[HN Gopher] Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology ...
___________________________________________________________________
Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two
decades
Author : cpeterso
Score : 566 points
Date : 2022-07-20 06:18 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cnn.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cnn.com)
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| People seem to complain a lot about Bluetooth, yet I owned dozens
| of devices of all vintages and they all played nicely with each
| other, except for a cheapo pair of MPow earbuds off Amazon.
|
| I even managed to transfer old school photos off my ancient 2003
| NEC flip phone to my current Android phone even though the former
| uses Bluetooth 1.1 and the latter 5.1. I also fondly remember
| using Bluetooth in school to transfer ringtones and wallpapers to
| that phone from my Windows XP PC, or to and from other kids'
| phones and it always worked.
|
| Maybe I was really lucky, but for all its apparent faults
| Bluetooth has always served me well and I personally can't really
| fault it for its intended purpose.
|
| As former SDR developer who dived into Bluetooth firmware at some
| point, I can only attribute the connectivity issues some
| Bluetooth devices have to just poor firmware design with
| insuficient testing, or most commonly, bad antenna design with
| insufficient real world testing from the device manufacturer
| (experienced RF graybeard engineers are expensive $$$, and most
| HW companies are sweatshops who pay their engineers peanuts, so
| there's the main problem that leads to the infamous Bluetooth
| connectivity issues IMHO), and not to issues with Bluetooth tech
| itself, fact confirmed after lengthy discussions with our HW guru
| in the lab. From my experience Sony, Bose and Panasonic put great
| thought into antenna design while Samsung and LG can be pretty
| hit or miss. I have not looked into Apple's though, so I can't
| say, but from the rest of their HW design and the talent they
| usually have in the HW department, I can assume it's top notch as
| well.
|
| The 2.4GHz spectrum is way more crowded today than it was in 1999
| when the first Bluetooth version came out, so getting
| uninterrupted real-time audio streams reliably on it is hard, but
| not impossible.
|
| One thing I can fault the Bluetooth SIG is that the spec is very
| complex and full of optional bits which could lead to many
| pitfalls for the uninitiated engineers and worse, gives
| developers too much freedom in implementation, meaning your
| widget might not play well with another widget because each took
| their allowed freedom in different directions, though Bluetooth
| chips from reputable manufacturers who know what they're doing,
| like CSR, TI, SiLabs and Nordic are nearly bulletproof in this
| regard, provided you also do a good job on your antenna design.
| dhsysusbsjsi wrote:
| Yet every month my Apple AirPods stop connecting with my Apple
| iPhone, until I hard reboot the iPhone. And a $70 Bluetooth
| headset that wouldn't connect to a brand new Apple laptop until
| I restarted it 4 times, rebooted the Mac twice, and toggled the
| pairing mode about 8 times. And Bose headsets that don't
| connect to iPhone for 2-3 attempts.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| That sounds more like an Apple Bluetooth stack issue at their
| OS level rather than something wrong with the Bluetooth
| chip/tech itself. It's where you should complain to Apple or
| ask for refunds/replacements.
|
| Granted, Apple is not alone here since both Google and
| Microsoft really botched their Bluetooth stacks on their OSs.
| Especially Google who hasn't learned you can't treat your C
| driver/embedded SW like front-end JS code.
| worthless-trash wrote:
| Apple have really, really weird BT stack issues.
| wildrhythms wrote:
| I find that my Apple Macbooks (I have a couple) tend to
| try to pair with my headphones more "aggressively" than
| any other device, even when my Macbook has its lid closed
| and in my backpack, it immediately jumps in and pairs
| with things that I'm trying to pair with something else
| (my phone usually). Very annoying
| RedShift1 wrote:
| On my Macbook Pro, when bluetooth is on, the bluetooth
| process uses 100% CPU. So I turn off bluetooth, process
| goes away, but every once in a while it turns itself on
| without me asking, bye battery life -_-
| joecool1029 wrote:
| 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 their own phones to test. It
| took about an hour to flash the repaired firmware on.
|
| Android is on its like 3rd bluetooth stack now?
| Gabeldorsche, since the meme is rewriting in rust. Every
| device can support a different number of codecs,
| everything works on the fallback (or should) but the high
| definition codecs are a crapshoot.
|
| I remember getting the first gen iphone SE and having a
| radar open with Apple as all bluetooth audio sounded like
| it was playing through tin foil speakers, they did fix it
| but here was the original thread on it:
| https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7521352
| t_mann wrote:
| 'It's not Bluetooth's fault, everyone is just using it
| wrong' does not sound good.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| I mean, if I give you a hammer, and you use it to drive
| nails by hitting them with the handle, then it's not
| really the hammer's fault, is it?
|
| What makes complex tech components like Bluetooth any
| different?
|
| Also, Bluetooth isn't a single product made by a single
| company that dictates the standard and has the golden
| implementation.
|
| To have Bluetooth audio between your phone and you PC for
| example, you can have different Bluetooth chips on each
| device, each with its own different firmware, then the OS
| on your PC and phone has a different driver and stack
| that interfaces to the Bluetooth chip and then there's
| the antenna design which links the two Bluetooth chips
| via the air. All these pieces need to come together in
| perfect harmony for you to enjoy seamless audio between
| two device.
|
| If any of the manufacturers fucked up the antenna design,
| or the firmware on the chip, or the driver/stack on the
| OS, then your entire experience can fall apart and
| testing/debugging these thousands of permutations of
| various different pieces is nearly impossible. That's why
| Apple usually goes their own route towards proprietary
| tech they can fully control over the entire stack.
| [deleted]
| michaelt wrote:
| _> What makes complex tech components like Bluetooth any
| different?_
|
| A hammer will be reliable if the user uses it correctly,
| which it's possible to do.
|
| With bluetooth I have the most popular, widely sold
| smartphone and the most popular, widely sold sports
| watch. They both claim to be compatible. I'm using both
| precisely as instructed. And sometimes they just....
| don't see one another.
|
| This isn't user error.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| Sorry but you completely misunderstood my argument. In
| this example you are not the customer of the hammer, as
| you're not the one buying the Bluetooth chips and SW/FW
| for them, but the phone/widget manufacturer is buying the
| hammer(chips) and he's responsible for using it correctly
| (FW and antenna design) to build a product where
| Bluetooth works well.
|
| But like I said in the comment above, if the phone/widget
| manufacturer fucks up the Bluetooth implementation
| (misuses the hammer) because they cheap out and buy the
| cheapest no-name Bluetooth chips they can find on the
| market instead of buying from established companies, and
| then farm out the FW and antenna design to the cheapest
| sweatshop in Shenzhen, Bangalore or Eastern Europe since
| cost cutting and crunch in the consumer hardware industry
| is rampant and everything gets nickel and dimed to
| fractions of a cent while being rushed out the door to
| meet Christmas sales season or some other arbitrary
| product release deadline, then the phone/widget
| manufacturer who sold you the device is to blame for the
| rushed and buggy implementation, not Bluetooth itself.
|
| So to conclude, if your bluetooth phone and watch are
| buggy, then blame their manufacturers for improper
| Bluetooth implementation and validation and ask for
| fixes/replacements/refunds, as a correct Bluetooth
| implementation is possible to do if you hire skilled
| engineers ($$$) and give them time to perform validation
| tests (more $$$), but instead, most of the widget
| manufacturers(including car companies) cheap out, like I
| said before, and cut dozens of corners to get their
| product out the door quickly and cheaply so they can skim
| more of the profits.
|
| I hope it's clear now.
|
| Source: Former FW engineer for Bluetooth widgets
| [deleted]
| Groxx wrote:
| Particularly with watches! So many of them are hot
| garbage at connectivity.
|
| I miss my Pebble :( Though the Bangle.js and other "just
| uses bluetooth LE" devices have been essentially perfect
| connectivity as well. LE seems pretty reliable.
| [deleted]
| rat9988 wrote:
| 'It's not Bluetooth's fault, Apple is just using it
| wrong'
| t_mann wrote:
| And Microsoft. And Google. According to the parent.
| EUROCARE wrote:
| Well, fortunately these are not the only companies in the
| world. I have always had only great experience with Sony
| and Samsung Bluetooth devices (phones, headsets, other
| hardware).
| x0x0 wrote:
| My $350 sony headphones regularly have trouble connecting
| to my macbook. While speaking, about once every 10 hours
| of use, I sound like a robot and have to power cycle them
| to make the mic work correctly.
|
| If they're connected to my android phone while also
| connected to any other device (dual connection is a
| feature they tout), they play a tick sound every minute
| like a terrible metronome.
|
| I'm incredibly sympathetic to Apple deciding everything
| about bluetooth is hot garbage and building an
| alternative for audio.
| rvnx wrote:
| I'm curious if you found a way to connect a Sony
| Bluetooth headset to a Mac and have both audio playing
| and microphone active, basically have a conversation. If
| you know please share, I never got such functioning,
| always either I can play audio, or I can record audio,
| but never both at the same time.
| EUROCARE wrote:
| Yeah, I have Sony WH1000-XM2 and XM5 and both work
| perfectly for Zoom and other video calls with my MacBook
| Air (M1) as well as my MacBook Pro (Intel 2019), I'm
| using it daily for work. Zero configuration, just pair
| and go. Sorry I can't help you with setting it up but I
| really didn't have to do anything, it worked immediately
| all by itself.
| rvnx wrote:
| Thank you, I have the XM3 so somehow now I know that it's
| possible.
| Nuthen wrote:
| Have the XM3 as well but I use Windows. This is an
| annoying issue with current Bluetooth headphones.
| Basically your choice is high quality audio but no
| microphone, or low quality audio with microphone. When
| you have the headphones connected it should offer 2
| different sound outputs. One for stereo and one for hands
| free audio. If the stereo output is active then the
| microphone won't work at all.
|
| Edit: Here's a post that explains the issue better than I
| can. https://www.reddit.com/r/sony/comments/fqf71z/wh1000
| xm3_can_...
| Groxx wrote:
| For those with bluetooth woes:
|
| I've had better luck _in all operating systems_ with a
| stand-alone USB bluetooth _audio_ dongle:
| https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B089PYFLBN
|
| It's not perfect, but the combination of "you can select
| the codec" and "the bluetooth stack is 100% out of the
| hands of the OS" gave me dramatically better results on
| _almost_ every headset I tried.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| It sounds like something specific to that person's piece of
| hardware. I use my AirPods multiple times a day, every day,
| swapping back and forth between my MBP and my iPhone.
| Occasionally it's slow to realize which device I wanted it
| to connect to, but I've not once had to reboot the phone.
| matsemann wrote:
| I sometimes wonder if it's almost deliberate incompetence on
| Apple's side, to make it seem even more lucrative to buy
| everything from them. My GF and I sometimes switch/borrow
| each other earphones and other gear, and she has loads of
| problems connecting to her Mac or iPhone. Like the Sony
| MX3000 something she has to reconnect every half an hour or
| they will be out of sync with the show she's watching on her
| laptop by a second or so. But for me never issues like that
| on Android/Dell.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Judging from all the comments, this is situational. I have
| a pair of MX4000s that I use when I want noise canceling,
| and aside from being finicky and slow to reconnect
| sometimes, once they're connected they're fine. No random
| disconnects.
|
| But I can also walk halfway across my house and bluetooth
| doesn't drop until just about the time I reach my
| refrigerator, so I may have an exceptionally low noise
| floor where I live.
| oynqr wrote:
| Judging from other comments, there are still lots of
| bluetooth problems even if all if your devices are Apple
| ones.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| Oh yes. Colleague has latest iphone 13 pro max, and
| latest airpods pro. Even this basic apple-apple setup is
| failing him numerous times, and you would expect this
| pair to be tweaked to perfection for that price. Conf
| calls where he had to give up pairing attempts and had to
| do it via phone. I could understand busy office space
| interference, but he has same issues at home.
|
| I have Samsung S22 ultra and Sennheiser momentum 2 buds.
| Pairing works 100% anywhere immediately with aptx
| (unfortunately they don't support HD variant of codecs).
| But if I do press play, first 1-2 seconds the music is
| some ugly skipping. I would rather prefer it to be quiet
| for longer.
| neurostimulant wrote:
| This is one of the reason why I prefer to use a usb-c
| bluetooth audio dongle to use my bluetooth headphones. I have
| multiple bluetooth headphones and multiple devices that can
| use them, so switching the headphones between those devices
| got old very quickly. Now I just plug the bluetooth audio
| dongle to the device I currently use (pc, laptop, or phone)
| and turn on the bluetooth headphone I want to use, and it's
| done. I basically turned the bluetooth headphones into a
| virtually wired headphones now.
| rektide wrote:
| I have over a dozen Bluetooth audio devices & near no
| complaints. across my various personal & work laptops & phones,
| everything works reliably & great. some of my oldest headsets
| have some dropouts while exercising and that's about it. it's
| very confusing reading anti-bluetooth articles & posts. i don't
| feel like we're using the same technologies.
| gfrff wrote:
| My $400 Bose headphones have worse range than my cheap MPow
| headphones. Perhaps whatever great thought Bose puts in doesn't
| result in great products....
| Aeolun wrote:
| Or the improved sound quality comes at a cost?
| emrvb wrote:
| Bose and improved sound quality in one sentence?
| prmoustache wrote:
| Like it or not, we aren't talking hifi and you may not
| love their specific coloration but the audio quality per
| form factor and price of bose bluetooth speakers is quite
| great compared to alternatives. I mean there are
| certainly better ones obviously but my soundlink revolve
| and my soundlink micro are much better than the models
| from other brands they replaced. Reliability however may
| be a different thing but I have not treated them very
| kindly to say the least.
|
| I also bought a Bose noise cancelling headset 2y ago and
| I would say it is quite good, I think the only great
| alternatives in the same price range are from Sony, the
| Yamaha, Apple ones are much more expensive. Maybe other
| decent alternatives would be from technics or sennheiser?
| emrvb wrote:
| In my opinion Bose performs only slightly better than the
| cheapest crap and only has a moderately better build
| quality, yet at a (near) premium price range. I think
| their products are barely worth half the money they ask
| for it.
|
| But this is my opinion on Bose in general and not this
| specific product range. Personally I cant stand Bluetooth
| audio for anything else but background noise. I'm still
| amazed how a 192kbs mp3 can sound better with 5 euro
| earplugs compared to a 200+ euro Bluetooth headset with
| aptX support.
|
| Eventually it doesn't matter at all, if you are happy
| with their product(s) and consider it money well spend,
| then who am I to judge.
|
| Edit:
|
| _amiga-workbench 51 minutes ago
|
| 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._
|
| I'm no longer amazed.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Better connection through research would also be expected,
| since wireless headphones without connection can't sound
| great /s
| neurostimulant wrote:
| Using a bluetooth audio dongle can significantly extends the
| range. My Bose would starts stuttering at ~4m range, but
| after using a bluetooth audio dongle, it basically cover the
| whole house now (>10m radius).
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> 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 devices will be cribbing from the
| BLE playbook. It is a _lot_ more usable than BR /EDR, but the
| data rate sucks. I think that changes to that, are on the
| horizon.
| DavidPeiffer wrote:
| > 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 majority of the time.
|
| I'm curious if your (and others) experience align with this?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Well, the equipment that my company made was really quite
| primitive, BT-wise. They also only supported Classic
| (BR/EDR), and only then, for control stuff (shutter
| release, aperture adjust, etc.). Image data was sent over
| WiFi, and BT was used to help set up said WiFi.
|
| Apple is probably the biggest offender, when it comes to
| custom implementations, but BT explicitly allows vendors to
| do custom implementations, so they aren't actually breaking
| any rules.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| 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.
| Groxx wrote:
| I've had pretty good luck with phones and most things (audio
| has various codec mismatches if you're going for high quality,
| but that's all at least visible on boxes), but not computers
| and [nearly anything except HID]. HID works great everywhere,
| and battery life is _amazing_ , I love bluetooth for HID.
|
| Bluetooth headsets and computers seems like a special kind of
| flaky-hell. I tried ~8 modern high-end headsets on 4 laptops (2
| windows and 2 macs, both pairs ~3-4 years apart age wise) while
| trying to pick one, and NONE of the headsets connected to every
| laptop without issues. EVERY headset had periodic audio drops
| at least after a couple minutes with at least 2 machines, if
| not all 4, and many had much more severe issues (disconnects,
| disconnects that wouldn't reconnect, not connecting at all,
| etc).
|
| ^ All of those headsets connected fine to two different phones,
| and used the codecs I'd expect... usually anyway. Good enough
| for the most part, and only 2 had periodic audio drops.
|
| Since you seem to know the field somewhat, what the heck is
| going on with computer bluetooth audio stacks? Are phones just
| buying all the good chips and bluetooth-OS-integrating-
| engineers?
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| That's weird. I've had pretty much the reverse experience. My
| Sony and Shure headphones have always worked perfectly (even
| on Linux!), but I've had issues with a keyboard and mouse not
| reconnecting after they went to sleep (computer stayed fully
| on), or at least taking forever.
|
| However, I was surprised by how little lag the mouse had
| compared to its regular wireless (Logitech unifying).
| Groxx wrote:
| I wonder if it's due to trying to use the newer Bluetooth
| profiles? Which of course OSX and Windows don't let you
| select, nor do the vast majority of headsets.
|
| Every headset I've used _with SBC selected_ has worked
| perfectly, including some ancient cheap ones, and I 'm
| _pretty_ sure that 's how things are connecting to my car
| (which always works).
|
| ---
|
| For mice, I dunno. I've had consistently good results, and
| I primarily use logitechs. My wife recently swapped out an
| _ancient_ one that worked perfectly with a AA that lasted
| 3+ months for a modern one that... also works perfectly
| with an AA that lasts for 1-3 months. Similar results for
| keyboards, I primarily use a chonky wired one and I can 't
| feel any difference when I use bluetooth ones.
|
| If I _did_ feel lag, it 'd be an weird and I'd probably
| immediately return it. So I do tend to stick with one for a
| long time, and haven't tried many.
|
| I've never done _objective_ latency tests, but they feel
| fine to me. No noticeable lag compared to wired, which is
| plenty good for me. RF dongles do at least make pairing a
| non-issue though, just plug and go (which I LOVE about
| Apple laptops + keyboard /trackpad, plugging it in sets up
| the bluetooth pairing).
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| I very rarely use Windows, but on Linux my headphones use
| either LDAC (Sony) or aptX HD (or something like that)
| for the Shure. On my mac and iPhone they use AAC. Never
| had any issue with any combination.
|
| Regarding the keyboard, I do feel a slight lag compared
| to wired, but not enough to bother me. The mouse also
| seems to have a tiny bit more lag compared to its own
| dongle; however sometimes it seems very laggy for a
| moment. This never happens with the dongle. I mostly use
| these in the countryside, in a detached house with not
| many wireless or microwave devices around, so I don't
| think it's interference related. The headphones don't
| skip a beat, either in the same environment or in my
| apartment building or office in the city, with plenty of
| wifis, microwaves, wireless mice, phones, etc around.
| ranger_danger wrote:
| Your experience is NOT typical. I have had random connectivity
| issues with every single Bluetooth device I have ever used.
|
| My biggest complaint is bluetooth gamepads. They simply never
| work right for me... always registering phantom presses or just
| none at all. I always have to hold it above my head for it to
| work right which is unusable.
| Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote:
| Xbox one wireless gamepad and ps4/5 gamepads are the most
| used out there and they seem to work fine, but I suspect
| these might not be using Bluetooth when connected to a
| console
| amelius wrote:
| The litmus test: can you and a friend listen to a single music
| stream with two BT headphones at the same time?
| sp332 wrote:
| Bluetooth barely has the bandwidth for stereo audio to begin
| with. Doubling it up means ok-ish mono audio for each of you,
| or really crummy stereo.
| amelius wrote:
| Why does it need to send the audio twice? Surely both
| phones can listen to the same broadcast signal?
| sp332 wrote:
| Bluetooth connections frequency hop among 79 bands to
| avoid interference. That way, you don't have to pick one
| channel and hope it stays clear, you just switch
| frequencies constantly and deal with the occasional
| hiccup. That means that when you pair devices, they share
| a key that synchronizes the pseudo-random choices for
| what frequencies the connection will use over time. So
| each connected device needs its own broadcast, because
| other devices won't be listening on the same frequency at
| the same time.
| amelius wrote:
| That is a detail and they could easily change that if
| they didn't already.
| shakna wrote:
| > One thing I can fault the Bluetooth SIG is that the spec is
| very complex and full of optional bits which could lead to many
| pitfalls for the uninitiated engineers, though Bluetooth chips
| from reputable manufacturers who know what they're doing, like
| CSR, TI, SiLabs and Nordic are nearly bulletproof in this
| regard.
|
| Earlier spec versions aren't just incredibly complex - they're
| contradictory.
|
| That's what led to so many manufacturers doing their own thing
| in very slightly incompatible ways. You can pick up two
| certified bluetooth devices and find them to have different
| behaviour in the exact same circumstances. In fact, some of the
| best devices are ones that aren't certified, because they
| ignore the spec and act more reasonable than it demands.
|
| Apple famously skips several of the mandatory verification
| handshakes to reduce latency in their AirPods. Not optional,
| mandatory. Because the spec doesn't work that well in the real
| world.
| amiga-workbench wrote:
| 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.
| nyanpasu64 wrote:
| 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.
| vel0city wrote:
| A2DP doesn't support microphones. You're thinking of Headset
| Profile (HSP). That's the low-latency profile with mic support.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| I guess during the many years developing AptX, they thought
| that _obviously_ nobody would ever want to hear high-quality
| audio and use the microphone at the same time!
| epx wrote:
| Zigbee failed in a similar way, didn't it? An exceptionally
| complex protocol (for the intended usage) that left out a major
| interoperability aspect: the pairing phase. (BT fixed this
| partially by adding Secure Simple Pairing.)
|
| Wireless protocols are inherently more complex, there are crappy
| Wi-Fi hardware out there, too.
|
| BT and Zigbee have one additional disavantage over Wi-Fi: they
| are slow, so they are more heavily affected by packet loss and
| interference in ISM band. This probably lead to more complex
| protocols, you cannot do things TCP/IP-simple if you don't have
| bandwidth to spare in order to retransmit losses.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| I have one bluetooth device that I connect to my TV that just
| captures anything it's ever been connected to, no matter where it
| is in the house. No amount of unpairing or repairing can overcome
| it. It's actually kind of impressive.
| meltyness wrote:
| This happens with all networking.
|
| The most well-funded companies oscillate between "trying to get
| ahead" by hacking in "whatever's next" and selling that to people
| and "just blowing off the spec" because they're not getting paid
| enough. This is a sedementary process because of whatever
| business-related adage stops them from rewriting their code.
|
| The next awful bit is what happens to the spec itself. We show up
| in Vegas at the Bluetooth conference in the hottest July on
| record. No one can share any vision about what this thing is
| supposed to do, or replace, so everyone just sneezes into the
| multithousand page specification.
|
| The multithousand page specification is actually a paid affair as
| well, and it's inefficient, confusing, poorly organized, and
| loooooong, so everyone just ends up building what they think the
| spec "sounds like."
|
| Even better, there's a deadline creeping up, because there's a
| rumor that Competitor B is pushing out their part of the stack in
| November, and even if we pay the unbelievable fee to the FCC to
| get expedited treatment, it's still a 2 month wait, if it's
| approved -- not to mention legal's checks.
|
| ...at least, that's what it looks like to an outsider.
| knorker wrote:
| It happens with other things, but Bluetooth is not other
| things.
|
| It doesn't need high speed. Just barely enough to get some
| audio through.
|
| Bluetooth should have been perfected over a decade ago, and
| chips with perfect operation should be a commodity.
|
| It's just not cutting edge, and shouldn't be.
| gorjusborg wrote:
| > he himself uses it seamlessly -- some "70% of the time."
|
| 70% of the time, it works every time.
| eternityforest wrote:
| 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.
| DoingIsLearning wrote:
| The biggest relevation I had with bluetooth was seeing an actual
| pairing sequence and data transmission on an RF spectrum
| analyser.
|
| It really is low-power. Once you realize it is a rat's fart above
| the noise floor you have a whole new appreciation for the fact
| that it even works in the first place.
| knorker wrote:
| No, that's not it.
|
| That's not why my bluetooth disconnects every single time I
| unsuspend my chromebook, about 2 minutes after connecting
| bluetooth it'll disconnect again, and will be permanently on
| the second time.
|
| That's not why I have to reboot my phone sometimes, or reboot
| my headphones, to get it to "unstuck". And the fact that it
| works to "turn it off and on again".
|
| It's reliably broken, not just by random patterns.
|
| If it were signal strength then we'd be seeing dropped packets.
| I get some dropped packets when on the other side of the house,
| on a different floor, from the transmitter. Yet sometimes I can
| still not get anything through at all when the devices are
| right next to each other, until I reboot them.
|
| And power goes down with distance squared. "Right next to each
| other" is at that point almost (but not quite) "so loud it
| could damage each other's receiver".
| cedivad wrote:
| No, you had a bad test setup. BT is 10dB below wifi, I can't
| see how what you are saying makes sense. Also it uses simple
| encodings that save on processing power but require more rf
| power to be decoded successfully.
| DoingIsLearning wrote:
| > No, you had a bad test setup.
|
| I was not in a test chamber at all and I had all sorts of
| real world background noise. Not sure what you mean, if bad
| setup means real-world with all sorts of automobile RF noise
| then yes, it was a bad setup?
| stackbutterflow wrote:
| For those who don't know, every 3db the energy is
| halved/doubled.
|
| So at -10db the energy has been halved over 3 times.
| knorker wrote:
| And for those who don't know, that's not actually a
| particularly big difference.
|
| The inverse square law means this is just the difference
| between 1 meter and 3 meters. And your WiFi has no problems
| at 3 meters from the AP.
| haskell_melody wrote:
| Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2055/
| google234123 wrote:
| I'm still annoyed that most bluetooth headphones haven't figured
| out how to provide stereo sound at the same time as using the
| microphone. There is definitely enough bandwidth in bluetooth 5
| LinAGKar wrote:
| I hope LE audio will fix that
| out_of_protocol wrote:
| By the way, what LE stands for? Legendary Edition?
| [deleted]
| shakna wrote:
| "Lite".
|
| The Bluetooth 5 spec is over a thousand pages long.
|
| The Lite Edition spec is "only" a few hundred, IIRC.
| kuschku wrote:
| Originally, Low Energy. Bluetooth LE removes all the
| different communication modes and introduces a single,
| packet network based approach for everything.
|
| You may remember the switch from bluetooth connections
| being something you had to manually enable every time you
| wanted it, to devices just being connected all the time
| (without causing your battery to drop). That's what LE
| enabled.
|
| The switch to the single packet network approach obviously
| also simplified everything else you might want to transmit.
|
| The audio specs are still from the pre-LE era with
| different modes for everything you might do (modem, fax,
| headset, headphones, HID, etc), and LE Audio introduces a
| new and clean way for that.
| zwirbl wrote:
| To expand on that, there is a pretty accessible free book
| covering LE Audio available here
| https://www.bluetooth.com/bluetooth-resources/le-audio-
| book/...
| izacus wrote:
| I tried really hard but I couldn't find any new spec for two
| way audio. It seems that the specification authority is
| completely ignoring that problem.
| zwirbl wrote:
| I don't think you looked all that hard, as this is central
| in the book "Introducing Bluetooth LE Audio" available for
| free here https://www.bluetooth.com/bluetooth-resources/le-
| audio-book/...
|
| LE Audio is built around a channel concept, where a channel
| is unidirectional and a connection can have multiple, e.g.
| listening on 2 stereo channels and when a call arrives
| enabling 2 mic channels in the other direction for stereo
| microphones
|
| Don't go around throwing shade at the spec authority if you
| haven't read the spec
| dogma1138 wrote:
| Most do but many can also go into a "headset" mode in which
| they use encoding that is more suitable for speech. That said
| this is mainly an issue for Windows these days that does that
| automatically for some reason nothing stops you from switching
| to headphones and still using the mic.
|
| In fact for voice and streaming apps that aren't classified as
| telco apps it doesn't even switch.
| kmarc wrote:
| worksforme on Linux, MacOS and Android. I have a Bose QC35 and
| it just works, now for years, reliably.
|
| On Linux, it used to work quite okayish with pulseaudio, even
| automatic switching between profiles, when an application
| requested microphone. Since pipewire came around, much higher
| quality.
| hjanssen wrote:
| It works, but the quality is noticeably reduced. Gaming (and
| using VoIP in e.g. CSGO) on this profile is practically
| unusable, the quality of sound is so diminished that it is
| very annoying.
| zwirbl wrote:
| That's because there is no profile for that, as per the spec
| the hands free profile only supports Mono
|
| This changes with LE Audio (spec released in March iirc) which
| is much more channel oriented (e.g. 2 channels stereo playback
| + 2 more stereo microphone), has a new codec (LC3) and has
| support in the upcoming android release
| znpy wrote:
| Nice, maybe in 15 years I'll be able to use that in debian.
| hedora wrote:
| 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.
| yalogin wrote:
| The user experience is also terrible. In all the Bluetooth
| enabled cars I saw, the audio starts playing the moment the phone
| connects to the car. There isn't anyway to disable it. This is a
| problem for atleast 5-7yrs now. Even Tesla and apple couldn't fix
| it
| amluto wrote:
| I suspect this is a problem with the car: it connects and sends
| the command to play. But Tesla has a particularly poor
| implementation in which it will do this even if it's not
| playing the Bluetooth stream -- the phone would stream into the
| void and the car will play other music.
|
| I don't _think_ this is Apple's fault. Apple could add a per-
| peer setting to disable play commands over Bluetooth or maybe
| to disable them within a few seconds of connecting.
| Digit-Al wrote:
| I have a Philips soundbar with Bluetooth. A couple or so years
| ago I was playing music on it from my laptop and the connection
| started crackling and then just died. I could not get any of my
| devices to connect, and even tried a factory reset with no luck.
| I was thinking I would have to buy a new one, but the next day I
| tried it again and it connected immediately with no problem. It's
| happened a couple more times since then and I have found that if
| I just out it back on standby and leave it for an as yet
| undetermined amount of time it starts working again.
|
| It's very strange.
|
| I've also found that if my phone connects to my laptop through
| Bluetooth at the same time that I am streaming music via
| Bluetooth from my laptop to my soundbar the phone will cause
| interference and the music will keep crackling and dropping out.
| iasay wrote:
| BT was actually fucking with me badly. I have a Sony soundbar and
| someone was connecting to it periodically and playing music
| really loud at 2AM. I had the BT mode on it turned off and the
| discovery stuff turned off. But still getting connections.
|
| Got fed up with it, opened it up and cut the BT antenna foil off
| the board in the end. Silence is bliss.
| FerretFred wrote:
| Try pairing (and actually using) an exotic Bluetooth device
| (y'know, a keyboard, mouse) with a Raspberry Pi via the command
| line. That's REAL pain.
| gc22browsing wrote:
| The problem at the radio frequency level is simply that not only
| is the 2.4GHz ISM band crowded by microwave ovens, WiFi and lots
| of other devices, but that one end of a BT device is typically
| battery powered and transmitting at a tiny fraction of the power
| of the interfering devices. In a typical office or home the
| moment you turn on the microwave or WiFi device you are
| effectively jamming the BT signal. Frequency hopping can hop it
| all likes and try to pick the least worse band out of all even
| more over-powering ones.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| What I get from this thread is that it probably matters what RF
| noise you have in your environment. Some people have lots of
| trouble regardless of device, some people have no problems at
| all. I suspect the latter are in a quieter RF environment. I can
| get quite a long ways from my laptop before my wireless
| headphones start to cut out. And I don't have any significant
| issues getting or staying connected. I live in a residential
| neighborhood, not an apartment, so maybe my location is pretty
| low-noise.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| Apple's "magical" continuity feature between devices (including
| Airdrop) is usually going crazy and works only 20% of the time if
| you are connected to the network with cable, not wifi, even if
| you are in the same subnet.
| [deleted]
| sgt wrote:
| My AirPods Pro are likely the only Bluetooth device I've seen
| that's not only easy to pair but also works every time without
| fail. The other day they actually did fail though, but that was
| because of massive interference of 2.4GHz that made nothing work.
| Can't really blame Bluetooth for that.
| bluescrn wrote:
| Good hardware ruined by non-replaceable batteries
| sgt wrote:
| Lithium-ion, should last a long time
| bluescrn wrote:
| If you're an audiobook or podcast enthusiast, you can get
| through a lot of charge cycles (and deep discharges) rather
| quickly.
|
| If you're using them frequently, expect to notice
| significantly degraded battery life in less then 2 years of
| use.
| wildrhythms wrote:
| I've started to notice my ~2 year old Bose earbuds only
| charge to 90% battery (it announces this when powered
| on), even after a full night's charge.
| mort96 wrote:
| Really? Phone batteries are lithium ion, and they get very
| noticeably worse after just a year or two.
| freddymilkovich wrote:
| My only real issue with bluetooth these days is that I cant
| disable certain MIDI CC events.
|
| The same midi blob that sends vol +/- from my cars volume
| encoder, is used by applications to hijack phone volume to push
| notifications.
|
| But it always resets to -inf once and there is no way for me to
| disable or modify midi cc behaviours globally or on a per
| application basis.
|
| Someone give me discrete midi cc control via a third party app
| before i drive off a bridge. Its maddening.
| mattacular wrote:
| Bluetooth works ok if you're not sharing receivers or if you
| don't have more than one device acting as transmitter. Anything
| beyond that where you're mixing and switching devices, or sharing
| receivers (like multiple speakers in your household etc.) it gets
| so easily confused.
|
| I've even had problems following my wife's car. Despite being
| fully paired with my car and working great, the transmitter
| (phone) will keep trying to connect to hers.
|
| It's probably one of the most frustrating mainstream technologies
| that you're basically forced to use as physical connections
| become less and less available.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| 1 word: unreliability
| oort-cloud9 wrote:
| blackhaz wrote:
| 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 baked into my mind forever at this point.
|
| As I want to set my plans in silence, I press stop on the
| dashboard. I set my Google Maps navigation, turn the knob to
| increase the volume so I could hear instructions, and this
| triggers "Songs of Innocence" to continue playing and the second
| burst of outrage in my cardiovascular system. I press the stop
| the second time, and at this point can continue on my journey -
| but should I try to increase the volume again, I have to remember
| the hugging men are always there.
|
| Once (or twice), the phone just went berserk and couldn't stop
| playing them. I tried everything, but the Songs were playing, and
| the men were hugging while I was doing 70 mph on the motorway. I
| had to reboot the phone, but after the reboot, the car was unable
| to pair with it.
|
| I don't know if it's a Lexus problem, or an Apple problem, but
| what I know is that I really fucking hate U2.
| seer wrote:
| 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.
|
| Additionally since I'm an Apple Music user, whenever I start
| the car, it just defaults to whatever's I've been listening to
| there, unless there was a book / podcast or even YouTube video
| playing before. Which is very often quite nice.
|
| Now why apple just defaults to Apple Music, and not "your music
| player of choice a.k.a. Spotify" is questionable, and why the
| automatic play is also not configurable is beyond me.
|
| Just wanted to give my 2c how this can lead to a good XP.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| My car (mazda 3) does this where it just sends the play
| command as soon as the phone (pixel) connects. But it just
| continues playing whatever I was last listening to, so it's
| always something different. Kinda nice.
| ycombinete wrote:
| My fathers android does the same thing with YouTube music
| makeitdouble wrote:
| Doesn't it also mean that whatever you were listening to
| yourself, and potentially stopped as you got company, is now
| playing in the speakers for everyone in the car just as
| you're turning it the engine on and can also reach the stop
| button so fast?
| woopwoop wrote:
| I have experienced this with NWA's "Gangsta Gangsta".
| Another delightful thing is that the volume is system
| volume * speaker volume, so that if you turned up the
| system volume because you were, e.g., using a quiet pair of
| headphones, this is now blairing at a total unreasonable
| volume, perhaps even destroying your car's speakers.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| This can include that porn you were watching in your mobile
| browser the night before. Ya know, theoretically.
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _...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".
| patentatt wrote:
| Too often I start my car and it begins playing a podcast
| where I left off. With my kids in the car. I listen to a
| decent amount of stuff that isn't necessarily appropriate
| for kids. Makes for a fun scramble to hit that pause
| button.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| And that pause button is never visible by default in
| CarPlay. Ya gotta hit the menu button in the bottom left
| a couple times.
| thedrbrian wrote:
| you can set up shortcuts to automatically start playing
| something. I've got one that changes to music and maxes the
| audio volume when it connects to my car.
| meibo wrote:
| > 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.
| moralestapia wrote:
| >but what I know is that I really fucking hate U2.
|
| We can agree on that!
| roody15 wrote:
| Apple has done this for years and my take is they are tying to
| increase usage and relevance of Apple Music.
|
| For example I only use Spotify in my car but it will not
| connect correctly unless I download and have Apple Music
| installed.
|
| Just bad move by apple in my opinion. Just connect by bluetooth
| and let me use any app want.
|
| Super dumb that you have to put a song labeled A in your song
| library that is just silence to get around this.
| thetinguy wrote:
| It's the car that auto plays the first thing. My old car used
| to do the same thing. New car no longer does this.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| what the hell did I just read... but yes Apple's implementation
| of Bluetooth is quite subpar compared to most peers, even
| though not sure if Lexus is 100% innocent here
| criddell wrote:
| I think the blame has to lie with Lexus. My current phone is
| an iPhone and my previous phone was a Pixel and both work
| perfectly in my Subaru, although the head unit was replaced 3
| times because it was triggering some type of SOS signal to
| Subaru.
|
| Frankly, I've had fewer BT issues with my iPhone than I had
| with my Android phone, but the Android was from three years
| ago and I think things have probably improved since then.
| hellweaver666 wrote:
| I haven't driven for a few years but my iPhone 4 always
| used to connect and work with my Peugeot 307 perfectly.
| dmix wrote:
| Everyone in this thread who is complaining has either a
| Lexus or a Toyota (who owns Lexus) so it's obviously a
| problem with some version of their infotainment system.
| The U2 thing was obviously an Apple issue.
|
| Not sure why they don't use CarPlay but maybe some people
| prefer Bluetooth.
| criddell wrote:
| I think CarPlay (both wired and wireless versions)
| requires Bluetooth.
| dmix wrote:
| I've never used a wireless version of CarPlay, I always
| plugged it in which worked reliably in every modern
| budget car I've rented (Toyota included).
| bpicolo wrote:
| I was in a Volkswagen rental last week and the Carplay
| integration was a disaster. 50% of the time, attempting
| to play a song on spotify would crash Carplay. It would
| refuse to work again (or hey, crash again) until you'd
| left the car off for a lengthy amount of time. Presumably
| the car turns off the infotainment system at some point,
| so this is a reboot, but there was no way to reboot
| manually... So it would remain broken for the drive.
|
| Seems like manufacturers aren't integrating particularly
| robust systems on the average
| TylerE wrote:
| I've owned a VW for 6 years and Carplay has always worked
| flawlessly.
| [deleted]
| 2muchcoffeeman wrote:
| If you consider Apples to be sub par. What's your standard
| for decent?
|
| I've never had any BT issues with Apple stuff. And most of
| the other things I own have terrible BT implementations. But
| maybe because I can't tell how to check for a good
| implementation?
| ben-schaaf wrote:
| Devil's advocate: Couldn't Apple's BT implementation be bad
| but still work well with itself?
| GoToRO wrote:
| I also had similar problems with iPhone and BT. Before it
| worked very good with an Android. What I've learned over time
| is that apple seems ti sabotage anything that is not apple. I
| had connection problems with my car, with my Sony BT
| headphones, with portable speaker. Alk that went away as I
| switched back to android.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| I guess you're right. My bluetooth experience is Macbook,
| iPhone, Apple keyboard, Apple mouse and Apple headphones.
| Everything works extremely well. The thing that I like most
| is power indicator integrated with iOS and macOS. Allows me
| to charge those things before they run out of power. As long
| as you stay in the garden, things are smooth.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| That's just... the BLE battery level service? AFAICT
| Windows does the same thing when you connect a BLE device
| that reports a battery.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| I have no idea, I've read reviews from some bluetooth
| mouse and reviewer mentioned that macOS does not display
| its battery level. I thought that it's proprietary.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| It is kinda funny, it was this behavior among others that
| made me switch from android to an iphone. I got so tired of
| BT shenanigans.
|
| I do feel sympathy for the people still having trouble, but
| mine has been flawless. I do not, however, drive a Lexus.
| fullstop wrote:
| My cars are all older, but my Android pairs up with a Kia
| Sportage almost immediately after starting the car. My
| wife's iPhone 11 sometimes takes several minutes. She ended
| up getting an adapter to connect audio to the 3.5mm jack.
| duffyjp wrote:
| I thought your anecdote was satire until the very last word.
| That was a great ride.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| I generally hate Bluetooth. But, your post is golden. I'm sorry
| you are dealing with it. I don't know if it's
| a Lexus problem, or an Apple problem, but what I know
| is that I really fucking hate U2.
|
| My best understanding is that this is a Lexus problem, because
| on the occasions I have connected wireless speakers to my
| iPhones this has never happened.
|
| CarPlay solves _some_ of these problems and is maybe not
| perfect, but generally a far saner UX experience than what car
| companies have managed to cook up over the years.
|
| I would assume similar things are true for Android Auto. Like,
| not perfect, but far saner than whatever the heck the UX
| wizards at Toyota brewed up.
| wollsmoth wrote:
| It's definitely a Lexus problem. In a ford I think it just
| continues playing whatever the last played song was.
|
| I also put songs on my iphone instead of using apple music, so
| I suppose it could be an issue with that service although idk
| why it would behave way differently from playing local files.
| asdf98 wrote:
| Only in fords with sync 3 or later. sync 2 is garbage
| faebi wrote:
| It's nearly as good as my story. I'm walking with airpods past
| my car. The car detects my keys and turns on bluetooth, iPhone
| connects and thinks it's better to send audio to my car instead
| of the airpods in my ears. A long and painful connection loss
| is the result while I walk away and hope that my airpods
| reconnect. There is no way to set a presedence or similar.
| These days it's even better, the iPhone also switches to car
| mode and forces me to disable it first.
| ajdude wrote:
| Similar happens in my Mazda. No matter what I do, unless the
| source was actively changed to something like the radio before
| I shut my car off, as soon as I turn on the ignition it starts
| force playing a random song on my iPhone , Usually at a
| painfully high volume. Apple has bloomed Mazda and Mazda have
| found Apple.
|
| It always tends to be a race between the Bluetooth connection
| in my ability to turn the volume down before it plays; even
| when it's stopped, the moment I take a phone call it starts
| playing at maximum volume again after ending the call.
| themaninthedark wrote:
| Not sure which version of the entertainment system you have
| but on my 2016 Mazda 3, it will try and play the last song
| you had playing on your phone. If it can't get the song to
| play it will then default to the other last audio device i.e.
| radio, XM, CD.
|
| You should have separate volumes for music, navigation and
| hands-free in the entertainment system. Also, you can mute
| the sound using the volume knob while the warning text is
| displayed during key on.
|
| My current solution is to make sure my CD player is the other
| last used device so that if the BT connection fails, I get
| sweet sweet Baroque music instead of FM blaring.
| swamp40 wrote:
| The iPhone forces Apple Music to self-start if nothing else is
| using the speaker when you auto-connect with a car Bluetooth
| system.
|
| Kind of like how Windows 10 forces you to use Microsoft Edge as
| a pdf viewer no matter how many times you switch to Adobe or
| how many settings you change.
|
| Apple doesn't want you to forget about Apple Music.
|
| > auto-magically restores itself somehow iCloud. Apple Music
| needs _something_ to play.
| j3th9n wrote:
| I have an iPhone SE (1st gen) and a 50 dollar bluetooth enabled
| radio in my car. It works flawlessly every time, I turn on
| ignition, the radio connects with my phone and I can hit play.
| When I turn off ignition the current song is paused and the
| radio disconnects.
| iasay wrote:
| 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.
| nomy99 wrote:
| I'm not sure if comedy was the intent here, but I laughed a
| lot.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| The first song in my library was a song by Killswitch Engage. A
| very loud song with lots of screaming. Ultimately I deleted the
| Music app from my iPhone to solve the auto play problem. I used
| Spotify for music at the time (now VLC). Deleting the app to
| solve the problem definitely feels like an extreme solution to
| a problem which shouldn't be a problem at all!
|
| But I have worse Bluetooth problems. My favorite Bluetooth
| headphones never want to connect the first few times. Trying to
| connect in this error state turns them off, for some reason. So
| I have this horrible dance where I turn them on and attempt to
| connect. My connecting device spins for a while. The headphones
| have silently turned off. I turn them back in and repeat. After
| about four times, they will usually connect. But sometimes I
| have to delete the connection and re-pair. Sometimes I have to
| turn off Bluetooth on other nearby devices to get it to work.
| And sometimes when connected, even near my source, the
| connection just goes silent.
|
| I wish Bluetooth could behave a bit more like FM radio. A
| source is streaming out audio and my headphones can tune to
| that secure channel and get the stream. Headphones can tune
| between channels easily. This would solve my connection woes.
| anonair wrote:
| Unfortunately, deleting Music app turns off iPod integration,
| and now I'm unable to use other media players on my car over
| USB
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| Oh no! Didn't happen to me in my Honda with my iPhone 7,
| but I guess every car is different.
| fullstop wrote:
| You may enjoy this episode of Reply All:
| https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/76hel39
| 0x00000000 wrote:
| If you use Apple Music, it has the additional benefit of
| wasting all of your data and battery every time you turn your
| car on since it streams your entire library on shuffle.
|
| I thought I was clever and could fix this problem by using the
| iPhone's "Shortcuts" app "Automation" feature to pause after
| connecting to the car's Bluetooth. But for some reason the
| thing called "automation" requires manual fucking interaction
| every time. Yes, that's right you have to click on a prompt to
| run the "automation" shortcut.
|
| Turns out it's a limitation of the "on connect to Bluetooth"
| trigger for "security" yet this isn't explained anywhere.
| Because if someone stole my phone and car they might be able
| to... pause the music? Thanks Apple.
| t3e wrote:
| 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.
| nobleach wrote:
| 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.
| conductr wrote:
| This is the real issue. Apple Music being a firm default. The
| U2 thing can be deleted from Apple Music. It exists because
| it was released that way a decade or so ago. It got pushed
| into everyone's playlist as a purchased album, but can be
| deleted. I have no music at all in Apple Music for this
| reason. I prefer silence over this.
|
| My problem is that I have to turn off BT on my phone for
| various reasons. Yet, no matter what, when I start my car it
| turns back on my phones BT setting and reconnects. (Eg. If my
| wife is playing her phone, then we stop for an errand, and
| get back in it always goes back to my phone.)
| cryptonector wrote:
| It's why I have NO music on iTunes.
|
| Did you hear that, Apple? I will _never_ give you money for
| music, ever ever, as long as connecting to a car == play
| iTunes.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| You can delete Apple Music from your phone, but that can
| break BT Audio playback on some devices.
| conductr wrote:
| Nice, thanks! I'm going to try that. I feel like I tried
| once and it used to be undeletable; probably long time
| ago.
| calt wrote:
| You can uninstall Apple Music. At least there's that saving
| grace.
| tarunkotia wrote:
| This happens to me every time I enter my car while on a Zoom
| call; the bluetooth or even the hardwired headset would switch
| to the car speakers and the call gets unmuted. I need to
| scramble to mute the call while my daughter is screaming at the
| back. Can't get it to work.
| FredPret wrote:
| That's a hilarious writeup.
|
| My car starts blasting the FM radio if I don't plug my iPhone
| in. I have never and will never willingly listen to FM radio,
| and yet, Ford has decided that it must be played at full volume
| an uncertain interval after the car is started. It's caused me
| enough anxiety that I'll be buying a different car next time.
| francisofascii wrote:
| This continues to happen in our 2012 Toyota Prius. U2 song
| "California" from the Sounds of Innocence soundtrack. Don't
| remember ever downloading it.
| flanbiscuit wrote:
| Can you turn BT off and connect via a chord?
|
| That's what I do with my car. Sure it's a little annoying to
| use a chord rather than using BT but at least you wouldn't have
| it auto-playing when you start the car.
|
| I have an Android and when we had the BT on the radio on, it
| would auto-connect to my phone and start playing whatever the
| last thing I was listening to on Spotify. If I stopped Spotify,
| my phone's audio output would still remain connected to the
| radio, even if my gf was connected with her iPhone and the
| system had switched to iOS CarPlay (the radio had both Android
| Auto and iOS CarPlay)
|
| We finally figured out we could disable BT via the radio's
| setting and that solved our problem. We actually prefer
| connecting via a cable anyways.
| 2-718-281-828 wrote:
| That's an iPhone problem. All our Androids (OnePlus, Google,
| Samsung, LG) have been connecting perfectly well to my TomTom
| navigator. Only my iPhone Xs refuses to connect. It's a well
| documented problem with iPhones and TomTom for many years.
| Similar story with my AirPods which won't connect to my
| Thinkpad running Linux - while all other BT headphones (Bose,
| Sony, Anker) do connect.
|
| Also the article seems to primarily refer to Apple products.
| corrral wrote:
| My iPhone doesn't have these problems with my nearly-a-
| decade-old Honda Odyssey's BT stereo system. Neither does my
| wife's iPhone, nor the couple others we've owned while owning
| this van. That thing (the stereo / "smart" entertainment
| system) has got plenty of "how the shit did this pass QC?"
| quirks, but none relating to its interaction with my phone.
|
| It's the car's fault.
| 2-718-281-828 wrote:
| Apple's entire interfacing be those digital or physical are
| intentionally designed for incompatibility with devices
| from the not-Apple universe.
| corrral wrote:
| I... have not found that to be the case at all (my van's
| certainly not made by Apple, nor is its stock
| entertainment system--my BT headphones aren't Apple, my
| BT keyboards and mice aren't Apple, my monitor and
| electric piano aren't apple, et c.) but it could be I've
| just been lucky.
| Izkata wrote:
| It's possible it's neither:
|
| > but what I know is that I really fucking hate U2.
|
| Back around 2010/2011, AT&T pushed a U2 album to Android
| phones in an OTA update as a system install, it couldn't be
| deleted.
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| That's so hilarious considering you've probably been putting up
| with that for years and years while there's a ton of solutions.
| Here's a fun fact about U2: If Bono himself is in his own car
| driving around and it comes on he has to change the channel.
| Doesn't like hearing his own voice (Not macho enough), nor the
| band name. [1] I also heard the same thing about Phil Collins.
|
| [1] https://www.thedailybeast.com/bono-says-he-switches-the-
| radi...
| jwhite wrote:
| Reading your comment made me feel like someone had been spying
| on me in my car. I go through this same thing in my Lexus every
| time I drive it as well. It is such a relief to know I am not
| the only one.
| blackhaz wrote:
| Amen, brother.
| holri wrote:
| Thank God that I have a car from 1981.
| chaosite wrote:
| The image you're taking about is the cover art for that album,
| right?
| blackhaz wrote:
| Yes...
| jknutson wrote:
| A likely story. This is a safe place pal, we're all friends
| here..
| mort96 wrote:
| It's album art for an album he never wanted though. Apple did
| a stunt some years back where they celebrated the launch of a
| new U2 album by automatically putting that album on
| everyone's iPhones. For many people, it's the only music they
| have in the stock Music app, so it's what gets played when
| nothing else is currently playing.
| nostromo wrote:
| This is primarily a problem with car manufacturers designing
| terrible user interfaces.
|
| Audi does a reasonably good job. I wouldn't buy a Toyota or
| Ford because they tend to be terrible.
|
| At this point, if a car doesn't let me default to Car Play
| automatically, I'm not buying it. And if every time I turn on
| the car it lectures me about driving safely, I'm _really_ not
| buying it.
| cryptonector wrote:
| Nowadays you can delete (really, hide), the U2 album. If you
| delete all remaining music in iTunes, then the U2 album gets
| restored, and you have to re-delete it.
|
| Other problems: - the darned thing is eager to
| connect My wife gets in the car to go somewhere,
| turns it on, my phone connects, and I lose audio / she
| steals my audio. - the darned thing connects even
| if the car's audio is off get in, use a
| maps app, can't hear anything, ohhh, right!
| - carplay uses wifi, iphone fails to route properly
| can't use carplay - anyways, carplay is super
| sensitive to EM noise be me, be driving
| w/ navigation on, go through high-traffic, EM noisy
| area, lose navigation -- distracting! dangerous!
|
| Solution: - refuse to connect to the car's wifi
| - that means no carplay - that means no
| distractions - delete the U2 album -
| delete it harder - turn off bluetooth every
| morning - that means no more stolen audio when
| someone drives the family cars
|
| > but what I know is that I really fucking hate U2.
|
| I can't imagine not hating U2.
| crb wrote:
| FWIW, the men are father and son; the lower man is U2's drummer
| Larry Mullen Jr.
| blackhaz wrote:
| I don't know if it's for much better or much worse, but this
| allows me some freedom of thought now. Thank you, sir.
| cryptonector wrote:
| > but what I know is that I really fucking hate U2.
|
| I bet your comment has hundreds of upvotes already.
| jader201 wrote:
| You've been able to delete the Music app for a while. If the U2
| album is the first thing to play, it sounds like you may not
| use the Music app anyway.
|
| Just delete it and problem solved (though agree with the
| general rage caused by this promotion).
| heavenlyblue wrote:
| I have exactly he same issue with U2 on Apple Music. Exactly
| the same song. I think it's because you get it for free.
| LetsGetTechnicl wrote:
| I have a Honda and if I plug my iPhone into it's USB port it
| will auto-play the first song in my Apple Music/iTunes library
| which for a long time was "A-YO" by Lady Gaga. The opening
| lyric of "heeerreee we gooo" was amusing and appropriate for a
| while until it got incredibly annoying once I switched to
| Spotify.
|
| I think the issue lies somewhere between Honda's implementation
| of the iPod standard and some weird backwards compatibility the
| iPhone is providing. When in this "iPod-like" mode I lost
| functionality like queuing songs via the Play Next option. It
| just disappeared from the long-press menu on songs.
|
| Anyways I just bought a Bluetooth adapter from Amazon and
| plugged that into the aux input. Waaaay better
| rjzzleep wrote:
| 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....
| blackhaz wrote:
| 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.
| jkestner wrote:
| Sir, have you tried picking Matt up and putting him down,
| narrating your actions for Siri?
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| There is a "Free Airport Wifi" WAP saved on my phone from
| Mexico City since my iPhone 6. It is long deleted, but it
| has migrated through the years to my current iPhone 13.
|
| Its residue is left on my phone in only this way: Whenever
| I connect to a new wifi point, after typing in the
| password, my phone will say it cannot connect to "Free
| Airport Wifi". I have to type the password in again
| (usually one someone just read to me) and connect again.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| Related story about the origins of the infamous "Free
| Public Wifi" viral hotspot:
| https://readwrite.com/the_story_behind_free_public_wifi_-
| _it...
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| I have a similar phenomenon with an exchange account.
| It's connected to Outlook and everything is working. But
| sometimes my iPhone X randomly asks me for credentials,
| doesn't let me input credentials, and then goes away and
| everything keeps working.
| macNchz wrote:
| 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!?".
| cnity wrote:
| You have a gift for writing humorously.
| SilasX wrote:
| Sorry, what was the humorous writing there? Seemed like a
| pretty direct statement of the facts of their case. The
| fact that underlying events are funny doesn't say
| anything about the style of writing, and I don't see any
| stylistic choices that were going for "deliberately
| humorous writing", let alone ones that show a gift
| (though of course the poster might show it in other
| contexts!).
| xeromal wrote:
| Woah. This comment is hilarious, but it's not the
| writing.
|
| But to explain the humorous aspects of the poster's
| story, it's the naked men that he sprinkles throughout
| the story. Mentioning it multiple times is what makes it
| funny among funny bits.
| xeromal wrote:
| Yeah, his story cracked me up.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| s3p wrote:
| what?
| xyst wrote:
| 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)
| asdf98 wrote:
| My car does this too when I plug my phone into USB, it starts
| playing the first song alphabetically no matter what. I became
| so sick of this I just have a long empty track with tildes in
| the name in my library. I would assume bluetooth would do the
| same but my car's bluetooth has been off since it came out of
| the facotory and I will never turn it on.
|
| Another obnoxious design is if i want to start a playlist I
| can't just start playing it - It gives me the playlist sorted
| alphatically. Once i start playing a track it then sorts them
| by playlist order. Literally the point of a playlist is the
| order which you choose your songs to be in. Same solution
| works, put a short empty file with a tilde, 0 or underscore. So
| when I pick a playlist I just have to press enter twice and not
| deal with the alphabetically sorted list.
|
| This trick also works when i try to navigate with google maps
| and my phone is plugged into usb. I wont get the navigation
| voice if a music track is NOT playing - again I go to my silent
| track and play it in order to get the navigation voice when my
| phone plugged into USB
| klyrs wrote:
| My girlfriend's phone automatically resumes in the middle of a
| podcast. Same spot, same podcast, every time. I had no idea how
| lucky we are.
| Loughla wrote:
| Right? I thought it was annoying that No Such Thing as a Fish
| kicked on into the exact same spot every time I went for a
| drive. But that's a million times better than anything by U2
| or whatever Songs of Innocence is.
| Nathanael_M wrote:
| 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.
| ianceicys wrote:
| Tip: remove the Apple Music app from your iPhone and it won't
| play anything.
| kn0where wrote:
| On my old car, deleting the music app prevented the shitty
| radio from detecting that my "iPod" (aka iPhone) was even
| connected, so I had to have the Music app installed even if I
| wanted to play Spotify.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| 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;
| iPhone is work mandated) and there's just no telling what'll
| happen any given time when we start the car. Especially
| annoying since modern infotainment units make you wait 3 to 5
| seconds to display crucial legal information before you can
| mute the darn thing. And let's not start if you have more than
| one Bluetooth headphone and more than one device at home :(
|
| (Yes I'm now the grouch that misses 3.5mm on modern phones and
| uses my old Note 8 and wired Sennheiser to listen to music
| hassle free :D)
| omnibrain wrote:
| I feel you man...
|
| The Miracle (Of Joey Ramone) must be our most listened Song
| of all time.
| allenu wrote:
| For me it was The Jackson 5's ABC that would play as soon
| as I plugged my phone into my car. That opening "A buh-buh
| buh buh" is ingrained in my memory forever.
| jeffhuys wrote:
| There's an app by Apple that allows you to remove the U2
| songs
| corobo wrote:
| Looks like that might be retired going by
| https://discussions.apple.com/thread/251184844
|
| > Customers are no longer able to remove the album on their
| own. You will need to reach out to Apple Support directly
| to have the album removed
| hutzlibu wrote:
| I guess this is the essence, of why I never wanted an
| apple device. And I bookmark this comment, in case I
| forget ..
|
| I would need to ask my apple masters, if they please
| remove U2 from my device? No thank you.
| mmmpop wrote:
| I remember raging about this back when it happened and my
| coworkers couldn't understand why I just wouldn't like a
| free album, and am I bothered by two half-naked men
| embracing each other?
|
| Boulder people are strange.
| tpush wrote:
| You can remove the album from your device just fine; This
| is about removing it from your account, which is
| contingent on the provider you have the account with no
| matter what company you're dealing with.
| shortsightedsid wrote:
| 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.
| deelowe wrote:
| Same. Happened twice, really. Once on the ipod and then the
| iphone. Made U2 haters out of my wife and myself. I wonder
| how many people hate U2 music now because this.
| bigie35 wrote:
| 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...
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| Yup. And the hate and negative backlash is still here - I'm
| not kidding, my wife can NOT hear U2 without a visceral
| reaction! It followed her through like 3 cars, until she
| finally married a guy nerdy and persistent enough :-D
| crubier wrote:
| That's literally what the parent comment is describing
| mandmandam wrote:
| 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.
| lostlogin wrote:
| It's really weird how much love Apple has for U2. That
| whole episode was just so cringe and tone deaf. Knowing
| the internal politics around it would be fascinating as
| surely someone tried to stop it.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| 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"?
| crubier wrote:
| I totally agree with that, I didn't like U2 back then but
| I know actively hate them since that episode.
| blackhaz wrote:
| 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.
| ricardobayes wrote:
| 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-specific social media, which
| sometimes had much better features and less
| agressivity/conspiracy theories/scams.
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| Of course the true FAANG solution would be to include a
| 3.5mm jack but disable it in software, requiring PS4.99
| per month to enable it with a rent-seeking subscription
| service.
| ROTMetro wrote:
| Can I get an audiophile 'Hi-def' tier for $9.99 that's
| almost but not quite 1982 CD quality?
| mwint wrote:
| Seems like that's more the BMW solution (ref. heated
| seats subscription)
| wil421 wrote:
| 3.5mm can go to hell for a phone. I'd prefer the
| waterproofing we have with iPhones nowadays. If you need
| an adapter they are available.
| wincy wrote:
| Is there? Last time I checked there doesn't seem to be a
| dongle that both outputs and charges my iPhone in the
| car. Or the non Apple ones have terrible reviews that
| they set off the persons coffee maker scalding the
| persons dog or something.
| MobiusHorizons wrote:
| Phones exist that have both waterproofing and a headphone
| jack. I'm sure it's a challenge, but it's not technically
| an either or decision.
| Larrikin wrote:
| 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 needed a new phone.
| incongruity wrote:
| 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 - but that's a different discussion.
| smoldesu wrote:
| If that _is_ the case, I have a hard time believing it 's
| still true on any model past iPhone X. There's plenty of
| space to fit a 3.5mm jack in there, I would happily trade
| any/all of the FaceID hardware or Lidar components for a
| headphone connector.
| dylan604 wrote:
| so you're saying that a 3.5mm port cannot be waterproof,
| yet the stupid Apple proprietary power/data port _can_?
| mwint wrote:
| Lightning is anything but stupid. It's small, has no
| breakable bits in the phone side of the port, and is
| pretty ubiquitous. I don't have to worry about whether
| this cable and charger support the Lightning 2-a (IIV)
| Gold standard ala USB-C.
|
| USB-C just felt terrible to me when I had a Nexus 5x.
| Port wasn't as secure, cable was huge. Not a fan.
|
| Some people wreck the 1st-party cables abnormally
| quickly; they should buy one of those armored cables from
| Amazon.
| dylan604 wrote:
| It's stupid in that it has exposed pins. It's stupid in
| that its proprietary. It's stupid in a lot of ways. It's
| not not stupid because you like it.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| Interesting; is there some connection between
| waterproofing and 3.5mm I'm missing?
|
| There's plenty of phones and devices waterproofed to any
| given standard with 3.5mm. To my ignorant mind, a USB C
| or Lightning port is not fundamentally different exposure
| / difficulty than 3.5mm when it comes to this - this is
| far from my area of expertise, but a cursory google
| search, and plentiful of counter-examples, indicates this
| is just a post-hoc justification for Apple's removal, not
| a real critical path.
|
| Understanding that "if you need something, get an adapter
| / live the dongle life" is the core Apple philosophy, and
| agreeing that most standards should eventually die
| (parallel port, Firewire, etc), 3.5mm still seems a
| uniquely standardized, useful, and time proof feature
| that's is sorely missed with no adequate replacement
| (dongle, of course, is not it, for many reasons -
| expense, inconvenience, losing them, and if you want to
| charge your phone while being on a call things get very
| wonky very quickly - does Apple even offer a 1st-party
| solution for this common office-worker use-case?)
| ant6n wrote:
| I have some Bluetooth speakers from Teufel. They are
| pretty big and heavy and supposedly good (actually way
| too bassy for me, hard to listen to podcasts on). And
| they have a battery, so they are mobile.
|
| They heave this "feature" where they turn off after 10
| min of silence. And they're Bluetooth, so once they turn
| off, u have to walk to the damn speaker (no remote), push
| the power button that's hidden on the back for several
| seconds (less used buttons are visible on top), then go
| to your playback device and reconnect the Bluetooth.
|
| People on the forums have been complaining about this for
| years, and the support still says this feature can't be
| turned off.
|
| For a company that supposedly makes very carefully
| designed, great Audio equipment made in Germany, this
| user interface is infuriating, pointless and feels never
| actually tested. (Also, Nowadays nobody reviews products
| anymore so bad user interfaces are not caught). Btw, I
| have some Bluetooth speakers with a tiny battery that
| will stay on for a day and not turn off, idling takes
| nearly no battery power.
|
| So yeah, this is like the laziest product I have owned,
| that just dares u to stop a movie for a bathroom or snack
| break lest it goes back to sleep, and it wasn't designed
| by some big monolithic FANG but a supposedly user centric
| design focused hiish end shop.
| aliqot wrote:
| 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 there being
| headphones sold for <$100 that blow them out of the
| water. I have in-ear-monitors that cost a fraction of
| what an airpod does, has detachable cords AND bluetooth
| to each ear, and they sound much better and balanced.
|
| Whoever took away the audio port on modern phones should
| be dragged outside and beaten like an unruly fax machine.
| Hapa wrote:
| 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 lose
| hadlock wrote:
| > 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 ~2016 and I brought them with me on my most
| recent trip here in 2022
|
| I don't know anyone who has ever complained about their
| bose or sony bluetooth noise canceling headphones. They
| just work, all the time, every time. Except that one time
| I forgot to charge them and let them run down to 0% (and
| it even warned me about an hour before)
| Hapa wrote:
| Yeah those headphones are great, but they are not true
| wireless.
| qart wrote:
| > I don't know anyone who has ever complained about their
| bose or sony bluetooth noise canceling headphones.
|
| My Sony XM4 cans often give me trouble with bluetooth.
| Once in a while, there is no sound from the device. The
| device says "connected", the phone app says it's
| connected, the computer says it's connected. The way to
| fix it is to plugin the 3.5mm jack, and take it off. The
| device powers off. The next time it is powered on, it
| works properly. Lots of other people have had this
| trouble too. I did not discover this "fix" myself, but
| was written online somewhere.
| Blackthorn wrote:
| 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.
| osigurdson wrote:
| The thing I never liked about Airpods is, instead of
| having one thing that is hard to lose, we now have three
| easy to lose things.
| ricardobayes wrote:
| I see the same happening with a certain new EV that I
| won't name. It has a nice design, but often gets people
| stranded, outright bricked through OTA. To the point
| where dealers advise users not to perform OTA updates.
| Literal pieces falling off the car while driving. The
| need to call the tow truck after 2k miles is very common.
| In normal car terms, it's junk. But people fight tooth
| and nail to defend it. Exactly because of the 'tribal'
| thinking you mention. It's our 'tribe', so we close in.
| bagels wrote:
| Sounds dire. What car is this, and where can I read about
| these cars that very commonly fail after 2k miles?
| corrral wrote:
| > You're part of the in group, you made it, you have
| achieved sameness, you have an iPhone.
|
| Orrrrr we tolerate repeated mistakes on Apple's part
| because every time we poke our heads up and look around
| at the rest of the market (or even try switching for a
| while!) it's clear we'd just be trading every one problem
| for three others.
|
| I sincerely wish any other tech companies would at least
| _credibly pretend_ to actually be competing with Apple
| head-on, rather than just avoiding them and trying to
| fill other niches.
| [deleted]
| nucleardog wrote:
| 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 manual and figuring out how to do a hard reset on
| some ear buds. And then ending up with only one paired.
| Etc, etc.
|
| I pretty much exclusively use in-ear headphones to listen
| to something to fall asleep to, so this is generally
| happening as I've already wound down and gotten into bed
| and... now it's tech support time!
|
| I paired the airpods to my phone the first time and have
| never had them fail to connect immediately since.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| I've gone through a few different high-end bluetooth buds
| from Jabra to Sony.
|
| I keep coming back to my Airpods, something that was
| gifted to me a year ago, when the other ones break. Most
| recently, one of my Jabra Elite buds plays audio at 50%
| volume from one ear 50% of the time.
|
| Not a fan of the tap interface nor the shape of the
| things nor the need to use a rubber condom (that doesn't
| fit in the case so I have to remove/add every time), but
| my Airpods are the ones that I can count on, so I have to
| give them that.
| vlachen wrote:
| Just a note: I had faltering volume on my Jabra Elite
| earbuds and I found an unauthorized repair [0] that
| brought it back to life. It requires some delicate
| cleaning of build up in the vent hole.
|
| [1] <https://crt.the-mori.com/2020-09-25-solve-jabra-
| elite-active...>
| MobiusHorizons wrote:
| This. I am honestly bewildered when I see the tech press
| comparing true wireless earbuds to AirPods and not
| mentioning the enormous ergonomic differences.
| smoldesu wrote:
| 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. You're not exactly
| writing a novel thesis here.
|
| Airpods are still just Bluetooth with an extra chip for
| NFC pairing. All of the "magic" your Airpods provide are
| software-based, not part of the actual hardware you're
| buying. I think Tech Press is totally justified to ignore
| software that isn't part of the headphones itself.
| stonemetal12 wrote:
| Isn't all that it just works software "driver quality"?
| If we were talking about a graphics card that couldn't
| detect monitor resolution and keep connected, we wouldn't
| give the card a pass just because it is a driver issue.
| smoldesu wrote:
| I mean, there are plenty of perfectly functional graphics
| cards that are given a pass because their drivers don't
| work with Wayland or refuse to implement resizable BAR.
| These are pretty solidly driver issues (ones that have
| persisted over decades, at that), and nobody really ever
| brings it up because it's not necessarily Nvidia's
| responsibility to address it.
|
| The larger factor (in my eyes) is implementation.
| Bluetooth quality is all over the place: mobile Bluetooth
| stacks used to be abysmal until ~5 years ago, and desktop
| OSes still don't have it ironed out yet. It makes perfect
| sense that reviewers would focus on the hardware, as
| opposed to enumerating how each device works on each
| operating system, and so on.
| the_watcher wrote:
| 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.
| TylerE wrote:
| > 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_.
| Damogran6 wrote:
| The work every time...and my hearing is shot so the last
| 5% worth of fidelity is lost on me.
|
| And my wife experienced their noise cancelling once on a
| flight and bought a set the next day.
|
| And we can share the audio between two airpod things when
| watching a movie, but not with non-Apple products.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| >> 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 / technical
| solution, turns out I was naive.
|
| (there ARE things that Apple does very well, when it
| comes to integrating within ecosystem, though some of
| them are CREEPY - like being prompted to share my wifi
| password with another person who happens to be looking
| for wifi around me; just because they happen to have an
| iPhone doesn't make them my best friend... or does it :P
| )
| aliqot wrote:
| 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.
| themaninthedark wrote:
| 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.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| 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 :)
| themaninthedark wrote:
| Not that I don't understand the difference between the
| communication modes, mostly just empathizing with the
| parent.
|
| Personally I hate text because most people will reply
| with one or 2 word answers and it takes much longer to
| get a decision vs a minute phone call.
|
| In collage my reasoning was purely financial and this was
| the beginning of the mass adoption wave. I can only guess
| that the pressure to conform is so much greater and the
| scorn/ridicule for not is as well.
|
| I also wonder if we will see a counter wave similar to
| the "I don't watch TV" that happened. Phones are great
| but they are also insediously great time wasters.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| Agreed; with text, and possibly since the days of BBM,
| there's also the personal pet peeve when a simple answer
| is spread across 7 individual messaged :D
|
| I think some counter movements are already seen; and more
| mainstream, people are trying to learn how to limit /
| constrain their phone interactions. Part of the problem
| is that our labeling is horrible outdated - it's not
| actually the "Phone" part of the rectangular device
| that's usually the problem, it's the "massively powerful
| computer and media consumption device" part :D
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| I don't think I can fully imagine; I prefer my ergonomic
| keyboard and massive monitor to be sure, so I dislike
| phone-first solutions (GRRR Whatsapp GRRR), or phone-
| priority design, and computers are definitely my hammer
| of choice.
|
| But between Winnipeg winter storms and kids and
| experience of civil war and strife in a previous
| lifetime, mobile phones as a safety lifeline were a
| strong priority for me early in my life in late 90's; and
| then I was one of those nerdy guys with Palm Pilot (I
| used to read entire books... many many books... on a
| 320x320px screen - which is why I find it hilarious when
| people so righteously proclaim "Retina or bust" :), then
| Palm Treo then HTC G1 then Galaxy S2 and so on. I am too
| self-absorbed or something to worry about social media (I
| genuinely don't _care_ what anybody else had for lunch or
| the cute picture of their cat or the latest copy pasted
| platitude that 's 5 words but 3MB overcompressed JPEG
| grr!), so scrolling Facebook or twitter notification etc
| are not a real threat vector in a portable phone for me.
| Which is to say, I don't care one iota if anybody else
| has a portable phone or not, but I personally find it
| much too convenient; and I can see it impacting me if
| somebody else doesn't have a phone, not from status
| perspective but from practical perspective - there's a
| change of plans, but oh, Bob is still going to the
| CoolCafe and we can't tell him to meet us at the
| NiceRestaurant; or my tire is blown, how am I going to
| call anybody; etc. How do you handle stuff like that?
| JohnBooty wrote:
| I'd never look down on anybody without a phone. In fact,
| I'd really respect it.
|
| But I would be frustrated if it was somebody close to me,
| if (if!) there was no other way to contact them.
| duderific wrote:
| 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
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| > you have achieved sameness, you have an iPhone.
|
| You mean "....you have iPhone". Gotta get the weird
| marketing right if you want to be in the club.
| causi wrote:
| It's patently ridiculous how much better the microphone on
| $15 wired headphones is than the ones on a $50 set of
| wireless earbuds.
| duped wrote:
| Most cheap wireless headsets are cutting the bandwidth
| down to like 4k for voice when you're talking.
|
| It's also not surprising when you realize no one buying
| these things is testing the mic before the purchase. They
| probably aren't even testing how it sounds. It's hard to
| sell better things when most customers will never know
| how bad they sound, and even the ones who do probably
| won't care. And worst of all they'll blame zoom, or the
| telephone network, or their internet, anything but the
| cheap piece of crap mic and half bandwidth connection
| they're using.
|
| Sorry for the rant. The economics of consumer audio are
| why I personally quit the industry. Some of these things
| are easy fixes but no one cares enough to make them.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| A 25 dollar logitech wired headset with a boom is
| brilliant. I have people with $200+ airpods on the call
| and I hear their cat dog air conditioner wind spouse
| keyboard car and everything. But they cannot be told this
| - they have expensive earbuds and they can hear ME fine,
| so it's all great!
| buran77 wrote:
| But you're starting with the wrong assumption: that
| people focus on having the best option in each situation.
| The people buying Airpods probably know they're not the
| best headphones or microphone. They are the best jack of
| all trades even if master of none. They are the best
| package. And you rarely choose what's best for others,
| others probably do the same.
|
| So when you WhatsApp from your mobile someone else has to
| see you type slowly, full of autocorrect errors and
| typos. You don't switch to the web Whatsapp from a
| computer, or a model M attached to the phone despite
| knowing they are faster because you get their messages
| fast and correct so it's all great.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Boom mic is always the superior choice.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| In an absolute sound quality sense, yes.
|
| But they also pick up peoples' gross mouth noises. You
| hear them chewing food, wheezing when they have a cold,
| or even eating food in waaaaay too much detail.
|
| Obviously _mute buttons exist_ but... I 've had multiple
| remote coworkers with boom mics and even if they
| rememeber to mute 90% of the time over the course of a
| year that other 10% really adds up lol
| vkou wrote:
| The solution to that problem is not a better microphone,
| the solution to it is noise-canceling software. It
| filters out something like 95% of gross mouth noises, and
| 99% of stupid background noises (Cars, fans, ACs, etc.)
| ansible wrote:
| Yes. All the software / DSP processing can't help if the
| physics is against you.
|
| By placing the microphone close to the mouth noises you
| make, you are increasing, by many orders of magnitude,
| the signal-to-noise ratio.
|
| Cars and other large BT devices (like an Amazon Echo) can
| use multiple microphones and some fancy processing to
| really isolate the voice signal coming from a specific
| direction (relative to the device) and also cancel out
| surrounding noise sources.
|
| With ear-bud systems, you can't fit in many microphones,
| nor can you spatially separate them enough for the
| software to do the job.
| JTbane wrote:
| I prefer wired because, for some reason, car audio via
| Bluetooth has adaptive volume, i.e. I start coasting in the
| car and the music becomes almost inaudible. I speed up and
| it returns to normal.
| dllthomas wrote:
| I guess you've gotta ask yourself... cui Bono?
| dingleberry420 wrote:
| kortex wrote:
| I don't think it's intended to be homophobic. The album art
| is just _really_ cringey.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songs_of_Innocence_(U2_album.
| ..
| tpush wrote:
| What's 'cringey' about it?
| Keyframe wrote:
| The way it is.
| dingleberry420 wrote:
| Alright, having seen it, fair enough.
| epsteinisntdead wrote:
| Out of that whole post, you landed on homophobia as a
| reasonable thing to call out?
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > it shows me a couple of half-naked shaved guys hugging each
| other
|
| Well, since nobody has ever read the spec in its entirety, it's
| completely possible that those guys are actually part of the
| specification, somewhere around page 5000 or so.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| This is a weird one. I also have a Lexus, but from the year
| before they put carplay in. I did an aftermarket carplay
| upgrade, and I've never had any sort of issue like this with
| Bluetooth on my wife's iphone before...
| treeman79 wrote:
| 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.
| nucleardog wrote:
| 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.
| olyjohn wrote:
| My mom's Subaru... has that god awful 15 inch monitor in
| the middle of the dash. Every time a phone call comes in,
| the music starts playing WHILE ON THE PHONE CALL.
|
| And I thought, wow, this huge-ass monitor will be awesome
| for Android Auto and CarPlay. NOPE, only like 1/3 of the
| screen gets used for CarPlay. This little tiny 7 inch
| section of the screen. Total joke these infotainment
| systems are. Give me back my goddamn double-din hole in the
| dashboard!
| Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote:
| For what is worth, the same is for android. Whoever thought
| that changing volume should trigger "play" didn't actually test
| it.
|
| I thought Audible was a virus, I can't shut it down or stop it
| and whatever I do, it starts playing
| blackhaz wrote:
| Oh, I am sure they did test it alright. With a Grinch smile.
| fuzzy2 wrote:
| That's not actually Android, or iOS. It's the car audio
| system sending the Play command.
| Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote:
| Oh I see, that's terrible
| pbreit wrote:
| I have never, not once ever, wanted something to autoplay when
| a bluetooth device connected.
| denimnerd42 wrote:
| this EXACT thing happens on my toyota but it's even more
| annoying because i'll be using my phone and we stop for gas and
| then when we turn the car back on U2 starts playing from my
| wife's phone
| jefe_ wrote:
| 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 happens
| occasionally since some Toyota update). The album art simply
| says: 'have a wonderful day.'
|
| The song: https://music.apple.com/us/album/a-a-a-a-a-very-good-
| song-si...
| mcculley wrote:
| 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.
| cptcobalt wrote:
| Same thing with my husband's car, his phone, and the song
| "A-Punk" by Vampire Weekend. I now jokingly play it as the
| first song any time we head off on a long road trip, much
| to his immense frustration.
| jgwil2 wrote:
| Haha, I can hum that opening riff instantaneously because
| it's the first song on my wife's phone. Do di do di do di
| do di do di do di. Bum, bum, bum bum bum bum!
| hbn wrote:
| My car's song of choice is About a Girl (Live Acoustic)
| from Nirvana's MTV Unplugged in New York live album
| lloeki wrote:
| Sort happens by album artist over here, the first one
| being Take On Me by a-ha, triggering all sorts of
| physical pavlovian reactions now.
|
| Trigger seems to be iOS thinking it's being helpful so
| that when I "plug" headphones (either physically,
| bluetoothically, or carplayly) I presumably want to play
| music.
|
| Also, double click on Library in Music.app nee iTunes on
| macOS. Plays the whole library, linearly, which, like,
| who does that?
| NavinF wrote:
| > iOS thinking it's being helpful so that when I "plug"
| headphones (either physically, bluetoothically, or
| carplayly) I presumably want to play music
|
| There's gotta be something else going on because I've
| never had this happen over the last decade. I'm pretty
| sure the car is sending a play command to the phone every
| time it connects.
| lloeki wrote:
| Except it happens randomly with headsets, whether
| bluetooth (Bose QC35) or wired (EarPods)
| derefr wrote:
| > Also, double click on Library in Music.app nee iTunes
| on macOS. Plays the whole library, linearly, which, like,
| who does that?
|
| Often, when I see a feature like that, one that makes you
| ask "who would want to do that with the _whole dataset_?
| " -- the answer is usually "developers regression-testing
| their feature branch of the program, where their 'whole
| dataset' is a test fixture consisting of a bunch of data
| samples where each one exercises a weird edge-case path
| in the code."
|
| Sure, you _could_ just make a playlist for this. But
| iTunes has a directory it watches within the library,
| where putting stuff in it will cause iTunes to
| automatically move those songs into your library. And if
| I were an iTunes dev, my scripted "Test" action would
| consist of creating a new library directory structure;
| plonking a copy of my regtest fixture dataset into its
| auto-import dir; starting up the new build targeting that
| dir; and then sending it the Automator action "Library -
| Play All." A playlist would only complicate that.
| [deleted]
| nostromo wrote:
| I wonder how much this person makes in royalties for a silent
| track.
| lattalayta wrote:
| Was (and maybe still is?) top of the charts
|
| https://www.engadget.com/2017-08-10-silent-10-minute-song-
| it...
| Lammy wrote:
| I use a jailbreak tweak for this:
| http://cydia.saurik.com/package/com.itortrix.stopplayin12/
| dhimes wrote:
| My Toyota only plays my iPhone bluetooth if (a) my car is in
| bluetooth "mode" and not radio _and_ (b) I have my music app
| open.
|
| I've never experienced what you (two) describe. 2020 Toy and
| iPhone 11.
| edgyquant wrote:
| I have a 2017 Toyota and never has that problem. Though for
| awhile I did have an issue where audible kept starting
| randomly but it seems to have fixed itself.
| SilasX wrote:
| 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...
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| focusedone wrote:
| Modern problems require modern solutions. Nice work.
| bakemawaytoys wrote:
| My car does this too! Except the first song in my library is
| A Christmas Festival by Boston Pops Orchestra.
|
| The song has a dramatic opening, to say the least.
| feet wrote:
| 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
| joshu wrote:
| i seem to recall that this is what the spec calls for, and
| toyota follows the spec. it drives me up the wall.
| dkarl wrote:
| Engagement is eating the world, maybe engagement is now
| driving these decisions, too. People who listen more, buy
| more, so optimize for time spent listening.
|
| My car and phone achieve a level of randomness that makes
| me wonder at the complexity of the software behind it.
| Usually it starts playing Music, but sometimes it's another
| app, especially if the last thing playing on my phone was
| YouTube. But sometimes it's YouTube even if the last app
| that played audio was something else. Sometimes I get the
| pause music from a game that's been running in the
| background for days.
|
| I can't even predict whether Music will start in shuffle
| mode and pick a random song or if it will start playing an
| album I was recently listening to in sequential mode.
|
| The result is that I've started to look at my phone the way
| I used to look at cable TV, as an invader in my home that
| works for people who want to manipulate me.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| So there's actually three different components involved
| with this. Someone else has already mentioned the
| possibility of cars that just lie to your phone and say
| you pressed the play button because "well the user
| connected their phone they must want music".
|
| The OS itself is also responsible for managing where that
| "play" command goes, and because this is a mobile device
| it also manages what apps are in memory, which one owns
| media playback, etc. If nothing is currently playing, it
| has to pick _something_ , because you pressed the play
| button and you're currently driving down an overextended
| highway at unconscionably American speeds and can't be
| arsed to care about _what_ app 's play button needs to be
| pressed.
|
| Individual apps can also grab or drop the media playback
| role at any time. Maybe that game has some background
| sync nonsense to send you a bunch of notifications, and
| whenever it gets woken up to do that the game engine it
| was written on _immediately_ tries to start media
| playback because nobody tested it for background use.
|
| Music's inconsistent behavior sounds like someone didn't
| implement state resumption correctly.
|
| The underlying problem is that nobody owns the whole
| experience and this all is supposed to happen _without
| projecting selection UI to the user_. The phone just
| hears "PLAY MUSIC DAMN YOU" and makes a shitty guess as
| to what you meant.
| feet wrote:
| This is one reason I'll only run customized android
| builds without gapps until something better comes along.
| Linux phone devices are becoming more and more appealing
| scifibestfi wrote:
| 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.
| krallja wrote:
| If you are listening to Spotify and accidentally engage
| with a video on Facebook, after the video plays, your
| device will be completely silent. "Now Playing" will be
| blank. If you press Play it will resume from whatever was
| last playing ... in Music.app!
|
| If you have a HomePod playing your family member's music,
| say "Hey Siri, pause" because a phone call came in, and
| then "Hey Siri, play," it will start playing wherever
| _your_ music.app last left off.
|
| User intention is a really tricky problem! But a cynical
| thought would be "why would Apple fix a bug that causes
| people to use Music.app more?"
| MDGeist wrote:
| Perhaps I am lucky but my Subaru does resume whatever I
| was last listening to. Although it seems to prioritize
| the itunes app over podcasts for some reason so even if I
| had been listening to a podcast there is a chance it will
| play whatever was last up in itunes. :/
| thewebcount wrote:
| Same. I have an Acura and it plays whatever the last
| thing that was playing out the speakers or headphones of
| the phone was. If that was Apple Music, that's what
| plays. If it was Podcasts, that's what plays. For many
| years, I used a 3rd party podcast app, and it would play
| that.
|
| It does, however, have the same connection problems
| described in the root of this thread. Sometimes just
| doesn't see the car (or vice-versa). Sometimes connects
| and starts playing within a minute of starting the car.
| Sometimes (frequently) stops playing after like 1 minute
| of playing. Sometimes auto-reconnects a minute later,
| sometimes doesn't. It's very irritating.
| oliveshell wrote:
| I believe what's happening is that certain car stereos are
| programmed to basically send the "play" command as soon as
| a device is connected. From the phone's perspective, it's
| as if you had connected Bluetooth headphones and then
| pressed the "play/pause" button.
|
| I say this because my iPhone never autoplays when
| connecting to any Bluetooth audio device _except_ for my
| car stereo.
|
| I agree it's aggressive and should be able to be turned
| off, but it's the car's software, not the phone's, that's
| the problem.
| swamp40 wrote:
| Agree that a "play" command is being sent from vehicle.
| This autostarts Apple Music if nothing else is using the
| speaker.
| gedy wrote:
| 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.
| onlyusername wrote:
| Delete the Apple Music app from your phone.
| jcpst wrote:
| Yep, I have it disabled. My main music apps are "Picky"
| and Bandcamp, and it works pretty well.
|
| When they do start autoplaying in the car (Picky does
| it), it's at least whatever I album I was last playing on
| the app.
| dudus wrote:
| 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.
| ggus wrote:
| You can try remapping the button. Not sure if it would
| work, but try:
| https://superuser.com/questions/554489/how-can-i-remap-a-
| pla...
| rkagerer wrote:
| Couldn't the phone provide an option to disable this on a
| per-device basis?
| tiagod wrote:
| Why do you assume this was decided by Apple?
| feet wrote:
| Because they're the ones programming iOS? Who else would
| decide it, it's not like iOS is an open source project
| nkjnlknlk wrote:
| It's obviously the car. Otherwise you would have heard of
| this problem well before now.
| rtsil wrote:
| The car may send the request to play, but the OS decides
| to play the same song again and again and again...
| dzikimarian wrote:
| Hmmm, what about these 10 or so comments of iPhone users
| with various cars?
| jeromegv wrote:
| It's quite clear that all those cars are sending a play
| command.
| bombcar wrote:
| I assume it's something to do with the devices not quite
| recognizing themselves as being identical to last time
| (perhaps any single change to anything on the iPhone causes
| it to download all the playlists again, etc).
|
| I just use a stupid adapter with a mini jack input. Ain't
| got time for wireless wierdness.
| StevePerkins wrote:
| 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 would have turned off the stereo before turning off
| their car. So it would be less confusing to carry forward
| that legacy behavior into this new thing.
|
| The problem is, it's 10 years later now. The culture and
| the consumer expectations have shifted. Maybe (?) the
| radio-like behavior makes sense for older consumers in
| their 60's and up, who lived with radio for many years more
| than they've lived with bluetooth. But for the younger
| bluetooth-native consumers, it's generally pretty
| infuriating.
|
| It's LONG past time for auto makers to stop this legacy
| behavior with bluetooth connections. Or at the _very_
| least, offer the option to disable it somewhere in a
| dashboard menu.
| sportslife wrote:
| I think the design is actually for us under 60, who got
| into the car listening to a podcast on earbuds, and want
| to continue listening as we drive off.
|
| What I can't get over is that I can be driving the car
| for 3 minutes before the podcast I was just listening to
| will play in my car (which does not have this play
| command quirk).
| rightbyte wrote:
| > 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.
| falcolas wrote:
| IME, this doesn't happen in any of my Subaru vehicles. It
| picks up where I am in Spotify with no issues. Whether via
| carplay or connecting via Apple's Car integration.
|
| That said, I _have_ had this issue when connecting an
| iPhone to a '11 truck via USB. It tries to treat it like
| an iPod, and consume its default playlist (all songs in
| Music, sans shuffle).
|
| So this is probably the bluetooth equivalent being done by
| the cars - treat it like an iPod that the entertainment
| center should be in charge of.
| jtbayly wrote:
| I created a one-hour long silent MP3 and named it similarly
| and added it to my phone. I've sent it to a friend who uses
| it as well.
| marbu wrote:
| I have a script (simple ffmpeg wrapper) to generate silent
| mp3 files:
|
| https://github.com/marbu/scriptpile/blob/master/silence.sh
|
| I'm not quite sure what I needed that for anymore, but I
| find it interesting that there are such weird use cases for
| this.
| a9h74j wrote:
| Call it _Subliminal productivity silence_ and you can make
| a fortune.
| calt wrote:
| I ended up uninstalling Apple Music because it would similarly
| play the same song (I forget what it was) at surprising times.
|
| Spotify doesn't give me the same problem.
| darthrupert wrote:
| An Apple problem. Their car connectivity follows the idea that
| configuration is evil and there's only one way to do a thing.
| nostromo wrote:
| This isn't correct. Apple Car Play does not play anything
| automatically on start. It's the Lexus that is telling the
| device to begin playing music.
|
| If you don't use Apple Music, it'll pick the only album you
| have -- which for many people is the U2 album Apple added to
| everyone's library for free many years ago.
| dr-detroit wrote:
| Robotbeat wrote:
| I had to laugh so hard at this as I'm literally sitting in my
| Tesla listening to Songs of Innocence that autoplayed on my
| iPhone without my explicit consent for exactly the reason you
| mention. I swear I have Stockholm Syndrome because the album
| that Apple forced my to download is slowly growing on me.
| cphoover wrote:
| Same thing happens in my GFs Prius... So annoying we refer to
| it as an "aural assault". I can't help but think U2's release
| strategy was really negative publicity for them in the long
| run.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| That sucks. For what it's worth, "old-school" Toyota headunits
| with Bluetooth seem to work quite well (for Bluetooth). The
| ones that came with graphics/more complex CPUs seem to have
| gone downhill.
|
| You can try to install an older model OEM headunit in your car
| to see if that fixes your Bluetooth. Certain models had really
| decent sound, are cheap when found used online, and should have
| the same connectors in the back (depending on speaker options).
| Here's an example of replacing your headunit:
| https://thetrackahead.com/projects/2003-toyota-4runner/the-u...
|
| Also, I think Auto-play is a setting in the headunit, in mine
| anyway. If not, your phone may have a setting for it.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| I'm building something that uses Bluetooth and largely for the
| classes of device I'm using everything seems to work fine? Isn't
| all this like everything, largely Apple and premium devices work
| well and cheap crappy stuff barely works? Sort of implies it's
| not necessarily the the standard at fault...
| tobyhinloopen wrote:
| AirPods Pro still randomly fail to connect to my iDevices.
|
| Other devices will randomly connect and disconnect to othet
| devices in my house, announcing the connect and disconnect
| every time even though the connection isn't used
| wildrhythms wrote:
| I commute with the Bose Soundsport bluetooth headphones,
| which I actually like, but randomly they will announce that
| they've disconnected from this or that device, despite
| continuing to play audio and all of the other features with
| that device just fine.
| numpad0 wrote:
| It's expensive stuff that gets finicky, because cheap devices
| are identical to one another in layers 2 and up.
| DelaneyM wrote:
| I used to serve on a BT SIG, and the current state of things does
| not surprise me. I was both blown away by the technical expertise
| of some of the contributors, from whom I learned a ton about
| platform philosophy & standards that I still use today; and
| deeply disappointed by the role PMs & BizDev played in
| proactively breaking compatibility just to preserve the option to
| someday take advantage of the standard for short-term profit.
|
| Really interesting though, if you're early in your career and
| have the option to participate in a standards body I strongly
| recommend it.
| znkynz wrote:
| My favourite thing about bluetooth is how when i drive past my
| missus car randomly, my phone connects to it, and my podcasts
| play in her car :/
| kyaghmour wrote:
| Because it's RF, shipping firmware can't be open source -- end
| user tweakable and replaceable. I bet this is one reason BT will
| never be good. If it could be open source there would be a
| winning stacks (or a few) that would bubble up on some git repo
| and be good enough for most everyone.
| jeshin wrote:
| the pine phone has end user replaceable firmware for its LTE
| modem. there exists an unofficial open source alternative for
| the official firmware (which incidentally has vulnerabilities
| that quectel seems to be unwilling to patch)
| stephen_g wrote:
| There's no reason Bluetooth stacks couldn't be open source -
| unlike a GSM modem, a Bluetooth chipset should only be able to
| transmit in the 2.5GHz ISM band, which is unlicensed. Even if
| you can change the LO enough to get outside the band, there
| should be hardware filtering etc.
|
| Of course, commercially available SDRs can transmit in all
| sorts of bands including licensed ones if you write the code to
| do so, and there are plenty of open-source applications for
| SDR, so it's not like it's impossible to legally have open
| firmware for whatever chipsets (even cellular modems)...
| kyaghmour wrote:
| It's not just the licensed bands but also SAR. Commercial
| devices with BT are often close to the body. For those
| devices to be certified they have to operate within specific
| power levels, and this has to not be operable/changeable. If
| you can change power levels, you can bust the SAR limits.
|
| It's one thing for geeks to do what they want with SDRs. It's
| another to get the certification to ship a real product.
| thiagocsf wrote:
| Is that because of regulation? What's the concern of having
| open source for RF firmwares?
| kyaghmour wrote:
| Regulatory requirements and certification.
| arein3 wrote:
| Is that a law?
|
| There are ath9k wifi cards with open source firmware
| https://github.com/qca/open-ath9k-htc-firmware
| doctor_lollipop wrote:
| > There are ath9k wifi cards with open source firmware
|
| I use these almost exclusively for laptops and routers, I
| keep ripping Intel wifi cards out of laptops and replacing
| them with ath9k cards.
|
| Ever since I started doing so things "just work" - no more
| random disconnects, lockups, need-to-reboot-to-get-wifi-
| working-again etc.
|
| Technology can be so nice if it's open.
| matrixcubed wrote:
| Arch Enemy's "Aces High" cover-song autoplayed one too many times
| at too-high a volume first thing in the morning while preparing
| to drive to work. I eventually cleared out my Apple Music songs
| and much more calmly welcome whatever pop station my wife leaves
| the radio on instead when I start my car.
| grumple wrote:
| Bluetooth is such a pain in the ass even as a techy. Most people
| probably just pair their iphones to their airpods and call it a
| day. But trying to use multiple bluetooth devices with each other
| (phones, laptops, ipads, connecting to headphones, speakers, and
| cars) is always a juggling act. Disconnect. Turn the headphones
| off. Sometimes forget the connection. Get out of range of the
| other device. Turn the headphones on. Turn bluetooth off. Turn it
| on.
|
| Comments mention NFC pairing. That would be better in most cases.
| seydor wrote:
| I had started to like my bluetooth headset, but then one day it
| stopped working during a presentation. Never again.
| kretaceous wrote:
| <rant>
|
| Someone should make a Bluetooth alternative just for audio
| transmission with a sane, forward-compatible spec.[1]
|
| More than half of Bluetooth woes will disappear.
|
| When I was annoyed to no end by my headphones, I searched upon
| Bluetooth alternatives and why are they not in widespread use. I
| did not find much.
|
| Bluetooth needs a rebirth.
|
| 1: No. Don't reply with xkcd 926.
|
| </rant>
| croddin wrote:
| Ok I'll reply with https://xkcd.com/2055/ then ;-) I wish
| something like what is described in this comic could be
| implemented as pairing method in a future version of Bluetooth.
| It sounds like it could help some of the problems.
| gchokov wrote:
| I love bluetooth. My mouse, my keyboard, my airpods, my other NC
| headphones, carplay, TV remote, smart home devices - so many of
| them working 99% of time just totally fine. Small glitches from
| time to time are small price to pay for the convenience my
| everyday tools bring to my life.
| ChildOfChaos wrote:
| The annoying thing I have with bluetooth, is with my headphones,
| I connect them up, set them as the sound source and just.....
| nothing.
|
| I have to go round all of my devices and disable the bluetooth on
| them, because some other device is connected too and although
| that is not playing any sound at all, somehow has priority and
| doesn't allow any sound to be played by any other device.
| neurostimulant wrote:
| One option is to use your bluetooth headphone exclusively with
| a usb bluetooth audio dongle (which is detected as a usb
| headphone when you plug it). Unpair the headphone from all your
| devices, and plug the bluetooth audio dongle to the device you
| want to use the headphone with. This is faster than scrambling
| to find whichever device currently grab your headphone and
| disable it.
| diogenescynic wrote:
| This is my biggest issue. I use my AirPods to connect to my two
| laptops, tv, Bose portable speaker, iPad, and iPhone and
| sometimes have to spend several minutes disabling devices to
| actually connect to the device I want.
|
| Worse, when I'm connected to one device like a laptop but I get
| a call that I want to answer on my iPhone, it's nearly
| impossible to actually transfer or reconnect the AirPods to the
| iPhone.
|
| I tried to get two pairs of AirPods to resolve this and keep
| one connected/dedicated to my iPhone, but even that doesn't
| work because once you're logged in with your Apple ID it will
| keep re-syncing to your other Bluetooth devices. It's insanity.
| zardo wrote:
| The worst is when it connects to my laptop with the lid shut
| and not logged in.
| wildrhythms wrote:
| Same issue. I find Apple devices are the most aggressive to try
| to pair themselves, even when the devices are in sleep mode!
| Most of the time I just relegate myself to holding the pair
| button on the headphones and re-pairing from scratch.
| enriquto wrote:
| > I have to go round all of my devices and disable the
| bluetooth on them, because some other device is connected too
|
| Sigh. If only there was some kind of mechanism to indicate
| physically which of the devices you want the sound to come
| from. A thin string of sorts, that you could attach easily to
| both devices to indicate that these two are to be connected.
| But we can only dream...
| criddell wrote:
| As long as you don't have to keep the string connected to use
| the device after pairing, I think that's a good idea.
| PainfullyNormal wrote:
| Isn't that essentially NFC pairing? I've had considerably
| better luck with NFC technology as a whole than with
| bluetooth.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| This annoys me to no end, too, but I'd say the issue isn't as
| much Bluetooth itself as the implementation of multiple sources
| on the headphones.
|
| I have the exact same issue with a pair of Jabra headphones
| that have multiple wired inputs. They'll switch between them
| for frivolous reasons.
| MattPalmer1086 wrote:
| I do find it a frustrating technology. As the article says,
| pairing can be quite hit and miss.
|
| I generally have to search how to pair devices when I have to set
| it up on a new device, even for devices I've had for years!
| They're all different, and it can be unreliable.
|
| I have read that it suffers the interoperability issues because
| the spec is complex with many optional bits in it, although I
| don't know how true that is.
| faeriechangling wrote:
| Pairing is my main issue with the technology as I'm frequently
| using one device across multiple devices. The ideal for me
| would be latency free crystal clear audio that can fuse maybe
| four different simultaneous input streams, but since that's
| likely impossible, I would just like to spend less time in the
| hell of trying to force my headphones to stop autopairing to
| the wrong device every time it turns on.
|
| Nobody offers bug free Bluetooth - nobody.
| meltyness wrote:
| I hadn't thought about it, but yeah this headline captures it
| for sure.
|
| The music / voice / connect construct of the spec seems to
| have improved this in the past few years so that it's
| possible in software to connect.
|
| I downgraded from a flagship to a dirtpile phone, and now
| when I turn off Bluetooth from the Android Quick Settings, it
| turns itself back on exactly once, every. single. time.
|
| Sending interactions is pretty reliable too for switching
| between devices. Pressing the call button on my car or my
| headphones signals my phone to instantly change audio
| contexts, but it's inconsistent, and some devices send
| "pause" signals at will.
|
| It's probably an accident, but my car displays correct, up-
| to-date, scrubbing and metadata, and I can get audio from my
| ANC headphones at the same time.
|
| Bottom line, I've seen the "Connect" button work, and there
| was even a Quick Settings panel listing paired devices for
| you to plug/unplug at your pleasure, but only if you've paid
| for an expensive phone.
| floodle wrote:
| Android automatically re-enabling Bluetooth after I _just_
| turned it off irks me to no end. It feels like a violation
| of the contract that I have with my phone.
| bgribble wrote:
| Not bug-free, but I have used the Jabra Elite earbuds for a
| while now (75t and 85t) and they manage multiple-device
| connections pretty well. Up to 3 (I think) devices can be
| connected to the buds at the same time.
| tgv wrote:
| I only have problems on a (cheap-ish) Android tablet. It often
| keeps asking "pair?" until you go into the settings and pair
| there, except directly after booting. I have the feeling it's
| not so much "the technology", but rather bad chips, lousy
| drivers and a 'lacking' integration in the OS.
| MattPalmer1086 wrote:
| I have had problems with premium devices too. I have a
| speaker that will connect to my pixel phone but not to an iOS
| device. It wasn't a particularly cheap speaker, although not
| premium.
|
| Ok, so that's a problem with the speaker Bluetooth, not the
| premium devices, in all likelihood.
|
| But after _so_ many years I 'd expect even low quality
| devices to Just Work(tm) for basic things like audio.
| pondidum wrote:
| I've not had problems with bluetooth for years.
|
| Printers on the other hand, never seem to work smoothly. How?
| mrweasel wrote:
| The only Bluetooth issues I'v had are weird ones. Apparently
| I'm to tall for Bluetooth, at least the cheap headphones I
| bought. Place the phone in my left hand pocket and the
| headphones, which have the antenna on the right can barely
| pickup the signal.
|
| The there's the implementation, and I cannot figure out how
| they messed up this one: Concept2 have an iOS app for their
| rowing machines. The previous version would pair the second you
| asked the rowing machine to connect. The new versions three to
| five times slower. It's the same bluetooth stack, why would
| pairing change?
| klodolph wrote:
| Buy better printers, or change your expectations. I haven't had
| problems with printers as long as I can remember, except a
| problem with large spool files created by PowerPoint.
|
| I used to work as a technician running computer labs. This job
| extended to printer repair. I later wrote software to manage
| printers. Some printers are really very nice to work with and
| not too hard to repair. Some laser printers are built like
| tanks and give you glorious crisp text forever. Some inkjets
| produce vivid or subtle colors with fantastic durability and
| consistency (assuming you use decent paper). Some people have
| unrealistic expectations about what a cheapo inkjet can do, or
| unrealistic expectations about what kind of paper you can use,
| and some people just buy the wrong model.
| [deleted]
| kmarc wrote:
| I bought a HP printer (scanner/fax/copier) 10ish years ago and
| since then I don't have printing problems. Before HP I thought
| the same as you :-)
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Almost every printer sold in the last decade supports IPP
| Everywhere, which has robust support on Windows, macOS, Linux,
| *BSD, ChromeOS, Android, and anything that can run CUPS. It's
| completely driverless, too.
| kristopolous wrote:
| And oh man does it have issues. Oftentimes you have to do
| SNMP. Take scanning for instance, many devices will just give
| you compressed JPEGs over their HTTP interface without any
| option for choosing otherwise
|
| Now they'll claim you can specify it a variety of ways such
| as picking the document type, but they'll just ignore you. I
| forget all the permutations but I tried them all.
|
| I've had to reverse engineer their windows program from pcap
| files to get the real protocol
|
| I've spent a good deal of time in cups supporting these
| systems. Reminds me that I'll need to convince cups to take
| my fixes somehow (which first requires me to convince them
| this is real; not as easy as you think because there's lots
| of hardware variance - you can't just reproduce random
| printer X and then I have to convince them that the XML
| documentation of claimed support is either incorrect or
| useless; then I'll have to convince them that SNMP is the way
| to go, then and only then, if I walk that tightrope can I put
| forth my solution ; gotta love the ceremony).
| darkwater wrote:
| > And oh man does it have issues. Oftentimes you have to do
| SNMP. Take scanning for instance, many devices will just
| give you compressed JPEGs over their HTTP interface without
| any option for choosing otherwise
|
| Just one data point (mine) but I have one of the cheapest
| HP Deskjet you can buy with scanner included, it works
| smoothly, no actions needed via wifi with Linux, I can set
| the DPI, save it as PNG or PDF, it's wonderful.
| kristopolous wrote:
| Brother is one of the biggest offenders here I've found.
| I've also found an HP with an issue as well but I haven't
| diagnosed it. I'm typing this from my bed on a phone so
| sorry I don't have the references on me
|
| What's your model?
| baq wrote:
| Interesting since past printer threads highlighted
| Brother as a reliable brand. Anecdotally I've got a ~10
| year old Brother laser printer+scanner and it still works
| great, but needs a Brother app to print from Apple
| devices since it doesn't support the new standard
| protocol.
| kristopolous wrote:
| Reliability and compatibility are separate dimensions.
|
| if the driverless tool and avahi tools can't find your
| printer then yes, you're living in hell and have dreams
| of a USB serial printer you can simply cat PDFs to. We'll
| probably get flying cars before we get another interface
| as reasonable as a line printer from 50 years ago
| darkwater wrote:
| > What's your model?
|
| HP DeskJet 2630, it's like 4 years old.
| oynqr wrote:
| They might support it, but few actually run the validation
| suite for IPP Everywhere. My Epson printer ignores specified
| orientations and shits itself when you specify print quality.
| Another certified HP printer of mine does just fine.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| I've been using cheap Brother and HP printers exclusively
| because my printing needs are simple, and I've been
| pleasantly surprised how well supported they are on
| computers and phones. This might be a Bluetooth-esque
| tragedy of poor vendor/driver/client/server/etc
| implementations ruining a good thing for some users.
| bjoli wrote:
| I buy stupid printers with good cups support and plug them into
| a printer server. It has been robust for about 7 years, and I
| have only had to update the raspberry pi once to a new LTS
| release.
|
| OTOH I am the kind of guy that only buys wired headphones.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2055/
| bandrami wrote:
| Is Bluetooth a secure comms protocol? Admittedly, no. But is it a
| reliable, easy-to-use protocol fit for mass consumption? Also,
| no.
| trollied wrote:
| There's some good stuff in the pipeline for Bluetooth. Auracast:
| https://www.bluetooth.com/auracast/ - this is essentially a
| localized broadcast bluetooth stream, and has loads of brilliant
| use-cases (think: commentary at a sporting event).
| scifibestfi wrote:
| It this a problem with bluetooth or the devices that use
| bluetooth? Because my AirPods Pro work great, but most other
| devices are hit and miss.
| matt_heimer wrote:
| Found out recently that Samsung Buds automatically go into
| pairing mode when you open their case which you do often because
| they charge in it. There is no way to prevent the behavior. So
| every time you go to use them all the nearby Windows computers
| prompt if you'd like to pair them and if you take them out of
| their case in public there is no way to prevent other people from
| pairing with them and playing whatever they want. Both the Buds 2
| and Buds Pro are like this.
|
| Also have some JayBirds and Bose Sport headphones in a similar
| form factor and thankfully you have to press a button on them to
| enter pairing mode.
| guzik wrote:
| If I can add few cents to the discussion. Bluetooth remains an
| 'unusually painful' technology for us, because:
|
| - There is no decent support on web so we need to rely on the
| mercy of Apple/iOS (RIP to Web Bluetooth API).
|
| - Some Android devices don't work well with Bluetooth (e.g.
| Motorola, OnePlus). Data packages are gibberish, connectivity is
| lost on random occasions, etc.
|
| And from customer perspective: device manufacturers can't agree
| which pairing strategy is best, so they are keep experimenting
| leading to massive confusion. That's frustrating.
| danuker wrote:
| I dare you to try sending anything between an Apple device and
| ANY Android phone.
|
| In my experience, the Android phones work between each other,
| and the iPhones work between each other, but I can't cross the
| Apple fence.
|
| Something tells me this is on purpose.
| autoexec wrote:
| > More than that, multiple US government agencies have advised
| consumers that using Bluetooth risks leaving their devices more
| vulnerable to cybersecurity risks.
|
| It was the security issues that first started me leaving
| Bluetooth disabled on my phones, but I'm glad that I did since
| it's so often being used to track us. Bluetooth tracking beacons
| are inexpensive and require less power than wifi trackers (which
| are still all over the place). They can run a long time on a
| battery or using RF to DC, allowing them to be easily and
| discretely mounted and can be triggered by motion/proximity
| sensors to extend battery life even further. They can be placed
| to log your location to within a couple feet, but some beacons
| can track you from many miles away.
|
| I've had my phone set to disable wifi and Bluetooth when I'm out
| of range of my usual networks. I can always manually enable
| either if I need it, but because I've still got a phone with a
| headphone jack, I've never actually needed to enable bluetooth.
| Laptops have the same issues. I'm hoping my next laptop will
| allow me to disable it in UEFI.
|
| UWB and 5G are also things to keep an eye on if you're concerned
| about being tracked and monitored.
| aljgz wrote:
| A lot of pain points in Bluetooth can be easily addressed by
| simple UX research: Phones and computers try to decide when to
| connect to a Bluetooth device. Just giving users an option like:
| "Connect to this device automatically" and unchecking it by
| default goes a long way.
|
| I had a Bluetooth speaker. An unknown neighbour was connected to
| it and there was no way for me to use this speaker, remotely,
| until I moved to another place.
|
| At night, I play sleep music on my Sonos wireless speaker. If I
| restart my Linux laptop, it connects to the speaker's Bluetooth
| interface, playing an annoying sound for my sleeping wife. I
| should remember to disconnect from it, or my music will be played
| to her.
|
| If you have a Bluetooth speaker, every time you turn it on, you
| have to find the phone/laptop that has connected to it,
| disconnect, and then connect the one that you want to use at the
| moment.
|
| Makes me wonder: do designers of these products use their
| products in any capacity?
| foobarbecue wrote:
| IMO the problem with bluetooth is applicable to many modern
| technologies:
|
| - it can do a lot of things and in many scenarios there are
| decisions to make (which device to connect to? multiple? should I
| start playing something? what? should I stop the other thing?
| play over it?)
|
| - instead of focusing on making it configurable, the designers
| focused on trying to guess what the average user wants (no users
| are average)
|
| And then there's the seperate fact that it doesn't have any
| decent 2-way audio protocols STILL which makes me sad.
| donatj wrote:
| 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 unable to get them both to connect to
| my phone reliably at the same time. It's been a couple months.
|
| All that said, that's the only real Bluetooth device that's given
| me more than 30 seconds trouble in recent years.
| johnwalkr wrote:
| I have a cheap but good bluetooth headsetthat I like. Sometimes
| I have trouble using it because it connects to a device I don't
| actually want to use first. If I made a headset I would put a
| switch for multiple devices on it, like some mouses have.
|
| Anyway it has a nice feature: long press the pair button to
| forget all pairings. It solves almost any issue, and it's more
| convenient to re-pair things that you want to use, than switch
| to a device you are not using to disconnect
| vxNsr wrote:
| 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.
| dkarl wrote:
| I hate that my bluetooth headphones glitch when they're connected
| to multiple devices. Something my phone does at irregular
| intervals causes audio from other sources to skip, even though
| the phone isn't actually making a sound. I manually disconnect
| from my phone multiple times per day so I can listen to media on
| my laptop without being interrupted.
| teddyh wrote:
| Obligatory xkcd from 2018: https://xkcd.com/2055/
| byteflip wrote:
| As someone who worked on Bluetooth in consumer electronics for
| years the title gave me a good laugh.
| salmonlogs wrote:
| One of the most frustrating problems I've encountered is
| arbitrary limits on the number of paired/remembered Bluetooth
| devices.
|
| My Denon amplifier has an arbitrary limit of 8 paired devices.
| When you pair a 9th the oldest is forgotten. Storage is cheap,
| why have the limit!
| tbihl wrote:
| My only complaint is, I suspect, a regulatory thing. Cars don't
| let you pair when driving, which is perfectly useless since the
| only time you pair a new phone to your car is when you have a new
| passenger wanting to connect her phone...
|
| Other than that, my Bluetooth experience is perfectly boring 99%+
| of the time.
| jeffnappi wrote:
| Bluetooth is quite amazing in general. What it is capable of with
| extremely low energy usage is just mind blowing really.
|
| I think the main reason it gets a bad rap (e.g. vs WiFi) is that
| the radio link is conflated with all of the messiness of
| codec/protocol compatibility and features provided over said
| radio link.
|
| If there were standards for devices to stream audio over WiFi
| links, I imaging we'd see nearly similar frustrations in codec,
| latency and compatibility issues - it's incredibly complex.
|
| Much respect to the engineers out there who make it a good
| experience. I personally tried my hand at tackling wide-band
| speech support with PulseAudio etc [1] and I was humbled by the
| complexity present in the protocol/codec layers.
|
| Hats off to the teams at both PulseAudio and PipeWire who have
| brought wide band speech support to Linux Desktops :)
|
| [1]
| https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pulseaudio/+bug/18...
| listless wrote:
| I think the main problem is exactly as the article states -
| there no standard for how things connect to each other. If they
| could just make the connection standard everywhere, that would
| get rid of a ton of the silliness.
| jeffnappi wrote:
| Try getting thousands of organizations to agree on something
| and then implement it successfully... The complexity of the
| problem far surpasses that of the technical standards
| themselves.
| pessimizer wrote:
| That's what we have governments for. Individual companies
| trying to set standards often just lose business to the
| companies they interop with, and the one that does best
| among the interoperable defects (or extends and
| extinguishes.)
|
| Instead of making individual companies strategize around
| interop, you just impose it. The real problem is that this
| doesn't work with regulatory capture, because you need
| people formulating standards who have both independence and
| expertise.
| amelius wrote:
| The same holds for USB.
| oblio wrote:
| USB A? Nope, super reliable for 5 nines of users and use cases.
| With billions of users you still get millions of duds, but
| that's ok.
|
| USB C is... Complicated.
| MrDresden wrote:
| There is nothing in this article actually answering the question
| posed in the title.
|
| Unless the answer is this paraphrasing "No clear agreement on how
| it should function was ever reached".
| noisymemories wrote:
| Ha anyone been able to deploy a better behaving protocol over the
| same ASICs/SoCs in so many years? I mean, I'm pretty sure no
| hardware or software vendor is remotely happy with the current
| status quo.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| My experience has been pretty good on cars after 2015 when using
| iphone
|
| Cars Speakers And other apple products
|
| Unusually awesome
| iso1631 wrote:
| My carplay experience when I plug my phone in via USB is great
|
| When I try to use bluetooth, forget it, works about half the
| time, massive pain having to pair with each new car, etc
| AmericanChopper wrote:
| There's a huge problem with BT that the article doesn't seem to
| touch on at all, which is that it's too low-bandwidth to provide
| a good experience for many of its intended use cases. It has no
| high quality full duplex audio profile. It is literally not
| possible to use a Bluetooth headset that doesn't very noticeably
| degrade the audio quality for both yourself and your audience.
| toxik wrote:
| My main problem with Bluetooth is connecting and disconnecting
| devices together.
|
| Want to use your corded headphones on your phone? Just plug them
| in. Want to switch to your computer? Just plug them in there.
|
| Want to use your Bluetooth headphones with your computer? Turn
| them on. Check what they automatically connected to if anything.
| If wrong, find that device, disconnect Bluetooth, go back to
| computer, find device in Bluetooth menu somewhere and connect.
| Pray that the device doesn't require you to enter discovery mode.
| Repeat the process for switching. Bonus points if your smartwatch
| was involved.
| turtleman1338 wrote:
| Bad audio quality with bluetooth on phones is mostly a myth.
| Todays smartphones only have cheap digital audio converters(DAC),
| so that you usually get higher quality music with a proper
| bluetooth codec like aptx.
| aki237 wrote:
| But... Does the quality of a phone's DAC matter? I was under
| the impression that Bluetooth is digital audio. And the quality
| issue is with the bandwidth mostly or the headset DAC sucks.
| somat wrote:
| Correct, the point was that the phones dac only matters when
| using the phones built in speaker, if you are using a
| blutooth audio device, then what matters for sound quality is
| the dac in the bluetooth device.
| astrange wrote:
| Recently phones don't have DACs since they don't have headphone
| jacks. Well, they have them for the speakers and vibration but
| presumably you didn't mean that.
|
| But their dongles' DACs are quite sufficient and are better
| than most of the audiophile DAC industry (which doesn't have
| the budget to actually make anything good).
|
| https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/r...
| Paul_S wrote:
| Bluetooth poor audio quality is not a myth. The bandwidth is
| just not there for high quality audio. Even with aptx. That's
| why companies roll their own with BLE and the 2M phy. And even
| with that it's still flaky because it's wireless and can and
| will drop packets.
|
| Yes, BLE audio is an improvement but those devices are still in
| the future. What you have currently, you're better off using
| your smartphone DAC.
| goldcd wrote:
| I think codecs are where I have most of my remaining BT
| annoyances. AptX is great (but there's also AptX HD, AptX.. is
| it variable? etc) - and exactly which AptX is supported varies
| by the Qualcomm chip in your phone and the device you're
| connecting it to. Or you can go with Sony's LDAC. Works great
| on my Pixel, once I've turned on "quality" in the Sony App,
| then turned on the LDAC opton that gives in my bluetooth
| settings (and optionally can go into the dev menu each time I
| connect, to adjust the bitrate).
|
| I do like bluetooth - but working out what features will work
| with which devices is a PITA. It always falls back to something
| functional, but fallback masks a lot of improvements that could
| be made. Although maybe that's the right approach. It works,
| and if you're somebody who likes to fiddle, you can.
| yndoendo wrote:
| Dear platform creators for Bluetooth, Please implement a privacy
| and battery saving measure. Where once I turn off the paired
| device, such as a car or headphones, the platform automatically
| turns off the Bluetooth radio. This prevents tracking with-in
| stores or offices. Saves battery power. And prevents the device
| from auto-connecting to my car during ignition. Just because I
| was using Bluetooth before I arrived does not mean I want to use
| bluetooth once I depart.
|
| I currently manually do this everytime.
| EMM_386 wrote:
| 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.
| Balgair wrote:
| Bluetooth horror story time?
|
| I was trying to get a system working to record the motions of
| vampire bats (long story). Previous people had decided on a small
| backpack mounted to the bats with a LiPo battery, the sensors,
| and a Bluetooth transmitter to a laptop for data recording.
|
| Everytime someone would walk by the room within 3 floors, the
| sensors would try to pair with their phone instead of keeping the
| connection to the laptop. If that sounds like nonsense, yes, _I
| agree_. Since this was in a research hospital there were no
| 'good' hours as patients and MDs and nurses walked by all the
| time. RF noise and the like is deep-dark-magic in normal times,
| combine with Bluetooth and you get a Rogaine subscription.
|
| I did get it working, with Bluetooth even, but only after
| spending a weekend building a crummy Faraday cage with screendoor
| mesh, a ton of soldering, duct tape, and dodgy ground loops into
| the wall outlets.
|
| Bluetooth, never again
| causi wrote:
| 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 newer headphones, has zero
| perceptible latency. My newer headphones are practically useless
| for gaming but if I try to use the headset profile the quality is
| so low as to be worthless for anything but phone calls. How is
| the old one doing it better? I have no idea.
| dmitrygr wrote:
| > 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
| [deleted]
| im3w1l wrote:
| I recently used bluetooth headphones (airpods) in a summer
| cottage in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night. The
| phone (samsung) was inches from the headphones. In other words,
| it's hard to imagine better radio conditions. And yet, the
| connection occasionally glitched (a handful of times over a total
| of many hours).
| fleddr wrote:
| Bluetooth is absolute garbage, I hate it with a passion even if
| overall it works in 90% of cases.
|
| Just the other day I was connecting my phone to a mobile speaker
| in the garden. The phone is an inch away from it. Still doesn't
| connect, just a spinner that times out after a minute with
| "connection failed".
|
| Why does it fail? Who knows. It might work tomorrow. Or on
| another phone. Or when the weather is different. What on earth
| are two devices directly next to each other doing for 60 seconds?
|
| I also have a few BT controlled LEDs where from an app I control
| brightness and color temperature. My phone is always in range,
| but the BT connection just doesn't sustain itself. It
| intermittently drops after which I need to redo the setup again
| on every single light.
|
| I'm sure the reason is "low power" or "interference" but that
| doesn't mean anything. It's not actionable. It's fragile and
| unreliable tech.
| jkaptur wrote:
| I feel the same way - it's so interesting how the lack of a
| mental model causes such frustration! There's perfectly well-
| understood metaphors for network availability ("how many bars"
| and so on). I wonder why Bluetooth doesn't use them or create
| its own, and instead _just fails to work_.
| deepsun wrote:
| > perfectly well-understood metaphors for network
| availability ("how many bars" ...
|
| ACKHSHUALLY, "how many bars" is well known to be very bad
| indication of network connectivity. Yes, if you have one bar
| it's probably worse than five, but for example "my phone show
| five bars and yours only three" is very wrong way to judge --
| there's no relative measure.
| caleb-allen wrote:
| That's true, but at least the mental model roughly holds.
| Somebody who is barely technologically literate will
| understand that "more bars" is better, and that's exactly
| what the abstraction should do. Communicate something
| simply at the cost of precision.
| qorrect wrote:
| We could have the segments of the b turn on or off based
| on signal strength
| avidiax wrote:
| You could actually have the devices too close (overdriving the
| RF receiver). Or the two antennas are oriented with their null
| directions facing each other.
|
| My go-to method to get difficult BT gear to pair is to place
| both devices in the microwave and shut the door. The microwave
| is a faraday cage for 2.4Ghz, so it removes interference as a
| potential problem. If it still fails, you can turn on the
| microwave and enjoy a light show at least.
| deepsun wrote:
| Often it's a problem with firmware/driver implementation in one
| of those devices (like speaker), resulting from poor
| development processes.
|
| Complexity of Bluetooth protocol, multiplied by the speaker
| price (assuming you have not the really expensive ones) does
| not help as well.
| amichal wrote:
| I have 3 BT headphone things. They are all paired to both my mac
| and my iPhone. Something changed recently. If paired to my mac
| two out of the three play on hold beeps whenever my Google Meet
| meeting is muted. Or, and this is really annoying, if my computer
| happens to transition through some sort of sleep state in the
| other room. So, if I have them on at night and unless I
| remembered to disconnect my computer at the end of the work day,
| I am woken up in the middle of the night with random on hold
| beeps until I get up, go to the other room, and disconnect the
| computer.
|
| On top of that they both of course randomly activate Siri in my
| iPhone (despite me setting Siri to only activate if I press the
| side button) and they both auto play the same random song.
| amitp wrote:
| I had a problem with the combination of Google Meet, my
| bluetooth headphones (Aftershokz), and Mac OS Monterey. It
| would keep beeping and putting it on hold.
| https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/disable-automatic-...
| was the workaround for me, and also in Zoom I disabled
| "automatically adjust microphone volume". Frustrating.
|
| I have a separate problem where if my computer goes to sleep or
| goes out of range, the headphones keep beeping until I turn
| them off. :-/ But this seems specific to the one I'm using and
| hasn't happened with my others.
| baybal2 wrote:
| Bluetooth is governed way better than any other comm standard.
| For example, WiFi implementation incompatibilities are legendary,
| and solving them is left to device makers instead of a specialist
| body. Certification is also non-existant.
|
| For Bluetooth, at least for a major vendor, it's unthinkable that
| they wouldn't be able to come to Bluetooth SIG, and call out the
| issue, and have it worked on until it's solved. But more usual,
| issue will be highlighted at the certification, and test stage.
| kypro wrote:
| Really? This isn't my experience. I use several BT devices
| regularly and they all work fine. The only time I run into issues
| is when using shared devices. For example, both me and my
| girlfriend share a car and when we get in the car together one of
| our phones will automatically connect which often means one of us
| will need to manually disconnect and reconnect if the wrong
| device pairs first. I'm not sure this is a flaw with BT so much
| though, or at least it's a bit of an edge case and could probably
| be addressed with a better implementation.
|
| The one technology that I still find unreasonably painful after
| decades of development is inkjet printers. I have no idea why
| it's still so difficult to reliably connect a printer to a
| device. To reliably print a document without random blank pages
| or weird margin issues. For the printer not to require cleaning
| and alignment with every use. And for the printer to do anything
| within a reasonable timeframe - sometimes it takes several
| minutes after clicking print for the printer to actually start
| printing anything.
|
| Bluetooth in comparison is really good.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Everyone should start a timer and try to transfer 3 small files
| (1-2MB) from their phone to another device, via Bluetooth, right
| now. Can anyone successfully copy all 3 small files in under 3
| minutes?
| wldcordeiro wrote:
| My biggest pain point right now with Bluetooth and my phone is
| that it's *all* media going through the paired device. I want to
| be able to pin just my music app audio to go out a speaker and
| still be able to use my phone speaker for all other apps but
| that's not possible.
| ChrisRR wrote:
| I worked on Bluetooth at the stack level, and from my experience
| of the specification, there's not any single thing that causes it
| to be flaky. Every level that I have experience with seems to be
| well defined.
|
| So why the hell is it so difficult to pair and connect? I have no
| idea. I can only assume that each level of the stack has a number
| of corner cases that all together create a perfect storm, because
| otherwise the specification seems to be robust enough that it
| shouldn't have such an issue with connecting.
| m12k wrote:
| I've always had this hunch that the Bluetooth protocol is
| somewhat underspecified - if you just implement the spec, you're
| going to have something that mostly works in the happy case, but
| you gotta do a bunch more to make it work consistently under
| less-than-ideal real world conditions (which companies like Jabra
| and Apple then tend to do). Any hardware people wanna chime in
| and tell me if I'm close or not?
| Paul_S wrote:
| You're not. When something in bt doesn't work it's caused by
| two things: a regular bug in the stack, or a feature of the
| spec that was implemented incorrectly which comes from
| ambiguous wording in the spec or simply the fact that it's
| several thousand pages long. This is usually not a problem if
| you have two devices using the same stack talking to each other
| but normally that's not the case.
| byteflip wrote:
| 100%. Interoperability is the complexity. You'll find old
| popular devices for example that are slightly different in
| behavior to the "norm". It could be straight up incorrect
| behavior or maybe something more subtle. Do you drop support
| for those devices or change your behavior dynamically based
| on the device? Would your customers complain if you did drop
| it? Can you identify the device reliably? What if they update
| their software/behavior in the future - would your workaround
| break? Does your BT software stack even give you enough
| control to do fix it? Does your hardware/software vendor give
| you enough support to fix things if you can't do it yourself?
| How many other devices did you test against?
|
| It was painful but fun to work on.
| shakna wrote:
| > I've always had this hunch that the Bluetooth protocol is
| somewhat underspecified
|
| Absolute opposite. The blutetooth spec is one of the most
| hideous, largest specs you have ever laid eyes on. The full
| spec, very heavy, very particular, is in excess of a thousand
| pages.
|
| If you "just implement the spec", you have an enormous team and
| budget. But, you'll still end up in a hole, because not
| everyone agrees with what the spec is actually saying, because
| it's too complicated, and too large. So there are parts which
| are in direct competition with each other, leaving you to have
| to guess an answer - knowing that there is no market agreement
| for what is the "right" answer.
| chrsw wrote:
| 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.
| 01100011 wrote:
| I worked for a company developing 802.15.3 over a decade ago.
| It gave me some insight into how these specs are developed.
| It's a complete shit-show. The company would pay non-technical
| folks, like relatives of employees or whatever, to attend IEEE
| meetings so they'd have more votes to skew the process.
| Technical merits have little to do with what ends up in the
| spec.
| haplessam wrote:
| 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.
| nine_k wrote:
| 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-standard features. They "save" on writing a good driver.
| They care little if devices made by their competition don't work
| reliably or at all in the mix. (And even sometimes their own!)
|
| - RF noise makes radio interfaces like BT inherently not always
| reliable. But the user never notices when a small EM storm rages
| nearby, for the user it's just "damn bluetooth glitches for no
| reason at all".
| makeitdouble wrote:
| BT device makers are also coming in a slightly less explored
| field and have to make UX decisions that might not have clear
| answers yet.
|
| For instance some BT headset have only a few buttons, and the
| play/pause button does also redial the last connected phone
| number depending on the phone's state. I'm sure someone thought
| this feature made a ton of sense and really helps them in their
| day to day life, while I hate with the heat of a thousand suns.
|
| I'd expect it takes us a few more years to come to a consensus
| on how to cleanly solve this kind of diverging views.
| westmeal wrote:
| Config files/settings.
| smackeyacky wrote:
| 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 LE.
| Most of us working in this space have some cack-handed way to
| advertise data without connecting because (for example) most of
| the connections to Bluetooth LE devices involve you having to
| do device discovery, even if you are connecting to 500 of the
| same damn device.
|
| Also, the bluetooth library in Android started out terrible and
| didn't improve despite being replaced, the Bluetooth chips in
| most cheap phones are also rubbish and fail when you exceed
| their undocumented number of connections, often requiring a
| reboot of the device etc.
|
| In short: You can sheet a lot of the problems back to an ill
| thought out spec and bluetooth chips in things like phones that
| just plain suck.
|
| Things like RF interference - I just don't know. Sometimes
| there is just a heap more bluetooth traffic around than anybody
| knows about. Packet sniffers are relatively cheap, it's
| interesting to fire one up in a busy office and see how many
| bluetooth packet collisions there are (hint: it's a lot). Blame
| RF storms or whatever but it's more likely to be something
| advertising a lot and spamming the spectrum.
| toxik wrote:
| Something I've noticed is that Bluetooth breaks down around
| major construction sites, like infrastructure projects. It's
| very strange, I wonder if they have some kind of high power
| BT transmitters for some reason.
| consp wrote:
| Any high power 2.4ghz transmitter will destroy Bluetooth
| communication, this is all in the same 2.45ghz ISM band. I
| guess they use some devices communicating on that band.
| dcx wrote:
| They certainly do - walkie-talkies!
|
| Edit: Yes, they do exist - you can google this. But on
| reflection, a commenter below is probably right that it's
| more likely wireless security cameras, given typical site
| requirements (range, penetration depth)
| gorgoiler wrote:
| Handhelds are usually UHF - in the 446MHz range. Do you
| know of personal radios that operate in the 2.4GHz
| unlicensed spectrum?
| gruez wrote:
| I don't think they use the 2.4 GHz band.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Mobile_Radio_Servic
| e
| mschuster91 wrote:
| On construction sites, I'd suspect that the problem is an
| awful lot of EM noise from machinery that should have been
| replaced or at least maintained decades ago, like mechanic
| spark generators/distributors from simple combustion motors
| or brushed electric motors (e.g. in drills).
|
| Additionally, remote controls for cranes, concrete pumps
| and other machinery may be the cause, depending on the
| frequency bands these use. Here in Germany, it's all
| 433/869 MHz from what I remember from sites I worked at,
| but no idea about the US.
| toxik wrote:
| It may be motor noise but anecdotal evidence suggests
| that it happens even when the machines are off, eg on
| national holidays. Some kind of transmitter seems likely
| though. I know one construction site had analog video
| signals in the 2.4 Ghz range for their surveillance
| cameras. I accidentally found out when I did a range
| sweep on a video receiver for other reasons.
|
| PS I am in northern Europe, not the US.
| seanalltogether wrote:
| > 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.
| chasil wrote:
| Bluetooth devices will "frequency hop" in a schedule to which
| they both agree. Noisy frequencies that result in lost data
| will be removed from their scheduled shifts.
|
| There are only a maximum of 79 channels switched 1600/second,
| and if there is more noise than not, then the data rate will
| suffer, although updated modulation standards might compensate,
| if implemented.
| fullstop wrote:
| Also, head units generally don't get updates and the lifespan
| of a car is quite long. The phones that we are using now didn't
| always exist when the head unit was made.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > It's like phone chargers before USB.
|
| No, it's like phone chargers before EU regulators stepped in.
| moonchrome wrote:
| >No, it's like phone chargers before EU regulators stepped
| in.
|
| When did this happen ?
| detaro wrote:
| 2009
| npteljes wrote:
| More info:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_external_power_supply
| grnmamba wrote:
| 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.
| RedShift1 wrote:
| > Everyone except Apple was already on USB.
|
| My old box of chargers begs to differ
| bigbillheck wrote:
| They most certainly were not:
| https://www.engadget.com/2009-06-29-nokia-apple-rim-and-
| othe...
| ralfd wrote:
| 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
| detaro wrote:
| How was getting all manufacturers to agree a "failure"?
| afiori wrote:
| The EU charger mandate required USB if USB was
| sufficient, IIRC apple managed to continue using
| lightning connectors b arguing that USB standards of the
| time where not enough for the iPhone.
| bigbillheck wrote:
| Is the situation today not 'everything is micro-usb,
| usb-c, or apple'?
| grnmamba wrote:
| Ok, so since 2009 everyone except Apple was on USB.
| seszett wrote:
| 2009 _is_ when the EU stepped in. They didn 't have to
| set it into law because the industry agreed to it
| voluntarily except for Apple.
| artiii wrote:
| "industry agreed to it voluntarily" China before
| eu(~1-2y) forces usb chargers. and industry had choice,
| make special version for them or not.
| id wrote:
| No, because there were many other manufacturers.
| Certhas wrote:
| That was my first association as well. This seems like a much
| much harder thing to regulate though...
|
| For USB chargers industry had come up with a good solution
| but market failure meant there was no incentive to adopt it.
| That's text book regulation stuff. Here there doesn't seem to
| be a good proven solution out there that you could mandate...
| pas wrote:
| there's no need to mandate it, but the EU could spend a few
| ebucks on consumer appliances interoperability testing, and
| simply shaming those that suck. (or at least put out a
| statement about the problem, which could be simply lack of
| incentives for cooperation on solving the issues. or maybe
| too much backward compatibility preventing the whole
| ecosystem to move to more robust BT standards, etc.)
|
| for example just a few days (week) ago there was a thread
| about how Logitech wireless stuff and wireless headphones
| interfere.
|
| sure, it's hard to point to a singular root cause (Logitech
| emits too much, or headphones are ill-designed and BT is
| simply not the right tool for this because this or that)
|
| _but_ there are clear software (firmware, drivers, kernel)
| failures, that stem from simply releasing absolute garbage.
| (and every layer just coding for the happy path.)
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| Logitech bluetooth wireless and apple airpods
| specifically. Logitech over their own wireless protocol,
| or any other set of wireless headphones is fine.
|
| I have three sets of bluetooth headphones that I use on a
| rotating basis daily with my logitech bluetooth mouse and
| keyboard, and they are all dead reliable... well dead
| reliable for bluetooth devices
| Bouncingsoul1 wrote:
| /Opinion: "Makers of BT devices can't agree on many important
| common things (easy discovery / pairing mode, priority, etc)."
| => I think it is not the creators of the devices (peripherals),
| it is in my expierence the SmartPhones (Apple/Google) => iOS
| won't let you discover BLE Devices which have only generic or
| costum services/characteristics => iOS will hide parts of
| advertisment/discovery data from app developers => iOS won't
| let you know if a device is bonded/paired via API => on iOS if
| you want to initiate bonding, you have to initiate it from the
| peripheral => Android sometimes "forgets" keys of paired
| devices => Android sometimes scrambles data from characteristic
| notify() => Android sometimes "misses" characteristic writes
| (ratio 1:1000000) This is just what I could come up with in a
| minute. I develop both FW for peripherals and Apps, so my 2
| cents => It's almost never the peripheral/fw and most time the
| Smartphone => RF noise is (almost) never an issue, glitchses
| come from phones
| CipherThrowaway wrote:
| I'll add that the specs are so bad that it's not commercially
| viable to try to fully understand them before building and
| launching BT products and middleware.
| nothis wrote:
| Trying to understand bluetooth's awfulness is a dead-end. I
| tried. I thought, "yea, you're nerdy enough to read the tech
| specs, it will be boring but after an hour you'll understand
| and your bluetooth keyboard will pair every time instead of 85%
| of times". Nope.
| snarf21 wrote:
| Most of it is the Bluetooth SIGs fault. It has got away from
| them. It reminds me of SMTP or HTTP, it is so useful that
| people couldn't wait for things and just implemented and added
| whatever they wanted. No certification is required just a
| registration for the logo so it has made it the wild wild west.
| Additionally being stuck in the "free" frequencies means that
| it has no ability to deliver quality in a noisy room.
| yosito wrote:
| > user never notices when a small EM storm rages nearby
|
| What's the easiest way to detect this? Is this something an
| average smartphone can detect with the right app? Or would I
| need to buy specific hardware to detect it?
| anon_123g987 wrote:
| We just learned that any Bluetooth device can detect it
| easily.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| 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.
| anotherhue wrote:
| I get far fewer problems if I make sure there's a 1:1 pairing
| between devices.
|
| Headphones playing from your phone and your mac in a back pack?
| The mac will wake up every few minutes and steal the connection.
| eimrine wrote:
| 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?
| itomato wrote:
| Maybe it's out of spec, but my little cassette boombox with
| Bluetooth outperforms every other device I've used.
|
| Instant pairing. Multiple devices. Unwavering signal.
|
| Only the speakers and driver circuit let me down. It's tinny and
| quiet, even at full volume with tone knob adjustments.
|
| Still, it's a sure thing as far as connection goes.
| kshahkshah wrote:
| Beyond some of the autoplay issues - which are software based and
| not the protocols problem - I haven't had any truly major issues
| with Bluetooth since 4.1
|
| Honestly since 4.1 it has been overwhelmingly a positive
| experience. Yes I need to manually click the bluetooth icon in my
| toolbar on my mac every once in a while to re-establish a
| connection but that is the extent to which I have troubles.
| Paul_S wrote:
| Let me pass on to you some ancient Chinese... er, German
| engineering wisdom: He who understands wireless communication
| uses cables.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| Sadly, apple started a 3.5mm free future and others were happy
| to jump on that horrible wagon (as well as soapbar sexy designs
| which you cannot hold without a case, but that's another
| lovable rant :).
|
| But yeah. My computers have Ethernet whenever they can. That
| alone saves what little hair I have left.
| askvictor wrote:
| 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
| which Just Works(TM), thus slowly exacting their revenge on
| the copycats and/or steering more sales towards Apple.
| ajdude wrote:
| > which they generally do Every delayed zoom meeting I've
| been in due to AirPods not pairing correctly would disagree
| with that sentiment.
| stkdump wrote:
| 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 cord rubbing against my cloths whenever I
| move, creating noise. And not having to deal with the cord
| when I put them on/off, etc. It is such a quality of live
| improvement, easily one of the biggest improvements in
| recent years.
| neutronicus wrote:
| Oh, I've got problems pairing my Android phone to my car.
|
| Well, not "pairing", but like 4 out of 5 times, the phone
| thinks it's outputting to the car's bluetooth, but is
| actually playing out of the phone speaker, and doesn't
| start outputting to the car until I switch the output
| from bluetooth to phone speaker and back again. And for
| some reason the Spotify app never implemented the thingie
| that lets you switch outputs, so I have to switch to a
| podcast app, do this little dance (treating my wife and
| kid to a little snippet of podcast), and then go to
| Spotify and play music.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| 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.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| I'm honestly shocked how good of a job Apple did on their
| AirPods. When they first came out I thought it was an
| expensive gimmick, but when they released the Pro's I
| bought in and they became my favorite Apple product of all
| time.
|
| At least for me, the reliability of the connection as well
| as being able to do a quick "handoff" from my iPhone to my
| Mac to take a call is a gamechanger. Also the spacial audio
| feature is probably one of the best overlooked features of
| the AirPods, the depth of sound you get with it enabled is
| truly incredible given what you are listening on. When I
| discovered that feature I pretty much re-listened to my
| entire Spotify library, listening to songs I've heard
| hundreds of times before, I picked up sounds I never heard
| previously.
|
| For $200, what a freaking package.
| m463 wrote:
| Friend has airpods, they have problems during phone calls
| pretty frequently. Maybe better than vanilla bluetooth,
| but still there are issues.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| I've heard consistent excellent things about AirPods in
| terms of connectivity and listening experience for the
| owner :)
|
| Let me be the annoying one to say that they can
| negatively contribute to a team meeting experience (which
| fair enough, isn't what they're designed for - but what
| many people use them for, not just in a pinch but as
| primary day-long mechanism).
|
| There's only so much software can do to mitigate the fact
| it's an omnidirectional microphone far away from one's
| mouth, as opposed to focused microphone 2cm from mouth.
| E.g. literally yesterday, we thought our colleague was in
| a hurricane in Nova Scotia. Turns out, after we
| eventually asked and we were all nerdy enough to pause
| and troubleshoot :P, he was at home during a heat wave;
| his line was quiet when he didn't speak, but when he
| spoke, the A/C noise came overwhelmingly from his line;
| making it appear he's experiencing massive intermittent
| gusts. With airpods (or any other non-boom microphone -
| Airpods indeed are best of the breed, this is not their
| issue), we always know if person is walking/moving (wind
| noise going over microphone while they're speaking), or
| in a car, or eating, or around kids, etc. With the
| Plantronics boom headset (which is our team's go-to set,
| there's another good Jabra one I think a few of us use),
| nobody has any idea if we are in the car, or walking, or
| quietly in the office. That boom microphone makes a
| massive, massive hardware physical difference that
| software struggles to overcome without penalty somewhere
| in the chain.
| sgarrity wrote:
| The worst technology I've encountered in recent years is:
| Other People's AirPod.
|
| When paired with a windows PC or older Mac, Airpods use
| an older or lower quality audio codec that sounds pretty
| poor for those hearing you speak.
|
| Caveat: I don't know what I'm talking about, technically.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| This is basically all bluetooth headsets though. Try
| using any of them to play games on Windows while using
| in-game chat. The audio drops down to tape recorder
| quality because there isn't enough bandwidth.
| [deleted]
| xen2xen1 wrote:
| I keep a cheap set of wired headphones to use when I call
| people. I've used them when calling tech support on site
| somewhere. I probably looked dumb in the airpods age, but
| they work so much better than anything else. I'd use
| headphones from the $5 store before real airpods.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| I agree with the mic issue and it's not ideal, though it
| eventually just gets down to what you can and can't do
| with the hardware. I will say for me at least this is
| non-issue since all calls are taken in my quiet
| apartment.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| Agreed; this is the tradeoff inherent in that hardware
| design; by all accounts, Airpods are the superior
| offering in that space.
| qikInNdOutReply wrote:
| Just turn on the emotors and watch all those connections
| scramble.
| fennecfoxen wrote:
| I worked on a wireless network management product for ~5 years,
| integrating with multiple vendors, and I'm putting fiber in my
| walls later this year
| xen2xen1 wrote:
| "If you can get a wired, use a wire.." Tech support advice
| I've given for at least a decade. It's amazing how often
| people end up being concerts to my way of thinking after a
| little bit. Wires don't have interference, they don't
| randomly not work (or much less, I have seen that). They have
| way more individual bandwidth. They are better in every way.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| I thought android auto was going to be cool. I've gotten to use
| it with my flagship phones and several late model rentals.
| Every single time, it will disconnect upon occasion while
| driving (and using nav) forcing me to unplug replug. I haven't
| waited long enough to see if it could recover ina minute or so.
|
| When I enable it by plugging my phone into the car, it tells me
| it is going to enable Bluetooth.
|
| That is like getting high speed internet only to have the modem
| do dialup.
|
| Does anyone know why a forced wired protocol requires
| substandard wireless connectivity?
| badthingfactory wrote:
| 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.
| wingworks wrote:
| A few years ago this is what I did. Got the cheapest Brother
| laser printer. Happened to have wifi, but managed to disable
| it. It's been working solid via cables for years.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| 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...
| noisy_boy wrote:
| I have the wifi laser printer from Brother - works fine
| wirelessly with Ubuntu.
| infinityplus1 wrote:
| Brother printers have regressed as well. See this post:
| Brother printers now locking out non-OEM paraphernalia
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131
| oblio wrote:
| 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.
| specialist wrote:
| 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?
| Koshkin wrote:
| > _It needed an HP account to be able to scan._
|
| You can use Windows apps to do the scanning without
| creating an HP account.
| dmix wrote:
| Yeah my mom has HP wireless printers and I always
| uninstalled the HP software and it works every time
| without having to install anything else.
|
| Maybe because I'm used to the MacOS world but that should
| be the default first thing you try is do nothing and let
| the OS handle it.
| jonathantf2 wrote:
| Some new HP printers lock scanning on the printer side
| unless you sign in with an account, any printer with an e
| at the end of the model number won't even let you print
| to 9100 without an account.
| wikfwikf wrote:
| I bought the cheapest Brother laser printer in the early
| 2010s because someone on a forum gave me this same advice. It
| has worked without issue ever since.
|
| A few years ago I plugged it into a Raspberry Pi so that I
| could share it via CUPS to all the family's PCs. This has
| also worked almost without problems (the exception being it
| had to be reconfigured a few times on my wife's Apple
| laptop). A year or so later I realised that while connected
| to wifi I can print from my Android phone. The phone found
| the CUPS server and the printer without me doing anything at
| all and it has never gone wrong.
| m463 wrote:
| I have one and connected via USB. Works well.
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| I feel like for the most part car manufacturers are to blame for
| the proprietary poorly designed infotainment systems that have
| issues all around.
| justinzollars wrote:
| My door, yes my front door is controlled by a bluetooth device.
| It's a horrible horrible experience.
| knorker wrote:
| Sometimes people make excuses for bluetooth. Like "it can do so
| many things, that's why it's so complex and can get bugs".
|
| No. Just no.
|
| 99.999% of use cases is "get audio to my headphones, and possibly
| from its mic too".
|
| 20 years and we can't even get the primary use case to work.
|
| If this were about setting up some esoteric "I can't believe
| bluetooth can do this" feature, then maybe.
|
| But just get audio to work. That's it. This is not fusion power,
| yet seems to be as hard for the people implementing it.
| ptx wrote:
| > _Bluetooth is said to borrow its name from [...] Early
| programmers adopted "Bluetooth" as a code name for their wireless
| tech [...]_
|
| Maybe the author should have at least glanced at Wikipedia to
| find out by whom this "is said" and who these "early programmers"
| are.
| moomin wrote:
| Honestly, I constantly criticize journalists for not going any
| deeper than Wikipedia, but this author is staying well out of
| even the shallow end of the pool.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-07-20 23:02 UTC)