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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

#471

Post by duderific »

aliqot wrote: post #199
NikolaNovak wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> You're part of the in group, you made it, you have achieved sameness, you have an iPhone. I assumed I was just a grouchy old man (because I am:) but I recently found out what level of social stratification happens for teenagers without iPhone. Immediate judgement, plus the continued dreaded green text box. It is brutal I thought I was exaggerating the iPhone as a status symbol as opposed to actually convenient / t…

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.

It's almost a requirement out in the world. Recently the following come to mind:

- A food truck sends a text when your food is ready

- The menu at the restaurant is only available via a QR code which sends you to a website

- You have to take a picture of your license plate for some parking requirement

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

#472

Post by qbasic_forever »

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…

The specs (there are multiple) are enormous and you honestly have zero hope of fully implementing one from scratch. It's thousands and thousands of pages covering everything from the physical layer all the way up to deep application-layer integration. Manufacturers rely on support libraries and hardware that does most of the work, and until only the last few years most of those on the whole have been total garbage (again because the specs are so massive it just costs too much time and effort to implement them). I don't expect anything less than a team of 10 people all with a mix of senior hardware and software/firmware experience could fully implement bluetooth & bluetooth LE from scratch in less than a year.

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

#473

Post by dmitrygr »

causi wrote: post #186

My biggest problem with Bluetooth is never having a good way to figure out why something's not working right. For example, one time I wanted to transfer photos from a phone to a tablet with no internet. With one on BT 3 and one on BT 4, the theoretical speed should've been 20mbps. Instead it was around 50KB/s. Why? Who knows. My crappy eight year old bluetooth receiver, while not having quite the audio quality of my…

> With one on BT 3 and one on BT 4, the theoretical speed should've been 20mbps

Um, no... I have no idea where you got that number.

Since EDR (BT 2.1) added 3Mbps, no faster modulations were added. And that is raw rate without framing or protocol.

BT3.0 added ability to offload actual xfer to another protocol (like wifi) but nobody implements this

BT4.0 just added LE (another modulation, another set of protocols) at 1 Mbps

BT4.2 added a faster rate of 2Mbps for LE

Source: a full-blown case of PTSD from working on BT for years

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

#474

Post by mandmandam »

crubier wrote: post #357
bigie35 wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

That's literally what the parent comment is describing

It bears repeating. I've tried to remove that f*cking album from my library so many times, on so many devices. It's effectively unkillable; and I'm no stranger to computers.

Why that tax-dodging blowhard felt he had the right to squeeze his turd of an album onto each and every apple product I buy for, presumably, the rest of my life is unfathomable.

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

#475

Post by rightbyte »

StevePerkins wrote: post #459
feet wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

As others have already explained, the autoplay is because the car sends a "play" command as soon as the bluetooth connects. From the auto manufacturer's perspective, this kinda "makes sense". Because that was the legacy behavior, pre-bluetooth. If you turn off your car with the radio playing, then the radio will start playing again the next time you crank up the car. If drivers didn't want that, then hey... they woul…

> If drivers didn't want that, then hey... they would have turned off the stereo before turning off their car.

There was a time of honey and milk where we could visualy inspect the power/volume nob before ignition and see if the radio was on or off. Maybe even turn the nob with a reassuring little feedback click.

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

#476

Post by xyst »

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…

infotainment systems built by car manufacturers are just absolutely dreadful from an end user perspective. I have had a similar experience in the past (albeit much less of an annoyance) but was fixed 3 years later in a firmware update while randomly visiting the dealership for warranty items.

android auto/apple car play are an absolute dream to use on the other hand. If I buy another car, it will be a must have (rather than an aftermarket accessory)

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

#477

Post by TylerE »

the_watcher wrote: post #409
nucleardog wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The airpods do one thing much better than anything else I've tried: work with an iPhone. I went through a few other pairs of bluetooth "true wireless" ear buds and every single one of them would exhibit the normal bluetooth problems. Sometimes one wouldn't connect. Sometimes both wouldn't connect. Sometimes trying to resolve this I'd "forget" them and then not be able to pair them again necessitating pulling out the…

This is why AirPods are popular. While this drives audiophiles and geeks who obsess over performance of their technology (not knocking them, I’m one of them for many devices) up the wall, the reality is most people are not audiophiles and can barely tell the difference. What they want are reasonably comfortable headphones that just work, and Bluetooth is so famously bad at this that AirPods stand out.

> the reality is most people are not audiophiles and can barely tell the difference.

That hasn't been my experience at all. The differences, even to a lay person, or not subtle.

Now, I can believe that many don't care, I can't believe that they can't tell.

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

#478

Post by eternityforest »

The only painful points I've seen for BT:

Some devices can't pair with multiple hosts(Not a big deal for me)

My phone has a bug where BT will turn itself off occasionally, and there are basically no times when I want BT to be off.

The latency is just a tiny bit too high for it to replace wireless mics in live sound, real missed opportunity to finally standardize that.

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

#479

Post by Hapa »

hadlock wrote: post #403
Hapa wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> it's hard to find high-end wired bluetooth headphones pre-covid we had an open floorplan office, typical valley startup layout, no noise dampening etc Everyone had the bose 35 quiet comfort i or ii noise canceling headphones. I was one of the new guys so started off with a $60 panasonic noise canceling headphone, and later when released got the sony ...mx4000? noise canceling headphones because they had USB-C in ~2…

Yeah those headphones are great, but they are not true wireless.

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

#480

Post by dudus »

onlyusername wrote: post #460
gedy wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This drives me crazy as I don't use Apple Music and I don't want to keep playing handful of songs I bought 15 years ago on iTunes. I've yet to find out how to disable this.

Delete the Apple Music app from your phone.

I don't have an iPhone. But at least on OSX I didn't find a clean way to remove Apple Music.

Every time I accidentally tap play on my bluetooth headset it opens Apple Music and asks me accept the ToS, which I happily reject. It's a daily thing for me because it's almost impossible to put my headphones on without triggering a play due to bad button placement.

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