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Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades

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

#561
post #128

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…

It's definitely a Lexus problem. The BT connection on my Citroen is absolutely 100% flawless. Works every time reliably. But it's literally just a dumb audio and telephony connection. Anything more complicated than that is guaranteed to be absolutely a universally huge fucking shit show.

Its funny as I have the toyota rav4 2021 hybrid, (toyota owns lexus) and have none of these problems. My money is on the shitty 'interpretation' of 'resume last song' between the car and the phone.

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

#562
post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not actually Android, or iOS. It’s the car audio system sending the Play command.

Oh I see, that's terrible

In the Audible settings (and i think in your OS) "continue playback after connecting headphones". Or just uninstall the app if you dont use it.

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

#563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple have really, really weird BT stack issues.

Legit everyone does. I one time had to convince a VW dealership to read a TSB issued for my 2012 Golf Cheater Edition, bluetooth only played the left channel of audio, but it played on both sides, so you needed music that was different enough on each channel to really notice. Dealership didn't want to believe me until I showed them left/right channel tests on youtube on both android and iphones and told them to use t…

Props on getting a response from apple. I've had significantly worse fun getting their security team around that time to respond.

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

#564
post #537

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…

We had the same problem in our 2016 Outback until the head unit died. The only thing we really miss about it is the backup camera; but we can live without that, and apparently the stereo, as a fair price for being free of bluetooth audio hell.

Not sure if it matters, but many aftermarket head units can have the reversing camera connected to restore factory functionality, I believe the average HN reader could do this.

Edit: https://motoristcare.com/how-to-connect-backup-camera-to-hea...

Is a pretty good example on how to complete this.

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

#565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's as simple as Jobs thinking people would like a free album, but they had no mechanism to "offer" an album, so they just added the entitlement to everyone's accounts. Then they had no mechanism to "remove" an entitlement, because why would anyone want to remove content that they "bought"?

Jobs died 3 years prior to this.

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

#566

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…

This is one of those stories you read where you thought it was just you but then realize it’s happening to a bunch of people

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

#567
post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We had the same problem in our 2016 Outback until the head unit died. The only thing we really miss about it is the backup camera; but we can live without that, and apparently the stereo, as a fair price for being free of bluetooth audio hell.

Not sure if it matters, but many aftermarket head units can have the reversing camera connected to restore factory functionality, I believe the average HN reader could do this. Edit: https://motoristcare.com/how-to-connect-backup-camera-to-hea... Is a pretty good example on how to complete this.

Thanks for the tip!

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

#568
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…

I had a Mercedes lease for three years with the same problem of automatically playing the first song as sorted alphabetically. In my case, it was "A Boy Named Sue" by Johnny Cash. That song loses its humor after you hear it a few hundred times.

Heh, decades ago a Phil Collins tape was stuck in my car's cassette player (yes, that was a thing) and there was no way to switch to radio when there is a tape inside. I guess I listened to that album few hundred times until I decided to do something (probably spray some WD-40) about it.

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

#569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bluetooth experiences will be largely software-dependent. Comparing Airpods on a Macbook to a Windows laptop and some Sony earbuds? It's no contest, Airpods will win every time. If we're, say, testing the Airpods on Windows and the Sony buds on Linux (where they have LDAC support), the tables will be completely turned. All of these headphones are context-sensitive, and will behave differently on different hardware. Y…

> All of the "magic" your AirPods provide are software-based This is actually not true. AirPods contain custom silicon from Apple for the controller that speaks bluetooth, whereas most true wireless headphones use a Qualcomm chip, and therefore suffer the exact same ergonomic issues almost regardless of price. The most obvious way this is shown is that you can be on a call with the right airpod in, then seamlessly ad…

The only feature the wideband chip provides is the device switching and pairing, which is largely redundant with multipoint Bluetooth spec and NFC, respectively. I'll appreciate what Apple did ergonomically, but I found the "smartness" of Airpods to be less reliable than using my XM4s connected to both the devices I was using. I understand the layman's struggle here, but I honestly think most people's bad experiences with Bluetooth were in the Nowadays, I think any phone running Android 10+ or Linux device using Pipewire has the best wireless audio experience I can think of. You can have high-bitrate audio codecs with excellent latency and a connection that's as good as the antennae you have plugged in. AAC and the funnel of buying U1 chip devices doesn't really put up enough of a fight, especially for a company that's long prided itself on delivering quality audio experiences.

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

#570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sony solved open headphone jack while being water proof nearly a decade ago. The idea the phone can't have a headphone jack and be waterproof was a lie pushed by Apple to save money on not having to put in a headphone jack. I've been using Sony phones in the shower and at the beach for years now and only briefly switched to a different company when they tried to pull that headphone jack removal of crap briefly when I…

My understanding was that it’s always been about the physical size and the impact it has on the stack-up of iPhone components. Looking at a standard mini-jack vs. my iPhone 13, the connector itself is close to 40% of the thickness of the phone. Add the additional size for the jack’s structure and you quickly get to a point where the phone has to be thicker. Now, has Apple gotten too obsessive about thin phones? Maybe…

I don't see how that could be true. The thinnest ever iPhone was the 6, and it had a headphone jack. The phones since then have been 3-20% thicker.

Some searching suggests that 5mm is about the point where it won't fit, and iPhones are comfortably 7+. One of these phones is 5.6mm thick with a headphone jack and has near-zero bezels.

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