41–50 of 165 posts
The main issue with Bluetooth is the sound quality sucks. That is actually due to the Bluetooth standard.
2. It has brand-name recognition.
3. People who need it know that its the "wireless thing" for audio and music, often without their being able to articulate precisely what it does.
4. It's baked into enough hardware that a competing technology would struggle to enter the market.
There's a long list of comments in that thread discussing "why" it's the case, with most simply saying "it's difficult." I disagree. I think it's the same reason why so much of our software is poor quality: taking something from "works" to "works well" is a cost sink. It will cost you and yet doesn't add much to the bottom line to compensate. It's sad that my family uses the available Bluetooth devices less than if t…
> It's sad that my family uses the available Bluetooth devices less than if there was a wire we could just plug into. I specifically buy wired gaming headphones, wired mice and wired keyboards - if there is any sensible wired option I'll take it every time, I even have an extra long network cable I can throw across the living room for the laptop. Wireless stuff is just less reliable and always seems to throw issues w…
This seems unnecessary unless you have high latency requirements, like for FPS or fighter gaming, but even then WiFi (and network coding for these games) has gotten so good that lag is barely noticeable anyway.
I say this as someone who has my desk hardwired with an unmanaged switch because it seems silly to not take the time to hardwire a stationary PC and the place where I spend the majority of my time working: if I go downstairs with my work laptop then I'm going going to drape an ethernet cable across my living room just so my connection is 1 Gbps still instead of 400+ Mbps.
There is an xkcd for this https://xkcd.com/927/
Have you ever bought a product because "the Bluetooth integration is so good?" I'm sure a few people have. But it's not like you choose a car or phone because of it.
Since everything else I cared about (price, legroom, etc) was basically the same, the brand I went with was the one who's stereo worked better with my iPhone.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We specifically got a printer that only can connect via a USB cable and it's been perfect. But that's not the answer. Why? It's not that much data. WiFi doesn't seem to have some of these problems. Why is Bluetooth so shit?
Because WiFi is only trying to fix one problem: connect your device to a local network. Bluetooth has hundreds of different use-cases.
That is probably true but part of the problem is that, as I recall from years of Intel Developer Forums, Bluetooth was originally focused on mobile headsets and there were a bunch of other wireless technologies floating around for other purposes.
However, for whatever historical reasons, Bluetooth through a number of iterations pretty much ended up gobbling up all the non-WiFi wireless use cases (other than cellular and NFC of course). And it arguably wasn't really suited for a lot of them.
We do have something better! And we’ve had it for decades. It’s a cable.
Wireless wins for all my uses. I can easily bike with my Beats wireless headphones. I can easily run. I can get up from the computer while watching a YouTube show or if I'm in the middle of a video chat and still want to listen in while I make a quick tea or something in the kitchen. I've literally gone swimming with my wireless headphones. Heads up front crawl, but still. These things are awesome. Why on earth would…
Are any of these problems actually Bluetooth problems? It seems the data protocol works just fine. It appears to me that the various devices just handle the associated tasks poorly. Eg you could take a call on your phone while playing music on your computer, if your phone had the functionality to send the music via Bluetooth and keep the phone conversation separate.
Exactly. At this point, it's not the protocol. It's devices with shitty implementations of the protocol.