We need a total rethink on close-range wireless communication for accessory devices. Preferably something patented with an expensive license so fly-by-night chinese hardware shops can't dump their garbage on the market using that protocol.
There are two important things about Bluetooth.
1. There are actually two kinds of Bluetooth. The "traditional" mostly connection-oriented Bluetooth and BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy). They share very little with each other, except for the marketing name. BLE works way better in practice. Many people still remember their old headsets that used Bluetooth and that took ages to connect to their phones and associate those with the "Bluetooth experience".
2. Bluetooth is complex. Many manufacturers get it wrong. But the problem is not with Bluetooth. You could invent a different set of protocols, and if they were to do everything that Bluetooth does, they would get very complex as well, and we would have the same problem, except in a less popular and less broadly adopted protocol.
To the end user, this is kind of a distinction without a difference. The end user doesn't care whether it's Bluetooth, The Standard that's bad or Bluetooth, the Implementation. He just knows that when he has to use Bluetooth, he's probably going to have problems.
I've worked with BLE implementation developers and I've heard the stack described as a "Layer cake of sorrow." There are major problems with it, and by "It" I mean the entire bag containing the specification, all the various implementations, and the hardware ecosystem. All of these things combined define Bluetooth in people's minds.
This discussion is intriguing. I wonder how many people commenting on "the spec" have actually read any part of "the spec" in question (I have).
And since we're posting anecdata: I can't think of a single problem I've had with a Bluetooth device in recent years, and I use a lot of Bluetooth devices. So this kind of generalizing doesn't help.
As a counterpoint, every embedded device that uses Wi-Fi promises a world of pain. The bizarre pairing procedures, connecting to temporary access points, entering passwords — it's all a combination of pain, timeouts, problems, and resets. But that doesn't lead me to state that "wifi is bad, the spec as a whole is bad, all layers of the spec are bad, the implementations are all bad".
Two xiaomi phone models with different BT issues: One couldn't connect to two chipolos, the other loses wifi stability when connected to A2DP (ping raises, connection stutters and as the BT devices get closer, connection is lost randomly) Samsung phone: no issues [detected so far]
Then I have some Sennheiser headphones that I can get stuck and need to be physically turned on / off when it loses connection due to distance and there are other phones nearby (I roam around the house without the phone. I know that's partially on me)
I remember the time there was for windows a "BlueSoleil" BT stack besides the "Broadcomm" stack. Blue soleil was more stable, supported more profiles (pan, a2dp, etc) on more devices.
And, all those BT security issues over time? It makes me feel BT protocol cockroaches always come back.
Apple has no excuse since they control both hardware and software. They are dropping the ball.
They don't control the Bluetooth hardware though - that's still Broadcom AFAIK (at least in this 2021 Macbook M1 Pro and my 2023 M3 Max.) They might be writing the driver (I don't know if they are or if they're just interfacing with a Broadcom shim) but that doesn't necessarily help if the hardware is shonky balls.
Personally, my experience with Bluetooth has been mixed. It certainly works, but audio quality is bad for headphones, latency is bad for mice and keyboards, sometimes the connection requires an intervention from the Norse pantheon, and so on.
That's going a little too far. If you're using bluetooth headphones, and you enable a microphone anywhere, you'll stop receiving sound from everything else on your computer.
But yeah I mean Bluetooth sucks, everyone has had the experience of trying to connect to a device repeatedly that keeps trying to autoconnect to some other random device that was used before. My usual interaction with Bluetooth is to always enter pairing mode and just be done with it, but hardly feels futuristic to manually hold down a button press every time you want to use a device.
> except in a less popular and less broadly adopted protocol
Isn't the usual way this problem is solved that the big players (Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc.) come together and create a consortium for a new technology? So you get widespread support in all new devices and within 5-10 years most people are using it over the old one. If a better protocol is possible I don't think this would be the bottleneck.
It's not like you can use a Bluetooth classic device to connect to Bluetooth low energy.
Then there's also like Zigbee and etc; I don't think the world is hurting for wireless protocols. Everybody has their own new standard that'll be able to replace the rest lol.