I find Bluetooth to be a frustrating experience. Almost every day I encounter issues when I'm trying to pair say, my headphones, with my MacBook. I hold the power button the headphones to turn them on or they're already on standby. I do a few clicks to pair them on my MacBook. macOS says it's paired but I didn't hear the pairing sound. So I try clicking again to unpair. No unpair sound. I toggle Bluetooth off and on and try pairing again. No dice. I power cycle the headphones and they pair with my phone instead. I hold the up and down volume buttons to force them into pairing mode again...
Not to mention that Spotify randomly decides to switch devices sometimes and refuses to switch back unless I kill the app. Or it says my headphones are paired even though Android does not.
On the London Underground, my music often goes crackly/distorted presumably because of interference from the trains and other devices around me. Frankly I never even considered that could be an issue. And it's not a faulty product or anything like that.
This isn't just a complaint about my AT headphones. My Anker earbuds are just as frustrating.
It would be so nice if you could just like, I don't know, bump two devices together and they use NFC to pair or something.
I’m am frustrated almost DAILY by Bluetooth and various connection issues. If I drop an earbud while running or cycling it’s basically an immediate $100+ loss.
I couldn’t imagine being a teenager in current year trying to watch romance films in my moms basement and accidentally connecting to the living room surround sound
I bounce between an M1 Macbook Air, a Windows 10 PC, and a Pop_OS Thinkpad. What complex thing am I trying to get all 3 of those to do? ... connect to my bluetooth headphones. The headphones themselves have all 3 saved and is happy to rotate through finding which ones are nearby... but every single time I have to completely delete the headphones from MacOS and re-pair them... completely kill the bluetooth daemon on Pop_OS and restart it, and on Windows I just generally can't get it to connect at all unless I both turn BT off/on + re-pair the device + reboot the device. Even then it won't work half the time unless I repeat the process a few times.
As for my Bluetooth mouse (generic Corsair one)... I have to do all of the above but then it also randomly just disconnects every 10-15 minutes and wont reconnect at all until I reboot everything involved.
Bluetooth and USB goals have both failed us completely and need to either be re-done from scratch or scrapped completely and replaced with something better.
* the SDK kept changing, not just in minor ways but drastically. My suspicion was that this was so customers would hire Nordic to implement their drivers.
* The hardware kept changing. The chips would go out of production on the order of months or a year. Get your design working, go to order the parts, and the chips are no longer available (and the new chips use the new SDK so you have to rewrite the firmware).
* The Nordic API was nothing like the Bluetooth API, it was a wrapper around it, designed to make creating apps/drivers "simpler". But that means a lot of the Bluetooth documentation is useless to you, you have to translate it to the Nordic API. It also locks your software into one chip design.
* The firmware on the chip changes at will. There is no guarantee it will behave the same when you upgrade it. You only have access to the wrapper source code, not the source code of the stack that runs on the radio MCU.
I spent two years working on what should have been a project of a few months (I previously integrated an ANT+ radio with the smartwatch and it was dead simple.) One thought I had was that Bluetooth was designed to be a barrier to entry. It's become the default on phones and ANT+ doesn't have the market penetration, so if you can't make your gadget or phone support Bluetooth, your product is not marketable. The complexity is there to keep the smaller players out. The spec manuals are like 1500 pages long!
All of this means that many Bluetooth implementations and drivers are faulty because the developers can't spend the time to fully understand what they are doing. Larger companies can afford to hire the Nordic developers to write their drivers.
With one exception, a "JBL Go" portable speaker I bought years ago. Rock solid, I take it on every holiday.
But otherwise, yeah. BT sucks, although slightly less than "casting", jeeeeez.
---
Windows 11 "system settings" constantly crashes, which is how I need to access the BT panel....
But in all, with BT headsets galore (I have a literal bag full of different BT headset types) -- they all SUCK.
And dont even get me started on "buds" <-- $150 USD+++ for a fucking earbud set.
Fuck all of this.
They are LITERALLY just microplastics++heavyMetals in the oceans in <5 years.
Completely non-recyclable.
Absolute consumer fucking garbage.
That's a thing on higher end kit. Has been for years. Obviously only works if both devices support it though - you won't pair your macbook for example.
Other than that, I find Bluetooth and wired set-ups both have their advantages and disadvantages: - Bluetooth gets difficult when there's interference, wired gets weird ground loops and interference. - Bluetooth can be tricky to connect, wired gear gets yanked out of my ear when it catches on my door handle, or an airplane seat armrest, or my dog. - I can walk around listening to something on my laptop with Bluetooth, but with wired I don't have to worry about battery life.
Bluetooth is an essential part of my life and has been for probably 6-8 years now, so I've worked out most of the tricks and kinks of the gear that I use.
It's really first-world-problem territory, but it's a little frustrating that all phone manufacturers are going all-in on dropping headphone jacks without a rock-solid replacement technology. This is prime territory for one of the big tech companies to come up with something better than BT, force it into the industry, and earn some significant loyalty points from me at least. Looking at you Apple.
I’ve got a Bluetooth helmet. It cost a crap-ton. It’s infuriating. I basically never use it because it’s not worth the trouble.
Who the hell decided hold for three seconds to turn on? (It’s so common it must be in the spec) Why not a hard power switch? Why can’t pairing just work? Here’s an idea. Two switches. Power and pair. How hard would that have been?
We suck. Bluetooth is an example of why humanity will never deserve the stars.
I think most of the times I've been flustered by it recently, my headphones had already connected to another device and then silently failed on the device I wanted to connect to. Possibly some geekier UI to expose that would help.
Though, I was slightly confused by your terminology. I thought 'pairing' was a one time thing, and I don't need to press any button to connect, except maybe turn them on for the ones that don't do that automatically when removed from their case.
I do live in a very small city that doesn't have a congested 2.4GHz band, that definitely helps, but I never have issues traveling either.
I'm not sure if it's just the "aura" or what, but it just seems to work all the time.
I find BT headphones to never be loud enough. Battery life tends to become ridiculously short after 3-6 months of use.
I think that BT suffers from sharing the same 2.4GHz ISM band as microwave ovens, WiFi and all manner of unlicensed RF devices. The band is unlicensed because it is so noisy and microwaves at the frequency are massive attenuated by rain, fog, etc. Which is actually the reason they work well in the microwave oven.
The text reads to me like the author goes into pairing mode every morning. That should not be needed. Once the device is on you should be able to connect it in any prior paired devices. Give it only one choice that will help.
I have two sets of BT headphones, and I avoid using them b/c of the unpredictable pairing behaviors.
It needs to be replaced with something dedicated to audio-- because I think the attempt at generality (object data transfers, mice, keyboards, etc.) and backward compatibility has made for a standard that isn't capable in a multi-device world. When buying hardware, I look at Bluetooth as a feature, but at best, just for input devices. Audio is a lost cause.
We have a lot of things that are build well enough to work, but few things built well enough to work well.
For example, my Bluetooth Pixel Buds work great with my new Samsung S22 phone and my new MacBook. My Samsung S22 and my 2021 car work great and pair together very reliably.
However, I also have a 2016 car, a 5 year old Asus laptop, and some older Bluetooth headphones. If I throw any of those into the mix, Bluetooth becomes frustrating and unreliable again.
- Microphone quality sucks and unless your headphones emulate two BT devices, your audio quality has to drop to a terrible early-2000's codec. - Now that I have a nice pair of headphones, it's paired to 10 different devices. They fight over what connects first. Most of my devices run with BT off to make it easier to connect.
They are all based on same chip. So if you buy 5€ BT-headphones and plug them into 1000€ dumb headphones, they very much sound the same as 1000€ BT-headphones.
Also your box can have much bigger battery, does not matter as it is in your pocketsies and not in your ears.
Me: "Isn't the PIN meant to be there for security?"