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Comment by city41 | Hacker News Reader

People in the Apple ecosystem usually report Bluetooth works great. I'm not in that ecosystem but I've heard this many times. I always assumed Apple works hard to make sure all their devices interop over Bluetooth well. For me, I just pretend Bluetooth doesn't exist and don't use it. I've pretty much never had a positive Bluetooth experience.

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Almost too well – I wish my phone wouldn't connect to my car when I’m sat inside the house and my wife arrives home. For cars in particular, how hard can it be to connect only when inside the vehicle?

I've actually had great frustration with Apple bluetooth, but I think a higher levels of the stack.

My wife has an iPad, iPhone, Apple watch, and iPods.

I have just iPods.

There are countless times when I'm listening to the iPad with my iPods, and when she comes into range, either my iPods switch connection to her iPhone, or her iPods steal my connection to the iPad.

I've found no setting on any device that fixes this. It drives me insane.

Ugh, that sucks. But I'd still take that over the experience I've had, which is usually trying over and over and over again to get a device to connect at all. Like listening to music in the car, pull over to get gas, and then spend 20 minutes trying to get the music going again (and usually just give up and listen to the radio). It's maddening.

That should only happen if those devices are all logged in to the same Apple ID. Do you all have separate Apple accounts?

Settings -> Bluetooth -> <your AirPods' name> -> press the little (i) -> "Connect to this iPhone" -> "When last connected to this iPhone" should do the trick.

In AirPods settings on iPhone, there's "Connect to this iPhone" option. It defaults to an automatic connection, but could be changed to connect only if previously connected.

I think this is supposed to cover your use case, though given the general Bluetooth unreliability, I won't be surprised if it didn't work as expected.

This page helped me: https://support.apple.com/guide/airpods/switch-airpods-betwe...

> People in the Apple ecosystem usually report Bluetooth works great

Bluetooth isn’t perfect in Apple world (multi device handoff doesn’t always work for me) but it’s substantially better than the chaos described above.

I’ve never had a situation where my AirPods started cutting out depending on how I walk (like the OP described) for example. I can walk several rooms away from my device before they start cutting out.

Having done some Bluetooth work before, the quality of everything from the stack to the hardware to firmware varies greatly from device to device. Anything Android was a nightmare a few years ago but it was getting better.

Can confirm. Bluetooth on my Apple devices work flawlessly, bluetooth on my non-Apple devices does not (Windows/Linux PC, JBL speakers, etc). No idea what Apple does differently.

Apple controls both sides of the link

Hit and miss I would say.

Budget Sony headphones I bought last year work great with my iPhone. No complaints at all.

The Bluetooth stack on my iMac has a bug where it will crash hard after around two weeks of uptime. Very annoying, because the (Magic) Keyboard and (Magic) Mouse stop working. Only way to fix it is a restart.

Apple AirPods Pro are the only BT device I've ever used that just works.

I didn't like my AirPods Pro because it was never clear to what device they were going to connect to. Sometimes they'd connect to my Apple Watch when something happened on the watch, and sometimes they'd stay connected to my iPhone while the Apple Watch used its speakers.

These days I have Sony earbuds and they stay connected only to my iPhone.

You just have to change each BT device (as in the airpods) to connect automatically "when last connected to this device" rather than "every time" or whatever the exact language is

I've only been using Bluetooth headphones with Android and Linux for about a year, but I don't remember having anything to complain about.

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