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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

#341

Post by vxNsr »

donatj wrote: post #12

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 un…

It was for this reason that I settled on AirPods. I tried nearly every single wireless earbud available at every price point, from free to $250 and none worked as well as the AirPods when it came to connecting reliably every time. I tested a whole bunch of relatively expensive earbuds for a week, some were a pain to connect from the get go, and never got better, others worked the first time but then got annoying after that. AirPods we’re great, since then I’ve had the occasional hiccup, but it’s like at most once a month and I use them multiple times a day.

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

#342

Post by BoxOfRain »

ricardobayes wrote: post #166
blackhaz wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We should start a club! My son just bought a 3.5 mm adapter for the phone. Turns out the younger generation prefers wired too.

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…

Of course the true FAANG solution would be to include a 3.5mm jack but disable it in software, requiring £4.99 per month to enable it with a rent-seeking subscription service.

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

#343

Post by hedora »

Neither the article nor the comments provide a theory as to why it is such a train wreck.

Unlike most networking technologies (like Ethernet and WiFi) the Bluetooth spec specifies application level protocols (like audio encodings, metadata, etc).

You could imagine that could work in theory, but in practice, it means that each device's firmware reimplements all sorts of high level stuff.

Imagine you had to use an unpatchable web browser that was bundled with (and ran inside of) a $20 USB -> Ethernet dongle.

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

#344

Post by nucleardog »

treeman79 wrote: post #254
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.

Not quite as bad, but my Subaru is similar. If I'm in the car with my phone when it turns on it connects immediately almost every time.

If I remote start the car and then go out to it it probably connects about 1/5 times. Another 1/5 I can go into the bluetooth settings and manually initiate the connection and it'll work. But a full 60% of the time I have to turn the entire car off and on again for the bluetooth to finally sort its shit out. Thankfully no 10 minute wait necessary.

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

#345

Post by nobleach »

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…

Oh my gosh, I didn't know where this was going with the half-naked shaved guys until you said, "Songs of Innocence"... and immediately it became a shared experience. If I could somehow tell my phone, "NEVER play Apple Music, always defer to Spotify if you have to auto-play anything", I'd do it in a heartbeat.

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

#346

Post by scifibestfi »

feet wrote: post #340
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…

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

I've always assumed this is a bug. Why isn't it just resuming from whatever you were last listening to? And why is this still an issue after so long?

This is one of those things that Steve Jobs would have fired people on the spot for.

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

#347

Post by Blackthorn »

Hapa wrote: post #282
aliqot wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I am extremely puzzled by true wireless bluetooth headphones to a point where it's hard to find high-end wired bluetooth headphones. True wireless have so many drawbacks: - lower battery life yet people got convinced that they last long thanks to powerbank, I meant ,,case" which you need to carry. - bulkier so they stick out of ear one way or another. They fall down easily when changing t-shirts, huddies .. - easy to…

I use them at the gym because I hate having things on my face/head while I'm sweaty. I don't have a use case for wired bluetooth headphones that isn't better served by something with a 3.5mm jack.

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

#348

Post by specialist »

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.

A (very) recent HP inkjet firmware update just broke all inkjet cartridges older than about 18 months. Including cartridges from HP.

Neither the on-device or OS mediated error messages explained this. I only figured it out from other angry users on reddit.

How was my mom supposed to have figured this out? She didn't know that her printer had updated itself a few days earlier. She doesn't even know what a firmware update is.

In a world of class action suites over batteries, chargers, keyboards, etc., why isn't HP being sued?

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

#349

Post by SilasX »

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…

Semi-related: I tried out Microsoft/Ford's SYNC system (voice commands for your car) in '08 and was upset that it didn't seem to support an option for "continue listening to podcast series X where I left off" ... like, the thing you would want to do all the time. (Item 5.)

http://blog.tyrannyofthemouse.com/2008/07/setting-sync-strai...

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

#350

Post by shortsightedsid »

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;…

This....

I have exactly the same problem with the U2 album. In general, I like U2, but that album is a pain. It starts up every now and then in my car with carplay. Especially if I have my phone on with no app in the foreground when I plug it in.

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