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Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades

cnn.com

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

#331

Post by jkaptur »

fleddr wrote: post #313

Bluetooth is absolute garbage, I hate it with a passion even if overall it works in 90% of cases. Just the other day I was connecting my phone to a mobile speaker in the garden. The phone is an inch away from it. Still doesn't connect, just a spinner that times out after a minute with "connection failed". Why does it fail? Who knows. It might work tomorrow. Or on another phone. Or when the weather is different. What…

I feel the same way - it's so interesting how the lack of a mental model causes such frustration! There's perfectly well-understood metaphors for network availability ("how many bars" and so on). I wonder why Bluetooth doesn't use them or create its own, and instead just fails to work.

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

#332

Post by nomy99 »

blackhaz wrote: post #91

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…

I'm not sure if comedy was the intent here, but I laughed a lot.

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

#333

Post by [deleted] »

mcculley wrote: post #300
jefe_ wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 happen…

I had a Mercedes lease for three years with the same problem of automatically playing the first song as sorted alphabetically. In my case, it was "A Boy Named Sue" by Johnny Cash. That song loses its humor after you hear it a few hundred times.

[deleted]

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

#334

Post by pessimizer »

jeffnappi wrote: post #317
listless wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the main problem is exactly as the article states - there no standard for how things connect to each other. If they could just make the connection standard everywhere, that would get rid of a ton of the silliness.

Try getting thousands of organizations to agree on something and then implement it successfully... The complexity of the problem far surpasses that of the technical standards themselves.

That's what we have governments for. Individual companies trying to set standards often just lose business to the companies they interop with, and the one that does best among the interoperable defects (or extends and extinguishes.)

Instead of making individual companies strategize around interop, you just impose it. The real problem is that this doesn't work with regulatory capture, because you need people formulating standards who have both independence and expertise.

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

#335

Post by deelowe »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #141
blackhaz wrote: post #91

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…

Haha, sorry, reminds me - my wife hates U2 with violent passion. Eventually I asked her what caused such burning rage, and she said her car starts playing a specific U2 song every time she turns it on. For years! Eventually I traced it to a promotional album U2 and apple and iTunes pushed to her devices without her knowledge. Man can these things backfire! But yeah we have a 2019 Honda and iPhones xr (not my choice;…

Same. Happened twice, really. Once on the ipod and then the iphone. Made U2 haters out of my wife and myself. I wonder how many people hate U2 music now because this.

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

#336

Post by dllthomas »

blackhaz wrote: post #91

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…

I guess you've gotta ask yourself... cui Bono?

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

#337

Post by allenu »

omnibrain wrote: post #227
NikolaNovak wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha, sorry, reminds me - my wife hates U2 with violent passion. Eventually I asked her what caused such burning rage, and she said her car starts playing a specific U2 song every time she turns it on. For years! Eventually I traced it to a promotional album U2 and apple and iTunes pushed to her devices without her knowledge. Man can these things backfire! But yeah we have a 2019 Honda and iPhones xr (not my choice;…

I feel you man... The Miracle (Of Joey Ramone) must be our most listened Song of all time.

For me it was The Jackson 5's ABC that would play as soon as I plugged my phone into my car. That opening "A buh-buh buh buh" is ingrained in my memory forever.

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

#338

Post by nucleardog »

aliqot wrote: post #183
ricardobayes wrote: post #166

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…

The airpods do one thing much better than anything else I've tried: work with an iPhone.

I went through a few other pairs of bluetooth "true wireless" ear buds and every single one of them would exhibit the normal bluetooth problems. Sometimes one wouldn't connect. Sometimes both wouldn't connect. Sometimes trying to resolve this I'd "forget" them and then not be able to pair them again necessitating pulling out the manual and figuring out how to do a hard reset on some ear buds. And then ending up with only one paired. Etc, etc.

I pretty much exclusively use in-ear headphones to listen to something to fall asleep to, so this is generally happening as I've already wound down and gotten into bed and... now it's tech support time!

I paired the airpods to my phone the first time and have never had them fail to connect immediately since.

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

#339

Post by denimnerd42 »

blackhaz wrote: post #91

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…

this EXACT thing happens on my toyota but it's even more annoying because i'll be using my phone and we stop for gas and then when we turn the car back on U2 starts playing from my wife's phone

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

#340

Post by feet »

jefe_ wrote: post #185
blackhaz wrote: post #91

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 happen…

But why the hell is it autoplaying in the first place? Does apple really hate their customers/users so much that they can't make this an option?

That's completely insane. The more I learn about apple, the more I see extremely hostile UI decisions for literally no reason

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