Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades • Hacker News Board

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

#271

Post by rootusrootus » Wed, Jul 20, 2022, 1:31 PM UTC

badthingfactory wrote: post #73

Paul_S wrote: post #56

Let me pass on to you some ancient Chinese... er, German engineering wisdom: He who understands wireless communication uses cables.

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 kinda did this. Cheapest Brother printer, but with WiFi. Which is exclusively how we use it. Been flawless, printing from windows laptops, macbooks, iphones...

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

#272

Post by NikolaNovak » Wed, Jul 20, 2022, 1:32 PM UTC

themaninthedark wrote: post #226

aliqot wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine how I feel, I don't carry or use phones, period. The level of outright indignation I experience is pretty high. People resort to levels of disgust when met with someone who openly rejects carrying around a little bother-box in their pocket as if I'm some type of unwashed knave.

Yeah that sucks. I graduated collage in 2008 and I refused to get a phone before that point. The amount of people complaining how it is inconvenient that they have to call your room phone instead of texting, how they can't make plans(in reality, it is a crutch for lack of planning), etc. For a while, it was the same with Facebook.

If it may be a helpful perspective - I don't care if I phone one's room phone or cell phone; but texting/messaging is a completely different mode of communication than a phone call to begin with.

Texting, like messaging and email, are async whereas phone is sync. For 99% of my communication, I don't need to talk to somebody right now (and they don't need to talk to me right now :). I don't care if other party has a cell phone or not, but written comms is preferred to voice comm for large number of my requirements.

Similarly, email/messaging/text can trivially be a group conversation, and plans can be narrowed down or many people can be informed quickly; again, don't care if other party has cell phone or not, but in many circumstances I'd prefer to send one quick message/email/text, than to call 7 people.

(lest you think I lack empathy, I am of course on the other side of the equation too! My family is all on Whatsapp, which for me is the worst messaging system that an evil mind could possibly invent, so I feel the pressure :)

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

#273

Post by focusedone » Wed, Jul 20, 2022, 1:32 PM UTC

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…

Modern problems require modern solutions. Nice work.

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

#274

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jul 20, 2022, 1:33 PM UTC

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…

[deleted]

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

#275

Post by jjoonathan » Wed, Jul 20, 2022, 1:34 PM UTC

DavidPeiffer wrote: post #121

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the spec is very complex I once printed out the BT5 spec (just the core), for Ss and Gs (on my employer's dime). I had a stack of 3-inch (large) 3-ring binders on my desk, reaching 2ft high (0.6m). It was well over 2,000 pages. It would have been five times that, if I had printed out the various profiles, and whatnot. BT is crazy. The difference between "Classic" and BLE is frustrating. I suspect that soon, all BT…

> I once printed out the BT5 spec (just the core), for Ss and Gs (on my employer's dime). I've never dealt with Bluetooth myself, but once heard/read that a company could follow that spec perfectly and their device wouldn't work with large swaths of devices. The claim was that companies implement something that's Bluetooth adjacent but there are some non-conformances that everybody "just does" to make it work the maj…

The BT spec defines 5 overly complicated ways to do any given thing but most devices only support 1 or 2. Multiply by the number of things that need to be done. In practice the compatibility situation is "test all pairs" and just as bad as if there were no standard at all.

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

#276

Post by CharlesW » Wed, Jul 20, 2022, 1:35 PM UTC

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…

> …since I'm an Apple Music user, whenever I start the car, it just defaults to whatever's I've been listening to there… […] Now why apple just defaults to Apple Music, and not "your music player of choice a.k.a. Spotify" is questionable…

As you noted, it continues playing whatever you were playing in whatever app you were using, with no preference for Apple Music (I'm also a Music subscriber). If you were playing something with Spotify, that's what will continue to play.

I do wish it were configurable with contextual defaults. Too often, I start my car and my sleep sounds app continues to play "Airplane Interior".

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

#277

Post by haplessam » Wed, Jul 20, 2022, 1:37 PM UTC

I can't enable bluetooth on my Sony TV because it displays a pop up dialog box when anything tries to connect with it, which is frequent due to some unknown neighbor's device constantly trying to pair with it 24/7. It renders the TV unwatchable. There's no way to disable bluetooth pairing on the TV aside from disabling bluetooth entirely - a well known design flaw. Naively, the TV designers assumed all devices (and people) are well behaved, and it was thought to be convenient to have one less configuration mode.

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

#278

Post by NikolaNovak » Wed, Jul 20, 2022, 1:38 PM UTC

stkdump wrote: post #231

askvictor wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe Apple had a sinister plan here... First, they make all of their own Apple gear's bluetooth work really well with other Apple gear (which they generally do). Then get rid of the cables, and everyone else will copy Apple because that seems to be what other companies do. But everyone else's bluetooth implementations suck (which they generally do), so people think that Android/Samsung/etc aren't as good as Apple wh…

I dunno, people here report having problems with iPhones pairing to their cars. I never had a problem with Android phones pairing with my car. Or with my soundcores. As matter of fact, it works so much better, that even though my phone still has a 3.5mm, never thought I would have to use it and would be quite ok if my next phone came without. Back before I had my first soundcores I would always be annoyed with the co…

I think Bluetooth is a different experience for different people.

Couple of questions that may help bridge the gap:

Do you have other people with cell phones who regularly pair to your car? (this is my pain point - I am getting ready to take kids to school, but minivan pairs to my wife's phone at home; or conversely, my wife is going out for groceries, but instead of pairing to her phone that's in the car, minivan pairs up with my phone 30ft and one floor up, and TAKES OVER my own bluetooth headset, so now she's hearing my work call in the car as she drives away, and everybody on the call is hearing my screaming kids, while I'm wondering why everybody has turned silent :P ).

Do other people pair with your soundcores; do you have multitude of headphones you pair with? (I have multiple content devices - work iPhone, personal galaxy note, and couple of tablets; conversely, I have a work boom headset as well as entertainment headphones; and then we throw my wife into the mix. Neither Android nor iPhone make us feel easily in control of what's happening).

What's your experience pairing with friends' cars, and home entertainment devices via bluetooth, or a net-new device? (it's a whole other fun party drinking game trying to join to another person's home devices! Devices may have meaningless names that are not indicative of what they are, or they may need to be in some special mode to be discoverable, some may require pins some don't, it's hard to confirm which side should initiate, some will show as an address until you click them at which point they'll become a name but you realize you took over neighbour's movie, etc etc etc! :)

If there's a way to create a priority list, a automatic connect or manual connect list, or create any kind of sophisticated rules for Bluetooth, I'm not aware of it.

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

#279

Post by nyanpasu64 » Wed, Jul 20, 2022, 1:40 PM UTC

amiga-workbench wrote: post #159

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.

Or worse, buying a touchscreen car stereo unit from China, that's basically an Android tablet running on bottom-of-the-barrel hardware, and its Bluetooth headset mode switches to fucking 64 kbit/s CVSD which sounds like an 8 KHz phone line plus added "clipping" sounds from slope overload distortion.

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

#280

Post by ralfd » Wed, Jul 20, 2022, 1:40 PM UTC

bigbillheck wrote: post #78

grnmamba wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone except Apple was already on USB. And even in the pre-smartphone days, phone chargers always worked reliably. Phone charging is and was the complete opposite of what bluetooth is today.

They most certainly were not: https://www.engadget.com/2009-06-29-nokia-apple-rim-and-othe...

Thankfully that EU initiative failed. They wanted the industry to adopt micro-usb as the standard, which would have sucked and would be worse than the situation today