Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades

I have a pair of Anker Bluetooth ear buds I really like. Fit nice, decent noise canceling.

They are just a fricken nightmare to sync. It took me half an hour of fiddling with them to get both of them to sync at the same time to my phone when I bought them.

My wife's headphones died and without asking she borrowed them. She messed with them and was unable to get them to sync to her phone.

Since then I have now been unable to get them both to connect to my phone reliably at the same time. It's been a couple months.

All that said, that’s the only real Bluetooth device that's given me more than 30 seconds trouble in recent years.

I've had pretty good luck with phones and most things (audio has various codec mismatches if you're going for high quality, but that's all at least visible on boxes), but not computers and [nearly anything except HID]. HID works great everywhere, and battery life is amazing, I love bluetooth for HID.

Bluetooth headsets and computers seems like a special kind of flaky-hell. I tried ~8 modern high-end headsets on 4 laptops (2 windows and 2 macs, both pairs ~3-4 years apart age wise) while trying to pick one, and NONE of the headsets connected to every laptop without issues. EVERY headset had periodic audio drops at least after a couple minutes with at least 2 machines, if not all 4, and many had much more severe issues (disconnects, disconnects that wouldn't reconnect, not connecting at all, etc).

^ All of those headsets connected fine to two different phones, and used the codecs I'd expect... usually anyway. Good enough for the most part, and only 2 had periodic audio drops.

Since you seem to know the field somewhat, what the heck is going on with computer bluetooth audio stacks? Are phones just buying all the good chips and bluetooth-OS-integrating-engineers?

That's because there is no profile for that, as per the spec the hands free profile only supports Mono

This changes with LE Audio (spec released in March iirc) which is much more channel oriented (e.g. 2 channels stereo playback + 2 more stereo microphone), has a new codec (LC3) and has support in the upcoming android release

Almost every printer sold in the last decade supports IPP Everywhere, which has robust support on Windows, macOS, Linux, *BSD, ChromeOS, Android, and anything that can run CUPS. It's completely driverless, too.

> One thing I can fault the Bluetooth SIG is that the spec is very complex and full of optional bits which could lead to many pitfalls for the uninitiated engineers, though Bluetooth chips from reputable manufacturers who know what they're doing, like CSR, TI, SiLabs and Nordic are nearly bulletproof in this regard.

Earlier spec versions aren't just incredibly complex - they're contradictory.

That's what led to so many manufacturers doing their own thing in very slightly incompatible ways. You can pick up two certified bluetooth devices and find them to have different behaviour in the exact same circumstances. In fact, some of the best devices are ones that aren't certified, because they ignore the spec and act more reasonable than it demands.

Apple famously skips several of the mandatory verification handshakes to reduce latency in their AirPods. Not optional, mandatory. Because the spec doesn't work that well in the real world.