 minute later, with exactly the same results. I have to deal with this every time I use the car.

When I try to have the car and phone scan for each other, they don't show up. The car doesn't see the phone, and the phone doesn't see the car.

I have given up even trying to get it to work.

I'm still annoyed that most bluetooth headphones haven't figured out how to provide stereo sound at the same time as using the microphone. There is definitely enough bandwidth in bluetooth 5

I hope LE audio will fix that

By the way, what LE stands for? Legendary Edition?

"Lite".

The Bluetooth 5 spec is over a thousand pages long.

The Lite Edition spec is "only" a few hundred, IIRC.

Originally, Low Energy. Bluetooth LE removes all the different communication modes and introduces a single, packet network based approach for everything.

You may remember the switch from bluetooth connections being something you had to manually enable every time you wanted it, to devices just being connected all the time (without causing your battery to drop). That’s what LE enabled.

The switch to the single packet network approach obviously also simplified everything else you might want to transmit.

The audio specs are still from the pre-LE era with different modes for everything you might do (modem, fax, headset, headphones, HID, etc), and LE Audio introduces a new and clean way for that.

To expand on that, there is a pretty accessible free book covering LE Audio available here https://www.bluetooth.com/bluetooth-resources/le-audio-book/...

I tried really hard but I couldn't find any new spec for two way audio. It seems that the specification authority is completely ignoring that problem.

I don't think you looked all that hard, as this is central in the book "Introducing Bluetooth LE Audio" available for free here https://www.bluetooth.com/bluetooth-resources/le-audio-book/...

LE Audio is built around a channel concept, where a channel is unidirectional and a connection can have multiple, e.g. listening on 2 stereo channels and when a call arrives enabling 2 mic channels in the other direction for stereo microphones

Don't go around throwing shade at the spec authority if you haven't read the spec

Most do but many can also go into a “headset” mode in which they use encoding that is more suitable for speech. That said this is mainly an issue for Windows these days that does that automatically for some reason nothing stops you from switching to headphones and still using the mic.

In fact for voice and streaming apps that aren’t classified as telco apps it doesn’t even switch.

worksforme on Linux, MacOS and Android. I have a Bose QC35 and it just works, now for years, reliably.

On Linux, it used to work quite okayish with pulseaudio, even automatic switching between profiles, when an application requested microphone. Since pipewire came around, much higher quality.

It works, but the quality is noticeably reduced. Gaming (and using VoIP in e.g. CSGO) on this profile is practically unusable, the quality of sound is so diminished that it is very annoying.

With pipewire you have all the AptX/LDAC/mSBC codecs. Same quality as under MacOS

As for "reduced", as in, worse than simply monoplex stereo headphones (no headset/microphone support), true, but it's a bandwidth-related limitation, not software impmentation limit, AFAIK

That's because there is no profile for that, as per the spec the hands free profile only supports Mono

This changes with LE Audio (spec released in March iirc) which is much more channel oriented (e.g. 2 channels stereo playback + 2 more stereo microphone), has a new codec (LC3) and has support in the upcoming android release

Nice, maybe in 15 years I’ll be able to use that in debian.

The problem at the radio frequency level is simply that not only is the 2.4GHz ISM band crowded by microwave ovens, WiFi and lots of other devices, but that one end of a BT device is typically battery powered and transmitting at a tiny fraction of the power of the interfering devices. In a typical office or home the moment you turn on the microwave or WiFi device you are effectively jamming the BT signal. Frequency hopping can hop it all likes and try to pick the least worse band out of all even more over-powering ones.

One of the most frustrating problems I've encountered is arbitrary limits on the number of paired/remembered Bluetooth devices.

My Denon amplifier has an arbitrary limit of 8 paired devices. When you pair a 9th the oldest is forgotten. Storage is cheap, why have the limit!

> More than that, multiple US government agencies have advised consumers that using Bluetooth risks leaving their devices more vulnerable to cybersecurity risks.

It was the security issues that first started me leaving Bluetooth disabled on my phones, but I'm glad that I did since it's so often being used to track us. Bluetooth tracking beacons are inexpensive and require less power than wifi trackers (which are still all over the place). They can run a long time on a battery or using RF to DC, allowing them to be easily and discretely mounted and can be triggered by motion/proximity sensors to extend battery life even further. They can be placed to log your location to within a couple feet, but some beacons can track you from many miles away.

I've had my phone set to disable wifi and Bluetooth when I'm out of range of my usual networks. I can always manually enable either if I need it, but because I've still got a phone with a headphone jack, I've never actually needed to enable bluetooth. Laptops have the same issues. I'm hoping my next laptop will allow me to disable it in UEFI.

UWB and 5G are also things to keep an eye on if you're concerned about being tracked and monitored.

I do find it a frustrating technology. As the article says, pairing can be quite hit and miss.

I generally have to search how to pair devices when I have to set it up on a new device, even for devices I've had for years! They're all different, and it can be unreliable.

I have read that it suffers the interoperability issues because the spec is complex with many optional bits in it, although I don't know how true that is.

I only have problems on a (cheap-ish) Android tablet. It often keeps asking "pair?" until you go into the settings and pair there, except directly after booting. I have the feeling it's not so much "the technology", but rather bad chips, lousy drivers and a 'lacking' integration in the OS.

I have had problems with premium devices too. I have a speaker that will connect to my pixel phone but not to an iOS device. It wasn't a particularly cheap speaker, although not premium.

Ok, so that's a problem with the speaker Bluetooth, not the premium devices, in all likelihood.

But after so many years I'd expect even low quality devices to Just Work™ for basic things like audio.

Pairing is my main issue with the technology as I’m frequently using one device across multiple devices. The ideal for me would be latency free crystal clear audio that can fuse maybe four different simultaneous input streams, but since that’s likely impossible, I would just like to spend less time in the hell of trying to force my headphones to stop autopairing to the wrong device every time it turns on.

Nobody offers bug free Bluetooth - nobody.

Not bug-free, but I have used the Jabra Elite earbuds for a while now (75t and 85t) and they manage multiple-device connections pretty well. Up to 3 (I think) devices can be connected to the buds at the same time.

I hadn't thought about it, but yeah this headline captures it for sure.

The music / voice / connect construct of the spec seems to have improved this in the past few years so that it's possible in software to connect.

I downgraded from a flagship to a dirtpile phone, and now when I turn off Bluetooth from the Android Quick Settings, it turns itself back on exactly once, every. single. time.

Sending interactions is pretty reliable too for switching between devices. Pressing the call button on my car or my headphones signals my phone to instantly change audio contexts, but it's inconsistent, and some devices send "pause" signals at will.

It's probably an accident, but my car displays correct, up-to-date, scrubbing and metadata, and I can get audio from my ANC headphones at the same time.

Bottom line, I've seen the "Connect" button work, and there was even a Quick Settings panel listing paired devices for you to plug/unplug at your pleasure, but only if you've paid for an expensive phone.

Android automatically re-enabling Bluetooth after I just turned it off irks me to no end. It feels like a violation of the contract that I have with my phone.

Bluetooth is quite amazing in general. What it is capable of with extremely low energy usage is just mind blowing really.

I think the main reason it gets a bad rap (e.g. vs WiFi) is that the radio link is conflated with all of the messiness of codec/protocol compatibility and features provided over said radio link.

If there were standards for devices to stream audio over WiFi links, I imaging we'd see nearly similar frustrations in codec, latency and compatibility issues - it's incredibly complex.

Much respect to the engineers out there who make it a good experience. I personally tried my hand at tackling wide-band speech support with PulseAudio etc [1] and I was humbled by the complexity present in the protocol/codec layers.

Hats off to the teams at both PulseAudio and PipeWire who have brought wide band speech support to Linux Desktops :)

[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pulseaudio/+bug/18...

I think the main problem is exactly as the article states - there no standard for how things connect to each other. If they could just make the connection standard everywhere, that would get rid of a ton of the silliness.

Try getting thousands of organizations to agree on something and then implement it successfully... The complexity of the problem far surpasses that of the technical standards themselves.

That's what we have governments for. Individual companies trying to set standards often just lose business to the companies they interop with, and the one that does best among the interoperable defects (or extends and extinguishes.)

Instead of making individual companies strategize around interop, you just impose it. The real problem is that this doesn't work with regulatory capture, because you need people formulating standards who have both independence and expertise.

“The great thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from”

I have a Philips soundbar with Bluetooth. A couple or so years ago I was playing music on it from my laptop and the connection started crackling and then just died. I could not get any of my devices to connect, and even tried a factory reset with no luck. I was thinking I would have to buy a new one, but the next day I tried it again and it connected immediately with no problem. It's happened a couple more times since then and I have found that if I just out it back on standby and leave it for an as yet undetermined amount of time it starts working again.

It's very strange.

I've also found that if my phone connects to my laptop through Bluetooth at the same time that I am streaming music via Bluetooth from my laptop to my soundbar the phone will cause interference and the music will keep crackling and dropping out.

I've not had problems with bluetooth for years.

Printers on the other hand, never seem to work smoothly. How?

Buy better printers, or change your expectations. I haven’t had problems with printers as long as I can remember, except a problem with large spool files created by PowerPoint.

I used to work as a technician running computer labs. This job extended to printer repair. I later wrote software to manage printers. Some printers are really very nice to work with and not too hard to repair. Some laser printers are built like tanks and give you glorious crisp text forever. Some inkjets produce vivid or subtle colors with fantastic durability and consistency (assuming you use decent paper). Some people have unrealistic expectations about what a cheapo inkjet can do, or unrealistic expectations about what kind of paper you can use, and some people just buy the wrong model.

I bought a HP printer (scanner/fax/copier) 10ish years ago and since then I don't have printing problems. Before HP I thought the same as you :-)

Almost every printer sold in the last decade supports IPP Everywhere, which has robust support on Windows, macOS, Linux, *BSD, ChromeOS, Android, and anything that can run CUPS. It's completely driverless, too.

And oh man does it have issues. Oftentimes you have to do SNMP. Take scanning for instance, many devices will just give you compressed JPEGs over their HTTP interface without any option for choosing otherwise

Now they'll claim you can specify it a variety of ways such as picking the document type, but they'll just ignore you. I forget all the permutations but I tried them all.

I've had to reverse engineer their windows program from pcap files to get the real protocol

I've spent a good deal of time in cups supporting these systems. Reminds me that I'll need to convince cups to take my fixes somehow (which first requires me to convince them this is real; not as easy as you think because there's lots of hardware variance - you can't just reproduce random printer X and then I have to convince them that the XML documentation of claimed support is either incorrect or useless; then I'll have to convince them that SNMP is the way to go, then and only then, if I walk that tightrope can I put forth my solution ; gotta love the ceremony).

> And oh man does it have issues. Oftentimes you have to do SNMP. Take scanning for instance, many devices will just give you compressed JPEGs over their HTTP interface without any option for choosing otherwise

Just one data point (mine) but I have one of the cheapest HP Deskjet you can buy with scanner included, it works smoothly, no actions needed via wifi with Linux, I can set the DPI, save it as PNG or PDF, it's wonderful.

Brother is one of the biggest offenders here I've found. I've also found an HP with an issue as well but I haven't diagnosed it. I'm typing this from my bed on a phone so sorry I don't have the references on me

What's your model?

Interesting since past printer threads highlighted Brother as a reliable brand. Anecdotally I've got a ~10 year old Brother laser printer+scanner and it still works great, but needs a Brother app to print from Apple devices since it doesn't support the new standard protocol.

Reliability and compatibility are separate dimensions.

if the driverless tool and avahi tools can't find your printer then yes, you're living in hell and have dreams of a USB serial printer you can simply cat PDFs to. We'll probably get flying cars before we get another interface as reasonable as a line printer from 50 years ago

> What's your model?

HP DeskJet 2630, it's like 4 years old.

They might support it, but few actually run the validation suite for IPP Everywhere. My Epson printer ignores specified orientations and shits itself when you specify print quality. Another certified HP printer of mine does just fine.

I've been using cheap Brother and HP printers exclusively because my printing needs are simple, and I've been pleasantly surprised how well supported they are on computers and phones. This might be a Bluetooth-esque tragedy of poor vendor/driver/client/server/etc implementations ruining a good thing for some users.

I buy stupid printers with good cups support and plug them into a printer server. It has been robust for about 7 years, and I have only had to update the raspberry pi once to a new LTS release.

OTOH I am the kind of guy that only buys wired headphones.

The only Bluetooth issues I’v had are weird ones. Apparently I’m to tall for Bluetooth, at least the cheap headphones I bought. Place the phone in my left hand pocket and the headphones, which have the antenna on the right can barely pickup the signal.

The there’s the implementation, and I cannot figure out how they messed up this one: Concept2 have an iOS app for their rowing machines. The previous version would pair the second you asked the rowing machine to connect. The new versions three to five times slower. It’s the same bluetooth stack, why would pairing change?

Found out recently that Samsung Buds automatically go into pairing mode when you open their case which you do often because they charge in it. There is no way to prevent the behavior. So every time you go to use them all the nearby Windows computers prompt if you'd like to pair them and if you take them out of their case in public there is no way to prevent other people from pairing with them and playing whatever they want. Both the Buds 2 and Buds Pro are like this.

Also have some JayBirds and Bose Sport headphones in a similar form factor and thankfully you have to press a button on them to enter pairing mode.

I used to serve on a BT SIG, and the current state of things does not surprise me. I was both blown away by the technical expertise of some of the contributors, from whom I learned a ton about platform philosophy & standards that I still use today; and deeply disappointed by the role PMs & BizDev played in proactively breaking compatibility just to preserve the option to someday take advantage of the standard for short-term profit.

Really interesting though, if you're early in your career and have the option to participate in a standards body I strongly recommend it.

My main problem with Bluetooth is connecting and disconnecting devices together.

Want to use your corded headphones on your phone? Just plug them in. Want to switch to your computer? Just plug them in there.

Want to use your Bluetooth headphones with your computer? Turn them on. Check what they automatically connected to if anything. If wrong, find that device, disconnect Bluetooth, go back to computer, find device in Bluetooth menu somewhere and connect. Pray that the device doesn’t require you to enter discovery mode. Repeat the process for switching. Bonus points if your smartwatch was involved.

I have a pair of Anker Bluetooth ear buds I really like. Fit nice, decent noise canceling.

They are just a fricken nightmare to sync. It took me half an hour of fiddling with them to get both of them to sync at the same time to my phone when I bought them.

My wife's headphones died and without asking she borrowed them. She messed with them and was unable to get them to sync to her phone.

Since then I have now been unable to get them both to connect to my phone reliably at the same time. It's been a couple months.

All that said, that’s the only real Bluetooth device that's given me more than 30 seconds trouble in recent years.

I have a cheap but good bluetooth headsetthat I like. Sometimes I have trouble using it because it connects to a device I don't actually want to use first. If I made a headset I would put a switch for multiple devices on it, like some mouses have.

Anyway it has a nice feature: long press the pair button to forget all pairings. It solves almost any issue, and it's more convenient to re-pair things that you want to use, than switch to a device you are not using to disconnect

It was for this reason that I settled on AirPods. I tried nearly every single wireless earbud available at every price point, from free to $250 and none worked as well as the AirPods when it came to connecting reliably every time. I tested a whole bunch of relatively expensive earbuds for a week, some were a pain to connect from the get go, and never got better, others worked the first time but then got annoying after that. AirPods we’re great, since then I’ve had the occasional hiccup, but it’s like at most once a month and I use them multiple times a day.

I worked on Bluetooth at the stack level, and from my experience of the specification, there's not any single thing that causes it to be flaky. Every level that I have experience with seems to be well defined.

So why the hell is it so difficult to pair and connect? I have no idea. I can only assume that each level of the stack has a number of corner cases that all together create a perfect storm, because otherwise the specification seems to be robust enough that it shouldn't have such an issue with connecting.

IMO the problem with bluetooth is applicable to many modern technologies:

- it can do a lot of things and in many scenarios there are decisions to make (which device to connect to? multiple? should I start playing something? what? should I stop the other thing? play over it?)

- instead of focusing on making it configurable, the designers focused on trying to guess what the average user wants (no users are average)

And then there's the seperate fact that it doesn't have any decent 2-way audio protocols STILL which makes me sad.

I've always had this hunch that the Bluetooth protocol is somewhat underspecified - if you just implement the spec, you're going to have something that mostly works in the happy case, but you gotta do a bunch more to make it work consistently under less-than-ideal real world conditions (which companies like Jabra and Apple then tend to do). Any hardware people wanna chime in and tell me if I'm close or not?

You're not. When something in bt doesn't work it's caused by two things: a regular bug in the stack, or a feature of the spec that was implemented incorrectly which comes from ambiguous wording in the spec or simply the fact that it's several thousand pages long. This is usually not a problem if you have two devices using the same stack talking to each other but normally that's not the case.

100%. Interoperability is the complexity. You’ll find old popular devices for example that are slightly different in behavior to the “norm”. It could be straight up incorrect behavior or maybe something more subtle. Do you drop support for those devices or change your behavior dynamically based on the device? Would your customers complain if you did drop it? Can you identify the device reliably? What if they update their software/behavior in the future - would your workaround break? Does your BT software stack even give you enough control to do fix it? Does your hardware/software vendor give you enough support to fix things if you can’t do it yourself? How many other devices did you test against?

It was painful but fun to work on.

> I've always had this hunch that the Bluetooth protocol is somewhat underspecified

Absolute opposite. The blutetooth spec is one of the most hideous, largest specs you have ever laid eyes on. The full spec, very heavy, very particular, is in excess of a thousand pages.

If you "just implement the spec", you have an enormous team and budget. But, you'll still end up in a hole, because not everyone agrees with what the spec is actually saying, because it's too complicated, and too large. So there are parts which are in direct competition with each other, leaving you to have to guess an answer - knowing that there is no market agreement for what is the "right" answer.

Really? This isn't my experience. I use several BT devices regularly and they all work fine. The only time I run into issues is when using shared devices. For example, both me and my girlfriend share a car and when we get in the car together one of our phones will automatically connect which often means one of us will need to manually disconnect and reconnect if the wrong device pairs first. I'm not sure this is a flaw with BT so much though, or at least it's a bit of an edge case and could probably be addressed with a better implementation.

The one technology that I still find unreasonably painful after decades of development is inkjet printers. I have no idea why it's still so difficult to reliably connect a printer to a device. To reliably print a document without random blank pages or weird margin issues. For the printer not to require cleaning and alignment with every use. And for the printer to do anything within a reasonable timeframe - sometimes it takes several minutes after clicking print for the printer to actually start printing anything.

Bluetooth in comparison is really good.

I do not know if this is true, but I read somewhere long ago that Bluetooth was intentionally designed to be complex to create a high barrier to entry for companies implementing wireless data, particularly in the phone industry but perhaps to make things like peer-to-peer protocols difficult to implement reliably also. ANT+ is certainly much easier to use and more stable. The Bluetooth spec in its entirety is up to what now, 3000-5000 pages? Do you have a year to read it and understand it before starting your project? And all the Bluetooth vendors have created their own custom stacks with incompatible API's "designed to make using Bluetooth easier" but also ensuring that it is difficult to switch vendors and making it difficult to do anything custom (first you have to reverse engineer their API, then guess what is inside their proprietary firmware stack). I've heard the same things about the SD card standard.

We need a BT manifesto of how phones, cars, etc should behave: 1. Don’t start any program/activity unless directed. 2. Don’t switch output devices without confirmation.

My biggest complaints are my car taking over a call mid-conversation (I pull in driveway and my wife is on the phone in the house) and now I’m hearing her call; or switching between 2 BT devices when I didn’t ask for it.

My AirPods Pro are likely the only Bluetooth device I've seen that's not only easy to pair but also works every time without fail. The other day they actually did fail though, but that was because of massive interference of 2.4GHz that made nothing work. Can't really blame Bluetooth for that.

Good hardware ruined by non-replaceable batteries

Lithium-ion, should last a long time

Really? Phone batteries are lithium ion, and they get very noticeably worse after just a year or two.

If you're an audiobook or podcast enthusiast, you can get through a lot of charge cycles (and deep discharges) rather quickly.

If you're using them frequently, expect to notice significantly degraded battery life in less then 2 years of use.

I've started to notice my ~2 year old Bose earbuds only charge to 90% battery (it announces this when powered on), even after a full night's charge.

Arch Enemy’s “Aces High” cover-song autoplayed one too many times at too-high a volume first thing in the morning while preparing to drive to work. I eventually cleared out my Apple Music songs and much more calmly welcome whatever pop station my wife leaves the radio on instead when I start my car.

I’m building something that uses Bluetooth and largely for the classes of device I’m using everything seems to work fine? Isn’t all this like everything, largely Apple and premium devices work well and cheap crappy stuff barely works? Sort of implies it’s not necessarily the the standard at fault…

AirPods Pro still randomly fail to connect to my iDevices.

Other devices will randomly connect and disconnect to othet devices in my house, announcing the connect and disconnect every time even though the connection isn’t used

I commute with the Bose Soundsport bluetooth headphones, which I actually like, but randomly they will announce that they've disconnected from this or that device, despite continuing to play audio and all of the other features with that device just fine.

It’s expensive stuff that gets finicky, because cheap devices are identical to one another in layers 2 and up.

My biggest pain point right now with Bluetooth and my phone is that it's *all* media going through the paired device. I want to be able to pin just my music app audio to go out a speaker and still be able to use my phone speaker for all other apps but that's not possible.

Maybe it’s out of spec, but my little cassette boombox with Bluetooth outperforms every other device I’ve used.

Instant pairing. Multiple devices. Unwavering signal.

Only the speakers and driver circuit let me down. It’s tinny and quiet, even at full volume with tone knob adjustments.

Still, it’s a sure thing as far as connection goes.

I have 3 BT headphone things. They are all paired to both my mac and my iPhone. Something changed recently. If paired to my mac two out of the three play on hold beeps whenever my Google Meet meeting is muted. Or, and this is really annoying, if my computer happens to transition through some sort of sleep state in the other room. So, if I have them on at night and unless I remembered to disconnect my computer at the end of the work day, I am woken up in the middle of the night with random on hold beeps until I get up, go to the other room, and disconnect the computer.

On top of that they both of course randomly activate Siri in my iPhone (despite me setting Siri to only activate if I press the side button) and they both auto play the same random song.

I had a problem with the combination of Google Meet, my bluetooth headphones (Aftershokz), and Mac OS Monterey. It would keep beeping and putting it on hold. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/disable-automatic-... was the workaround for me, and also in Zoom I disabled "automatically adjust microphone volume". Frustrating.

I have a separate problem where if my computer goes to sleep or goes out of range, the headphones keep beeping until I turn them off. :-/ But this seems specific to the one I'm using and hasn't happened with my others.

The user experience is also terrible. In all the Bluetooth enabled cars I saw, the audio starts playing the moment the phone connects to the car. There isn’t anyway to disable it. This is a problem for atleast 5-7yrs now. Even Tesla and apple couldn’t fix it

I suspect this is a problem with the car: it connects and sends the command to play. But Tesla has a particularly poor implementation in which it will do this even if it’s not playing the Bluetooth stream — the phone would stream into the void and the car will play other music.

I don’t think this is Apple’s fault. Apple could add a per-peer setting to disable play commands over Bluetooth or maybe to disable them within a few seconds of connecting.

That's app dependent, at least on Android. I've got the PowerAmp music player as my default, it has an option to disable "Resume on Bluetooth".

Apple's "magical" continuity feature between devices (including Airdrop) is usually going crazy and works only 20% of the time if you are connected to the network with cable, not wifi, even if you are in the same subnet.

Bluetooth works ok if you're not sharing receivers or if you don't have more than one device acting as transmitter. Anything beyond that where you're mixing and switching devices, or sharing receivers (like multiple speakers in your household etc.) it gets so easily confused.

I've even had problems following my wife's car. Despite being fully paired with my car and working great, the transmitter (phone) will keep trying to connect to hers.

It's probably one of the most frustrating mainstream technologies that you're basically forced to use as physical connections become less and less available.

Everyone should start a timer and try to transfer 3 small files (1-2MB) from their phone to another device, via Bluetooth, right now. Can anyone successfully copy all 3 small files in under 3 minutes?

I can't enable bluetooth on my Sony TV because it displays a pop up dialog box when anything tries to connect with it, which is frequent due to some unknown neighbor's device constantly trying to pair with it 24/7. It renders the TV unwatchable. There's no way to disable bluetooth pairing on the TV aside from disabling bluetooth entirely - a well known design flaw. Naively, the TV designers assumed all devices (and people) are well behaved, and it was thought to be convenient to have one less configuration mode.

I get far fewer problems if I make sure there's a 1:1 pairing between devices.

Headphones playing from your phone and your mac in a back pack? The mac will wake up every few minutes and steal the connection.

What I get from this thread is that it probably matters what RF noise you have in your environment. Some people have lots of trouble regardless of device, some people have no problems at all. I suspect the latter are in a quieter RF environment. I can get quite a long ways from my laptop before my wireless headphones start to cut out. And I don't have any significant issues getting or staying connected. I live in a residential neighborhood, not an apartment, so maybe my location is pretty low-noise.

Bluetooth is such a pain in the ass even as a techy. Most people probably just pair their iphones to their airpods and call it a day. But trying to use multiple bluetooth devices with each other (phones, laptops, ipads, connecting to headphones, speakers, and cars) is always a juggling act. Disconnect. Turn the headphones off. Sometimes forget the connection. Get out of range of the other device. Turn the headphones on. Turn bluetooth off. Turn it on.

Comments mention NFC pairing. That would be better in most cases.

Dear platform creators for Bluetooth, Please implement a privacy and battery saving measure. Where once I turn off the paired device, such as a car or headphones, the platform automatically turns off the Bluetooth radio. This prevents tracking with-in stores or offices. Saves battery power. And prevents the device from auto-connecting to my car during ignition. Just because I was using Bluetooth before I arrived does not mean I want to use bluetooth once I depart.

I currently manually do this everytime.

Sometimes people make excuses for bluetooth. Like "it can do so many things, that's why it's so complex and can get bugs".

No. Just no.

99.999% of use cases is "get audio to my headphones, and possibly from its mic too".

20 years and we can't even get the primary use case to work.

If this were about setting up some esoteric "I can't believe bluetooth can do this" feature, then maybe.

But just get audio to work. That's it. This is not fusion power, yet seems to be as hard for the people implementing it.

Try pairing (and actually using) an exotic Bluetooth device (y'know, a keyboard, mouse) with a Raspberry Pi via the command line. That's REAL pain.

Beyond some of the autoplay issues - which are software based and not the protocols problem - I haven't had any truly major issues with Bluetooth since 4.1

Honestly since 4.1 it has been overwhelmingly a positive experience. Yes I need to manually click the bluetooth icon in my toolbar on my mac every once in a while to re-establish a connection but that is the extent to which I have troubles.

There’s a huge problem with BT that the article doesn’t seem to touch on at all, which is that it’s too low-bandwidth to provide a good experience for many of its intended use cases. It has no high quality full duplex audio profile. It is literally not possible to use a Bluetooth headset that doesn’t very noticeably degrade the audio quality for both yourself and your audience.

I hate that my bluetooth headphones glitch when they're connected to multiple devices. Something my phone does at irregular intervals causes audio from other sources to skip, even though the phone isn't actually making a sound. I manually disconnect from my phone multiple times per day so I can listen to media on my laptop without being interrupted.

When I first time interacted with Bluetooth, my expectation was that when I pair a telephone and a PC, I can share sound and Internets in both directions exactly as it is possible to do that with files. It was maybe 15 years ago and all what has changed nowadays is a... low energy only? Maybe we the people have to liberate the Bluetooth stack somewhat?

There's some good stuff in the pipeline for Bluetooth. Auracast: https://www.bluetooth.com/auracast/ - this is essentially a localized broadcast bluetooth stream, and has loads of brilliant use-cases (think: commentary at a sporting event).

The only painful points I've seen for BT:

Some devices can't pair with multiple hosts(Not a big deal for me)

My phone has a bug where BT will turn itself off occasionally, and there are basically no times when I want BT to be off.

The latency is just a tiny bit too high for it to replace wireless mics in live sound, real missed opportunity to finally standardize that.

I recently used bluetooth headphones (airpods) in a summer cottage in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night. The phone (samsung) was inches from the headphones. In other words, it's hard to imagine better radio conditions. And yet, the connection occasionally glitched (a handful of times over a total of many hours).

This happens with all networking.

The most well-funded companies oscillate between "trying to get ahead" by hacking in "whatever's next" and selling that to people and "just blowing off the spec" because they're not getting paid enough. This is a sedementary process because of whatever business-related adage stops them from rewriting their code.

The next awful bit is what happens to the spec itself. We show up in Vegas at the Bluetooth conference in the hottest July on record. No one can share any vision about what this thing is supposed to do, or replace, so everyone just sneezes into the multithousand page specification.

The multithousand page specification is actually a paid affair as well, and it's inefficient, confusing, poorly organized, and loooooong, so everyone just ends up building what they think the spec "sounds like."

Even better, there's a deadline creeping up, because there's a rumor that Competitor B is pushing out their part of the stack in November, and even if we pay the unbelievable fee to the FCC to get expedited treatment, it's still a 2 month wait, if it's approved -- not to mention legal's checks.

...at least, that's what it looks like to an outsider.

It happens with other things, but Bluetooth is not other things.

It doesn't need high speed. Just barely enough to get some audio through.

Bluetooth should have been perfected over a decade ago, and chips with perfect operation should be a commodity.

It's just not cutting edge, and shouldn't be.

My only complaint is, I suspect, a regulatory thing. Cars don't let you pair when driving, which is perfectly useless since the only time you pair a new phone to your car is when you have a new passenger wanting to connect her phone...

Other than that, my Bluetooth experience is perfectly boring 99%+ of the time.

Because it's RF, shipping firmware can't be open source -- end user tweakable and replaceable. I bet this is one reason BT will never be good. If it could be open source there would be a winning stacks (or a few) that would bubble up on some git repo and be good enough for most everyone.

Is that because of regulation? What’s the concern of having open source for RF firmwares?

Regulatory requirements and certification.

Is that a law?

There are ath9k wifi cards with open source firmware https://github.com/qca/open-ath9k-htc-firmware

> There are ath9k wifi cards with open source firmware

I use these almost exclusively for laptops and routers, I keep ripping Intel wifi cards out of laptops and replacing them with ath9k cards.

Ever since I started doing so things "just work" - no more random disconnects, lockups, need-to-reboot-to-get-wifi-working-again etc.

Technology can be so nice if it's open.

There’s no reason Bluetooth stacks couldn’t be open source - unlike a GSM modem, a Bluetooth chipset should only be able to transmit in the 2.5GHz ISM band, which is unlicensed. Even if you can change the LO enough to get outside the band, there should be hardware filtering etc.

Of course, commercially available SDRs can transmit in all sorts of bands including licensed ones if you write the code to do so, and there are plenty of open-source applications for SDR, so it’s not like it’s impossible to legally have open firmware for whatever chipsets (even cellular modems)…

It's not just the licensed bands but also SAR. Commercial devices with BT are often close to the body. For those devices to be certified they have to operate within specific power levels, and this has to not be operable/changeable. If you can change power levels, you can bust the SAR limits.

It's one thing for geeks to do what they want with SDRs. It's another to get the certification to ship a real product.

the pine phone has end user replaceable firmware for its LTE modem. there exists an unofficial open source alternative for the official firmware (which incidentally has vulnerabilities that quectel seems to be unwilling to patch)

I have one bluetooth device that I connect to my TV that just captures anything it's ever been connected to, no matter where it is in the house. No amount of unpairing or repairing can overcome it. It's actually kind of impressive.

Ha anyone been able to deploy a better behaving protocol over the same ASICs/SoCs in so many years? I mean, I'm pretty sure no hardware or software vendor is remotely happy with the current status quo.

Zigbee failed in a similar way, didn't it? An exceptionally complex protocol (for the intended usage) that left out a major interoperability aspect: the pairing phase. (BT fixed this partially by adding Secure Simple Pairing.)

Wireless protocols are inherently more complex, there are crappy Wi-Fi hardware out there, too.

BT and Zigbee have one additional disavantage over Wi-Fi: they are slow, so they are more heavily affected by packet loss and interference in ISM band. This probably lead to more complex protocols, you cannot do things TCP/IP-simple if you don't have bandwidth to spare in order to retransmit losses.

My favourite thing about bluetooth is how when i drive past my missus car randomly, my phone connects to it, and my podcasts play in her car :/

I feel like for the most part car manufacturers are to blame for the proprietary poorly designed infotainment systems that have issues all around.

It this a problem with bluetooth or the devices that use bluetooth? Because my AirPods Pro work great, but most other devices are hit and miss.

I had started to like my bluetooth headset, but then one day it stopped working during a presentation. Never again.

My only real issue with bluetooth these days is that I cant disable certain MIDI CC events.

The same midi blob that sends vol +/- from my cars volume encoder, is used by applications to hijack phone volume to push notifications.

But it always resets to -inf once and there is no way for me to disable or modify midi cc behaviours globally or on a per application basis.

Someone give me discrete midi cc control via a third party app before i drive off a bridge. Its maddening.

My door, yes my front door is controlled by a bluetooth device. It's a horrible horrible experience.

As someone who worked on Bluetooth in consumer electronics for years the title gave me a good laugh.

My experience has been pretty good on cars after 2015 when using iphone

Cars Speakers And other apple products

Unusually awesome

My carplay experience when I plug my phone in via USB is great

When I try to use bluetooth, forget it, works about half the time, massive pain having to pair with each new car, etc

> he himself uses it seamlessly — some "70% of the time."

70% of the time, it works every time.

I love bluetooth. My mouse, my keyboard, my airpods, my other NC headphones, carplay, TV remote, smart home devices - so many of them working 99% of time just totally fine. Small glitches from time to time are small price to pay for the convenience my everyday tools bring to my life.

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2055/

<rant>

Someone should make a Bluetooth alternative just for audio transmission with a sane, forward-compatible spec.[1]

More than half of Bluetooth woes will disappear.

When I was annoyed to no end by my headphones, I searched upon Bluetooth alternatives and why are they not in widespread use. I did not find much.

Bluetooth needs a rebirth.

1: No. Don't reply with xkcd 926.

</rant>

Ok I’ll reply with https://xkcd.com/2055/ then ;-) I wish something like what is described in this comic could be implemented as pairing method in a future version of Bluetooth. It sounds like it could help some of the problems.

The same holds for USB.

USB A? Nope, super reliable for 5 nines of users and use cases. With billions of users you still get millions of duds, but that's ok.

USB C is... Complicated.

1 word: unreliability

Obligatory xkcd from 2018: https://xkcd.com/2055/

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2055/

Bluetooth is governed way better than any other comm standard. For example, WiFi implementation incompatibilities are legendary, and solving them is left to device makers instead of a specialist body. Certification is also non-existant.

For Bluetooth, at least for a major vendor, it's unthinkable that they wouldn't be able to come to Bluetooth SIG, and call out the issue, and have it worked on until it's solved. But more usual, issue will be highlighted at the certification, and test stage.

Is Bluetooth a secure comms protocol? Admittedly, no. But is it a reliable, easy-to-use protocol fit for mass consumption? Also, no.

Bad audio quality with bluetooth on phones is mostly a myth. Todays smartphones only have cheap digital audio converters(DAC), so that you usually get higher quality music with a proper bluetooth codec like aptx.

Bluetooth poor audio quality is not a myth. The bandwidth is just not there for high quality audio. Even with aptx. That's why companies roll their own with BLE and the 2M phy. And even with that it's still flaky because it's wireless and can and will drop packets.

Yes, BLE audio is an improvement but those devices are still in the future. What you have currently, you're better off using your smartphone DAC.

But... Does the quality of a phone's DAC matter? I was under the impression that Bluetooth is digital audio. And the quality issue is with the bandwidth mostly or the headset DAC sucks.

Correct, the point was that the phones dac only matters when using the phones built in speaker, if you are using a blutooth audio device, then what matters for sound quality is the dac in the bluetooth device.

I think codecs are where I have most of my remaining BT annoyances. AptX is great (but there's also AptX HD, AptX.. is it variable? etc) - and exactly which AptX is supported varies by the Qualcomm chip in your phone and the device you're connecting it to. Or you can go with Sony's LDAC. Works great on my Pixel, once I've turned on "quality" in the Sony App, then turned on the LDAC opton that gives in my bluetooth settings (and optionally can go into the dev menu each time I connect, to adjust the bitrate).

I do like bluetooth - but working out what features will work with which devices is a PITA. It always falls back to something functional, but fallback masks a lot of improvements that could be made. Although maybe that's the right approach. It works, and if you're somebody who likes to fiddle, you can.

Recently phones don't have DACs since they don't have headphone jacks. Well, they have them for the speakers and vibration but presumably you didn't mean that.

But their dongles' DACs are quite sufficient and are better than most of the audiophile DAC industry (which doesn't have the budget to actually make anything good).

https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/r...

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