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Comment by Spunkie | Hacker News Reader

I was really hoping they would go back to having a headphone jack on the 'a' series of pixels.

I picked up a 7a pixel and fooled myself into thinking it "can't be that bad". But bluetooth is the worst technology to ever grace our airways, dongles fucking suck, and it's been a constant source of annoyance since I got it.

I guess I'll be picking up something other than a pixel when it comes time to upgrade. But there is an ever shrinking number of options that have both a headphone jack and allow bootloader unlocking/locking...

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> But bluetooth is the worst technology to ever grace our airways, dongles fucking suck, and it's been a constant source of annoyance since I got it.

Can you expand on your issues with it? It has been very reliable for me.

Managing one pair of headphones that connects to more than one device is a nightmare, everything always auto connects/disconnects when you don't want. Many devices don't have a temporarily disable connection attempts toggle.

I use Bluesnooze [1] on my Mac for that reason, it won't even disconnect when suspended otherwise and you have to log back in to turn off BT. It's pretty easy to disable on phones/tablets otherwise.

[1] https://github.com/domzilla/Bluesnooze

Depending on the client device, you can often put it into pairing mode immediately upon turning it on to prevent auto-connect, then click connect from the desired host device. Still annoying but slightly less so than having to disable bluetooth on every other nearby host.

I have three devices: personal laptop (thinkpad/linux), work macbook, personal android.

It's absolutely insane trying to get exactly the one I want connected to my earphones. Basically, I have to make sure two of them have bluetooth off, so the third one reliably connects. Otherwise, sometimes left earphone will connect to one device, and right to other.

This is a deficiency of the protocol that there is no sane way to do this.

I guess this is were Apple does things well within ecosystem.

I have: personal MacBook, work MacBook, personal iPad, personal iPhone, and an old personal iPhone I use as a lower-distraction music player. I also often connect to my Fire TV stick to listen to TV without disturbing others in the house.

With my AirPods, this is all pretty seamless these days. I never have to turn Bluetooth off on them.

Yes, apple fixed this by appending to the protocol. The Bluetooth standard should consider doing something similar.

I feel like Bluetooth has improved a lot. Maybe it just takes time to propagate everywhere...

Have you ever been to a crowded area and it just crashes.....

> dongles fucking suck

Why?

because I might be charging the phone or something else that requires that port. I don't want to use a dongle. I want the same 3.5mm aux jack that continues to work reliably for many decades, and continues to support headphones older than the internet instead of the disposable bluetooth stuff they try and sell you today.

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