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Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades

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181–190 of 599 posts

Re: Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades

#181
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Re: Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades

#182
post #164
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or the improved sound quality comes at a cost?

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?

Re: Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-spe…

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

Re: Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades

#184

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!

Re: Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades

#185

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…

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...

Re: Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades

#186
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.

Re: Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades

#187
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).

Re: Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades

#188
post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-spe…

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…

>> 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 )

Re: Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades

#189

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…

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.

Re: Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades

#190
post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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!
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