I've always had this hunch that the Bluetooth protocol is somewhat underspecified - if you just implement the spec, you're going to have something that mostly works in the happy case, but you gotta do a bunch more to make it work consistently under less-than-ideal real world conditions (which companies like Jabra and Apple then tend to do). Any hardware people wanna chime in and tell me if I'm close or not?
Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades
21–30 of 599 posts
Re: Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades
#22I've not had problems with bluetooth for years. Printers on the other hand, never seem to work smoothly. How?
I buy stupid printers with good cups support and plug them into a printer server. It has been robust for about 7 years, and I have only had to update the raspberry pi once to a new LTS release.
OTOH I am the kind of guy that only buys wired headphones.
Re: Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades
#23I've always had this hunch that the Bluetooth protocol is somewhat underspecified - if you just implement the spec, you're going to have something that mostly works in the happy case, but you gotta do a bunch more to make it work consistently under less-than-ideal real world conditions (which companies like Jabra and Apple then tend to do). Any hardware people wanna chime in and tell me if I'm close or not?
You're not. When something in bt doesn't work it's caused by two things: a regular bug in the stack, or a feature of the spec that was implemented incorrectly which comes from ambiguous wording in the spec or simply the fact that it's several thousand pages long. This is usually not a problem if you have two devices using the same stack talking to each other but normally that's not the case.
Re: Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades
#24People seem to complain a lot about Bluetooth, yet I owned dozens of devices of all vintages and they all played nicely with each other, except for a cheapo pair of MPow earbuds off Amazon. I even managed to transfer old school photos off my ancient 2003 NEC flip phone to my current Android phone even though the former uses Bluetooth 1.1 and the latter 5.1. I also fondly remember using Bluetooth in school to transfer…
Yet every month my Apple AirPods stop connecting with my Apple iPhone, until I hard reboot the iPhone. And a $70 Bluetooth headset that wouldn’t connect to a brand new Apple laptop until I restarted it 4 times, rebooted the Mac twice, and toggled the pairing mode about 8 times. And Bose headsets that don’t connect to iPhone for 2-3 attempts.
Re: Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades
#25People seem to complain a lot about Bluetooth, yet I owned dozens of devices of all vintages and they all played nicely with each other, except for a cheapo pair of MPow earbuds off Amazon. I even managed to transfer old school photos off my ancient 2003 NEC flip phone to my current Android phone even though the former uses Bluetooth 1.1 and the latter 5.1. I also fondly remember using Bluetooth in school to transfer…
I have over a dozen Bluetooth audio devices & near no complaints. across my various personal & work laptops & phones, everything works reliably & great. some of my oldest headsets have some dropouts while exercising and that's about it. it's very confusing reading anti-bluetooth articles & posts. i don't feel like we're using the same technologies.
Re: Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades
#26People seem to complain a lot about Bluetooth, yet I owned dozens of devices of all vintages and they all played nicely with each other, except for a cheapo pair of MPow earbuds off Amazon. I even managed to transfer old school photos off my ancient 2003 NEC flip phone to my current Android phone even though the former uses Bluetooth 1.1 and the latter 5.1. I also fondly remember using Bluetooth in school to transfer…
Yet every month my Apple AirPods stop connecting with my Apple iPhone, until I hard reboot the iPhone. And a $70 Bluetooth headset that wouldn’t connect to a brand new Apple laptop until I restarted it 4 times, rebooted the Mac twice, and toggled the pairing mode about 8 times. And Bose headsets that don’t connect to iPhone for 2-3 attempts.
That sounds more like an Apple Bluetooth stack issue at their OS level rather than something wrong with the Bluetooth chip/tech itself. It's where you should complain to Apple or ask for refunds/replacements.
Granted, Apple is not alone here since both Google and Microsoft really botched their Bluetooth stacks on their OSs. Especially Google who hasn't learned you can't treat your C driver/embedded SW like front-end JS code.
Re: Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yet every month my Apple AirPods stop connecting with my Apple iPhone, until I hard reboot the iPhone. And a $70 Bluetooth headset that wouldn’t connect to a brand new Apple laptop until I restarted it 4 times, rebooted the Mac twice, and toggled the pairing mode about 8 times. And Bose headsets that don’t connect to iPhone for 2-3 attempts.
That sounds more like an Apple Bluetooth stack issue at their OS level rather than something wrong with the Bluetooth chip/tech itself. It's where you should complain to Apple or ask for refunds/replacements. Granted, Apple is not alone here since both Google and Microsoft really botched their Bluetooth stacks on their OSs. Especially Google who hasn't learned you can't treat your C driver/embedded SW like front-end…
Apple have really, really weird BT stack issues.
Re: Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades
#28Re: Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades
#29I'm still annoyed that most bluetooth headphones haven't figured out how to provide stereo sound at the same time as using the microphone. There is definitely enough bandwidth in bluetooth 5
worksforme on Linux, MacOS and Android. I have a Bose QC35 and it just works, now for years, reliably. On Linux, it used to work quite okayish with pulseaudio, even automatic switching between profiles, when an application requested microphone. Since pipewire came around, much higher quality.
It works, but the quality is noticeably reduced. Gaming (and using VoIP in e.g. CSGO) on this profile is practically unusable, the quality of sound is so diminished that it is very annoying.
Re: Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades
#30I've not had problems with bluetooth for years. Printers on the other hand, never seem to work smoothly. How?
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.
And oh man does it have issues. Oftentimes you have to do SNMP. Take scanning for instance, many devices will just give you compressed JPEGs over their HTTP interface without any option for choosing otherwise
Now they'll claim you can specify it a variety of ways such as picking the document type, but they'll just ignore you. I forget all the permutations but I tried them all.
I've had to reverse engineer their windows program from pcap files to get the real protocol
I've spent a good deal of time in cups supporting these systems. Reminds me that I'll need to convince cups to take my fixes somehow (which first requires me to convince them this is real; not as easy as you think because there's lots of hardware variance - you can't just reproduce random printer X and then I have to convince them that the XML documentation of claimed support is either incorrect or useless; then I'll have to convince them that SNMP is the way to go, then and only then, if I walk that tightrope can I put forth my solution ; gotta love the ceremony).