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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

#251

Post by Nathanael_M »

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…

James Keelaghan will take priority over U2. Ever time I step into my 2014 Hyundai Elantra I am greeted with Canadian folk music. Definitely a step up.

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

#252

Post by bigie35 »

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;…

Highly likely I'm misremembering, but a decade (at least) or so, there was an iTunes promo where Itunes literally pushed a free U2 album to everyone who had an iTunes account for free.

I specifically remember the internet hate that received at the time haha.

Here's a link: https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/09/09/the-free-u2-album...

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

#253

Post by Koshkin »

oblio wrote: post #117
badthingfactory wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any time a relative asks me which printer they should buy, I tell them to get the cheapest Brother laser printer they can find without wifi. I mostly do this to save myself support calls, but it's also the printer I use in my own house.

I bought a wireless HP printer. Besides the fact that I never printed anything from my phone. It literally required reinstallation (not restart!) to print again, every time, on Windows. It needed an HP account to be able to scan. Locally. I just chucked it out and got a USB Brother.

> It needed an HP account to be able to scan.

You can use Windows apps to do the scanning without creating an HP account.

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

#254

Post by treeman79 »

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…

Would love if CarPlay would just work constantly. On my Ford remote start results in it not working 50% of the time. Regular start fails 10% of the time.

Solution is turn car off for 10 minutes or so. I assume some capacitor has to drain fully.

This is apparently just a known bug.

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

#255

Post by EMM_386 »

In my Mazda, every time I get into my car my Android phone alerts me there is a Blutooth pairing request from the car.

Whether I authorize it or not, Bluetooth doesn't work.

Then this occurs a second time about 1 minute later, with exactly the same results. I have to deal with this every time I use the car.

When I try to have the car and phone scan for each other, they don't show up. The car doesn't see the phone, and the phone doesn't see the car.

I have given up even trying to get it to work.

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

#256

Post by seanalltogether »

smackeyacky wrote: post #58
nine_k wrote: post #54

I tried to learn why BT is still somehow painful to use, and the article basically does not have an answer. My take from comments here and my experience: - Makers of BT devices can't agree on many important common things (easy discovery / pairing mode, priority, etc), and have little incentive to seek agreement. It's like phone chargers before USB. - Makers of BT devices tend to cut corners and/or add not-entirely-st…

They do agree on an awful lot of stuff, but the tools provided by the Bluetooth guys aged very poorly (i.e. their tools for generating GATT interfaces as C code is absolute garbage, full of holes and has a built-in buffer overflow capability). The one thing nobody seems to do is stick to the standards provided, because they simply aren't broad enough for the creative stuff that people do with Bluetooth and Bluetooth…

> The one thing nobody seems to do is stick to the standards provided, because they simply aren't broad enough for the creative stuff that people do with Bluetooth and Bluetooth LE.

Yeah, I've been working with BLE now for clients for 3 years, it seems like most people think of their devices as little CRUD servers (unless you're doing genuine pairing with constant data streams). BLE would be much better using a simple REST model than the GATT table model.

> Also, the bluetooth library in Android started out terrible and didn't improve despite being replaced

One thing I'll give Apple credit for is having a very solid bluetooth stack. We've had only a handful of BLE connection failures on our testers apples devices over the past 3 years, whereas on android test devices we get at least one connection failure DAILY that interrupts test cases from running. Furthermore Android devices just reach a point of critical failure where you need to just restart the device to resume BLE.

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

#257

Post by macNchz »

blackhaz wrote: post #114
rjzzleep wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There used to be a link to remove the album[1] but it seems like they shut it down. So the only way for you to remove the album from your account is to contact apple support. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-29208540#:~:text=Apple%2... .

I also have an alarm set up I cannot delete. It says "pick up Matt from school." It migrated all the way from iPhone 7 to this X. But he has grown up since and I don't need to pick him up anymore. I'll include this in my request.

I’ve had a similar saga with my Apple ID profile picture. I snapped it in a poorly lit kitchen with my new laptop’s built-in webcam in December 2008, and in spite of occasional efforts to remove it, it has propagated itself back and forth between devices and services for so long it now looks like a “needs more jpeg” meme. Over the years several people have exclaimed from behind me as I open my laptop “where the hell did that picture come from!?”.

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

#258

Post by chrsw »

Last time I checked the Bluetooth and BLE specs were massive documents. That's always a red flag for me. Low level tech like this should be clear, simple, concise and unambiguous. You can add complexity to the layers on top, if you must, if your application demands it. But as it stands the designers of the spec let the complexity escape everywhere.

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

#259

Post by eimrine »

When I first time interacted with Bluetooth, my expectation was that when I pair a telephone and a PC, I can share sound and Internets in both directions exactly as it is possible to do that with files. It was maybe 15 years ago and all what has changed nowadays is a... low energy only? Maybe we the people have to liberate the Bluetooth stack somewhat?

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

#260

Post by meibo »

seer wrote: post #192
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…

The general idea I think is that once you start the car, it just send a play command the moment it detects the connection. And in theory it _can_ provide a really nice experience. For example I'm walking to my car listening to an audio book, the moment I start the car, BT is connecting to the phone and moves the audio playback from my AirPods to my car speaker without skipping a beat, its really impressive. Additiona…

> Now why apple just defaults to Apple Music, and not "your music player of choice

I think this should be obvious, they want you further into the ecosystem.

If every morning when you get into your car your iPhone starts playing Apple Music, you're more likely to switch to Apple Music for all of your listening than to get another phone.

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