Ask HN: Bluetooth kinda sucks. Why don't we have something better?

[zachallaun]

There was a recent, highly upvoted article about the pains of Bluetooth: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32162131

Summarizing only a tiny fraction of the complaints:

- Connecting can make devices do weird stuff (play default songs, etc.)

- Pairing multiple devices leads to unpredictable behavior (random switching, switching when you don't mean to)

- Can't connect multiple headsets to one device (why do my wife and I need to share earbuds watching a movie on a plane?)

- Can't connect multiple devices to one headset (why can't I listen to music on my computer but still get calls from my phone?)

- ...

Why don't we have something better already?

I'm sure the answer spans a number of different fields/challenges. Standardization, security, adoption, regulation. Are there ongoing efforts to create a new protocol that solves for the problems so apparent with Bluetooth? Are there specific (seemingly) insurmountable roadblocks to improving the status quo?

Asking from pure curiosity. And because I spent 5 minutes getting something to correctly pair this morning.

[davidhyde]

The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) is responsible for publishing all the Bluetooth specs and you can download them here: https://www.bluetooth.com/specifications/specs/

Notice that everything appears to be there: very detailed specs and information about testing. However, when you try to implement one of these specs you quickly realize that you cannot do it with the spec alone. You need example code, base implementations, test suite software and test data to build conformant software. Unfortunately, the Bluetooth SIG hides these resources behind a membership wall. Guess what happens then? You get lots of implementations of these specs that are a little bit off and don't handle all edge cases.

If I were to wave a magic wand I would like to see Bluetooth SIG change to a donation based financial model and for them to make all resources freely available. Right now they make money from branding, certification and country club membership fees. No wonder the ecosystem is one big tire fire.

[natch]

So, you are suggesting that the Bluetooth SIG did just a fine job with the technology, no problems there, and that people like Apple don't see fit to use the money in their budget to cough up a membership fee? Seeing as how it is Apple devices on which I often encounter pairing difficulties. Super convenient for the SIG that they can point fingers like this (I wonder if that's why they set it up as you describe, ugh), but I would be skeptical of any implication that Apple doesn't pay a membership fee.

[systemvoltage]

Same with USB consortium. Gotta pay like $10k to get a USB vendor ID. What the fuck were these people thinking to rally up behind this draconian standard? There is a limit to how many vendors they can have, iirc 10k.

But for all the issues with it, usb seems to work on devices without Bluetooth-like issues.

Standards should be open and free for common public and only have to pay once you reach certain company size. Things like ISO standards aren’t free.

[david927]

There's a long list of comments in that thread discussing "why" it's the case, with most simply saying "it's difficult." I disagree.

I think it's the same reason why so much of our software is poor quality: taking something from "works" to "works well" is a cost sink. It will cost you and yet doesn't add much to the bottom line to compensate.

It's sad that my family uses the available Bluetooth devices less than if there was a wire we could just plug into.

We think of technical innovation as a straight line forward but sometimes it goes back the other way.

[noir_lord]

> It's sad that my family uses the available Bluetooth devices less than if there was a wire we could just plug into.

I specifically buy wired gaming headphones, wired mice and wired keyboards - if there is any sensible wired option I'll take it every time, I even have an extra long network cable I can throw across the living room for the laptop.

Wireless stuff is just less reliable and always seems to throw issues when you really need it to work.

[PaulHoule]

My experience is that better quality Bluetooth headsets can handle being paired to multiple devices, cheaper ones will drive you crazy. I have these on my head right now at the office

https://www.v-moda.com/us/en/products/crossfade2-wireless

and I have a pair of these at home

https://www.poly.com/us/en/products/headsets/voyager/voyager...

I wound up getting these after having been deeply dissatisfied with Bluetooth headphones and I think they've been a very good investment.

My current complaining is about the host devices.

My work laptop is a thin Dell Latitude, the performance of Bluetooth is great on that, in a metal frame office building I am able to listen to audio in the bathroom a considerable distance from my office. My personal computer is a huge Alienware (also Dell). Bluetooth is OK when I am sitting directly in front of it but if I go to the next room it only works if I am careful to tilt my head the right way. I think it's a poor radio and/or a badly designed antenna.

Apple devices on the other hand seem to refuse to play music over WiFi with Bluetooth. Most people don't seem aware of this because they use iPhones with cellular connections but I can't do it with my iPad and we always have visitors to our cell phone dead spot (most of upstate NY) try to play streaming music from their phone to bluetooth speakers and fail.

[rhacker]

I don't think you explained why you disagree. If it's difficult, why is that wrong, why do you disagree?

[stinkledinkle]

I think this hits the nail on the head. A device developer will develop a bluetooth gadget. They test it, it works, but they know it's not great. But they know that when a consumer buys it, none of that matters as long as they buy the product and don't return it.

So the trick is to make sure you have a nice feature set which works well enough so that you can gaslight consumers into thinking the failure is their fault. So if it only works half the time, that's fine. Just tell them to turn their bluetooth off and on or to reboot their device. It'll probably fix it and now they think they are at fault.

[Jenk]

Why did Betamax lose out to VHS? Why did MiniDisc never take off? Why does the internet still rely on JavaScript?

From my sideline perspective it's probably because Bluetooth was developed without knowing how successful and expansive its use would become. It was developed by mobile phone companies to connect wireless earpieces to mobile telephones, and that was it. The entire scope of the product that is Bluetooth. They didn't even expect it to be used for stereo (or more channels) audio, _just_ for telephony ear pieces.

It has since been used for many things that it just wasn't engineered to do.

However, it _is_ (or rather has become) a rather ubiquitous protocol through lack of alternatives, and now is the must-use option for any hardware vendors wanting to connect to nearby devices. Pragmatism/apathy.

[thematrixturtle]

I worked in telco in the early 2000s when Bluetooth hype was at its peak, and that's just not true: if anything, Bluetooth was hailed as the Next Big Thing because it would enable "Personal Area Networks" (PAN), a now all-but-forgotten buzzword. But don't take my word for it, here's the IEEE in 1999:

Examples of applications include Collaborative Maintenance, Mobile Worker, Medical Sensing, Data Synchronization, etc. Examples of devices, which can be networked, include Computers, PDA/HPCs, printers, microphones, speakers, bar code readers, sensors, displays, Pagers, and Cellular & PCS Phones.

https://grouper.ieee.org/groups/802/15/pub/par/5C.html

Funnily enough, it's the very last thing they mentioned, cellular phones, that ended up being the primary user!

Pedantic note: IEEE 802.15 was a grab-bag of various PAN proposals, with Bluetooth (IEEE 802.15.1) really the only one to go mainstream, although low-rate networks (802.15.4) like ZigBee were eventually adopted in the IoT world as well.

[The_Colonel]

> It has since been used for many things that it just wasn't engineered to do.

I don't buy this line of reasoning.

Bluetooth is at version 5.3, it's not stuck at specification from 1998. The original revision might have been designed for only a few use cases, but later revisions added support for a lot of new things (e.g. multipoint) and I wouldn't be surprised if the protocol has been (several times) completely rearchitected to better support the new reality.

[AlotOfReading]

We don't have anything better because radio silicon is a terrible industry to be in. The amount of institutional knowledge and capital required is insane, and the network effects on the protocol are massive.

The flip side is that consumer electronics manufacturers are horrendously cheap when it comes to BOM cost. If your component doesn't directly provide a feature list item consumers will recognize, it's not going in the device. Similarly, consumers don't care about radio protocols that aren't universal. This leads to a chicken and egg problem where manufacturers won't introduce new things, and when they do consumers won't use new things because new things don't stick around.

As for why BT sucks, it's a combination of very few chipset manufacturers (at one point it was basically just Broadcom and CSR, now both part of Qualcomm) that suck at software owning the entire market, legacy protocol design decisions constraining future capabilities (this is why audio sucks), and simply being too complicated.

[molasses]

I abandoned bluetooth early on, because I kept having issues. Stubborn pairing is still a pain.

For music, I bought a DLNA renderer (more like a Chromecast), and just assumed that lots of software could remotely talk to it. But about the only software that almost works with it is something with a poor UI from yesteryear on Android. And music service support is hit and miss. So I'm edging towards Bluetooth now.

That said, yesterday I resorted to CDs. And today, I've jacked a spare phone into an auxiliary port. And I won't use my phone for Bluetooth music mainly because if I walk out the room or want to take a call it all goes tits up.

I've had Bluetooth on Debian Linux on my Thinkpad for years, and different releases have been hit and miss for things like file transfer. And address book syncing. And that's not confined to Linux either.

When it works... It does feel like magic.

Really I want to easily route sound from one app to a particular device or devices with easy remote management. Voice control is a bit hit and miss. But hands free remote is a good idea.

UI is very esoteric, like when you are offered a list of Bluetooth services. A phone I had would offer itself as a remote device or something, but I never figured out how and what it did. Or the worry that your phone might turn into a data access point accidentally.

[pwinnski]

Most of the problems seem to be poor implementations, because what's the motivation for, say, a car company to get Bluetooth exactly right? How many people buy cars based on the speed with which Bluetooth connects?

As evidence, sticking with a single vendor means I don't have weird stuff happen, and can in fact connect multiple pairs of AirPods to a single Apple TV unit so my partner and I can watch together in outward silence.

I still cannot, as far as I know, connect a single pair of AirPods to more than one device, but that doesn't seem like a feature anybody would have considered when initial developing the BlueTooth spec. Perhaps such a feature will come soon, at least with a single vendor solution like Apple's.

[lotsofpulp]

>How many people buy cars based on the speed with which Bluetooth connects?

I would not rank Bluetooth itself as being high on the list of wants for a car, but I would rank quality wireless Carplay / Android Auto functionality pretty high (along with a wireless charging mount). If it is possible, but I have not seen that it is yet. Until then, wired CarPlay / Android Auto works fine. And lack of CarPlay / Android Auto is a dealbreaker.

[saiya-jin]

Apple demands a hefty price for this compatibility, and its purely within their tiny ecosystem. Which is OK, they do premium hardware and software, some of it top of the notch. Some other manufacturers are trying this but they are nowhere near this level of quality.

The problem I have are the parts where they are not top of their game, ie earbuds. If your only requirement is good call quality then their products can be titled best if paired with ie iphone. But I don't care about that at all. I bought ones which sound for music significantly better than airpods pro, have much better battery life (also their case has better battery for recharging and overall stamina). When yet better ones come (or I lose mine), I will go again for the best within my budget, easily from another manufacturer since brand loyalty is rather meaningless fluff for me, only quality of specific product matters.

But - I can't connect them to any apple product via high quality variations of codecs. So instead of using aptX HD to play my flacs in phone, I would have to resort to some basic implementation and effectively cut off some quality of those flacs. I am sure some wouldn't mind, but I do.

Hence you do shopping around, because in +- apple price bracket you have tons of options for quality hardware, be it notebooks, tablets, different headphones and so on.

This opinion doesn't take into account things like apple's stand on privacy on phones, which for many puts them above rest of the market. Suffice to say for me its more a case of clever marketing than actual proper security of such an important device, especially since I am not an US person and some US laws see me as sub-human, thus US 3-letter agencies act accordingly. But maybe I am completely wrong on this part, it would actually be great since I am already spending same dollars, just for other brands. Just haven't seen a single solid proof of that, and quite a few in contrary.

[AlotOfReading]

The size of the paired devices list isn't even in the spec. It's entirely up to the manufacturer. All the spec tells you to do is store the specified info somewhere and gives an error code to be returned if you can't for some reason. 8 is typical, but there are various reasons you might want to chose 1 instead. It simplifies and speeds up reconnection, eliminates unnecessary button combos, and potentially reduces BOM cost, etc.

[jrmg]

The reason (or a reason, at least) we have poor implementations, though, is that the protocol stack is so incredibly complicated.

[rchaud]

I'd been using BT for the past decade as a wireless receiver for audio or mouse/KB.

It's only very recently that I discovered that you could use it to transmit files from Device A to Device B. No middleman app or cloud sync service needed! Considering how awful USB file sync is between Mac OS and Android, I don't even break out the cable to transfer files anymore.

The downside is that transmission speeds are very slow, approx. 5 seconds to transfer 1 MB. That's fine for EPUBs and text-heavy PDFs, but not for anything bigger.

[ecliptik]

This was one of the original uses for Bluetooth - replacing PDA cradles, serial/USB cables, and IR for syncing things like contacts, email, calendars, etc.

There were articles in the early aughts about the "failure of bluetooth" [1] since syncing with 802.11 to a network was a better option.

1. https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/bye-bye-bluetooth/

[vel0city]

Back in high school we'd transfer photos, ringtones, and games between phones through Bluetooth. It worked reasonably well for the time. Photos from those early camera phones weren't very large, wallpapers were less than like 250x150 pixels usually, and lots of games were a meg or less.

[IshKebab]

You can use wi-fi direct for that now with decent speeds. The only issue is it is so hard to discover!

On Android you find a file and then Share -> Nearby. The recipient might need to fiddle in settings to enable it.

[giantg2]

Are any of these problems actually Bluetooth problems? It seems the data protocol works just fine. It appears to me that the various devices just handle the associated tasks poorly. Eg you could take a call on your phone while playing music on your computer, if your phone had the functionality to send the music via Bluetooth and keep the phone conversation separate.

[carrychains]

Exactly. At this point, it's not the protocol. It's devices with shitty implementations of the protocol.

[vel0city]

As for multiple headsets to one device, a lot of devices have challenges playing a certain audio stream to multiple output devices. For instance, my laptop has a speaker and my monitor has a speaker. There's no default way in Windows to play the same audio out on both of these outputs. I would need software to emulate a sound device and end up duplicating the stream to both other sound devices to target both outputs at once. Its been a while but I think that's also true on MacOS, its true for the defaults of a lot of Linux distros, its true on Android. You might have issues outputting to multiple headsets depending on your chipset, but the first level limitation is really more on the operating system side of things.

As for "can't connect multiple devices to one headset", as mentioned by others you can do this if you get the right hardware. I have a few headsets which support multipoint.

[viraptor]

> its true for the defaults of a lot of Linux

Not anymore. New distributions have moved to pipewire audio, so since about this year you can open qjackctl, Carla or any of the audio routing apps and drag and drop audio from a chosen app to any number of outputs. (not sure if you'd count not built into the traybar mixer panel as default or not)

[fallingfrog]

Yeah, the bluetooth in my car is so hopelessly pathological that I always turn off the bluetooth in my phone and turn the internal phone speakers up if I want to use the maps app. If I don't, first it will immediately pick some song at random on my phone and play it at full volume without my asking. If the radio is turned off, it will still connect to the phone, which disables the phone speakers, but then it will not make any sound at all. Or it will connect up but will turn the volume all the way down which also results in no sound. Sometimes it will randomly connect to various devices in the car. Sometimes if you plug in the phone to recharge but leave the bluetooth on it will turn off the phone speakers but also not make any sound from the car speakers. It's bad. The whole system is actively hostile to the user.

[themanmaran]

Car bluetooth is a whole different world of terrible software. I wish there was a standardized interface that car manufacturers would use, rather than hand-rolling their own.

[asdff]

Honestly the 3.5mm jack is better technology.

- connecting does nothing confusing, just changes default output speaker for most software

- pairing multiple devices just needs a splitter then it works the same as pairing one device in terms of ux

- can connect multiple headsets to one device

- can connect multiple devices to one headset

- can purchase replacement 3.5mm cables cheaply at any convenience store around the world

- can repair this equipment yourself with soldering or even just a wire stripper and tape

- doesn't need charging or any external power supply, everything from the connection to even the output speaker in the case of headphones is powered by the device which makes ux easier (just one thing to keep charged)

- can use brand new equipment or decades old equipment all the same. my headphones are 10 years old and will last decades longer easily

I have no reason to let go of my 3.5mm cables and adopt this inferior system.

[vel0city]

I can stay seated on the couch and connect my phone to my stereo. It turns on the receiver and changes the input to Bluetooth upon connection. From there I can then play anything and control the volume on the stereo from my phone. All without needing to even get up from the couch, or potentially even needing to go into the room with the receiver.

The receiver has good Bluetooth range. I can change the output to the speakers by the pool (albiet through the receiver app or from the receiver's remote or its face buttons) and take my phone pool-side. Then I can change the music (and the volume, once again) from my phone through just Bluetooth.

Both of these are experiences where Bluetooth is better than a 3.5mm jack.

[navjack27]

For audio devices like speakers or headphones I've thought about an idea for playing music at least. You could have the host device send the playback device the files and the playback device would play the file locally and it would be synchronized with some sort of a timestamping routine between the host and the playback device. There wouldn't be any need to transfer data in real time in high bandwidth between them so you could have lossless audio. Being able to play back a majority of audio codecs shouldn't be all that hard or license encumbered. Even if you take a shortcut method and just transcode everything on the fly to flac. You maybe only need to store the current song that you're playing back. Heck you could extend this so it doesn't need to be built into the headphones or the speakers as a protocol and it could just be like one of those portable Bluetooth things that you can buy that you could plug any audio device in except it uses this new thing.

But the touch on all of the things that you brought up in your original post related to like real time audio. I swear there are implementations where multiple headsets on one device or multiple devices to one headset do exist. I don't think the problem has much to do with Bluetooth as a standard even though the standard is extremely complicated I think it all has to do with software and implementation on the part of the host device like the computer or the phone and the playback device. Like if there was a standard reference device example for both of these things that did everything correctly I'm pretty sure all of the things that you brought up work. Although I would like to be corrected on this.

[schaefer]

We do have something better! And we’ve had it for decades.

It’s a cable.

[3pt14159]

Wireless wins for all my uses.

I can easily bike with my Beats wireless headphones.

I can easily run.

I can get up from the computer while watching a YouTube show or if I'm in the middle of a video chat and still want to listen in while I make a quick tea or something in the kitchen.

I've literally gone swimming with my wireless headphones. Heads up front crawl, but still. These things are awesome. Why on earth would I want to be shackled with my computer or phone or worry about tripping on a cable while exercising?

To me the hard part is finding the right headphones. Sound quality isn't perfect, but a reliable bluetooth connection and easy ergonomics for skipping a song are near-perfect on these Beats.

[soheil]

Another way to look at it is that BT is such a successful technology that it lowered the barrier to entry for a lot of devices that would simply not exist was it not for BT. It means that with any technology we would have the same problems, lots of cheaply made devices with half ass implementation.

[swamp40]

I'm pretty sure Apple got some tweaks put into the Bluetooth chips they use to help out with some of the connection reliability issues. Put in at the bare metal level before the stack so as to avoid breaking the "standard".

Apple has also used out-of-band pairing mechanisms to enhance the customer experience. But again, there is only so much they can do.

There are many problems built into the standard and so there was only so much they could do.

Ironically, the standard itself is preventing better experiences.

It's been over 10 years now since BLE came out. Many companies have crashed and burned or abandoned products or just accepted poor user experiences in those 10 years.

The Bluetooth SIG is a monstrosity. I bet you would have to break off to fix the problems in under 10 years. And the SIG would probably sue to prevent that.

[tpmx]

I'm pretty sure Apple got some tweaks put into the Bluetooth chips they use to help out with some of the connection reliability issues. Put in at the bare metal level before the stack so as to avoid breaking the "standard".

I'm not a Bluetooth expert but that doesn't sound right. Surely the vast majority of BT complexity in a modern stack is in the software?

Also, if you're "breaking the standard" in a closed system like in an Apple product, who cares if you're doing it in software or hardware?

[swamp40]

Having said all that, BLE is an amazing technology and is improving slowly.

You can track your dog or purse or car anywhere in the world, all using a CR2032 coin cell battery that will last for years.

It provides your phone with an easy extension into the real world, which has thousands of use cases.

[rapjr9]

ANT+ is easier to develop for and has far fewer issues and was available at the same time as Bluetooth, so we had something better:

https://www.thisisant.com/consumer/ant-101/what-is-ant/

But phone manufacturers opted for Bluetooth instead. Go ask them why. Sony still supports ANT+ on their phones, but it's mostly only used to connect to fitness equipment (which has also mostly moved to Bluetooth because it is what most phones support.)

[fuzzfactor]

IIRC the purpose of Bluetooth was to be a patented hardware approach to something, with the intention of it becoming a widespread standard of some kind.

Most importantly, an extremely detailed and ambiguous foundation was established so that copyrighted implementations which would far outlast patents would continue to provide an income stream once the patent expired and the hardware was in the public domain.

Just so happened to be an approach to short-range PC radio communication.

[SavageBeast]

I have spent some time wondering this same question - what I came to - Bluetooth is most likely a protocol spec where by any and all action the protocol can take is defined. The implementations are left to the vendors such that for one Bluetooth spec we get N physical/software implementations. So we're always taking a device from vendor X and trying to pair it with implementations from vendor Y and Z. We're now talking about 3 different versions of the same spec here more or less.

Cross vendor implementation of software is where I see a big potential for problems. As a protocol specification Id imagine all this has been thoroughly thought out. Where the rubber meets the road in the software, its probably not been so faithfully implemented (it works with my laptop - SHIP IT!).

Just my thinking on the backside of finally getting a new phone paired with my car.

[oneplane]

Multiple reasons (as outlined partially by others):

  - It is incredibly hard to make something so versatile work well everywhere, all the time, for everything
  - It is even harder to get multiple stakeholders to do this consistently
  - And it harder still to do this if the business case doesn't allow for (long-term) support

This is mostly a business problem and not really a technical problem. Wi-Fi is similarly pretty badly implemented, for similar reasons, but the upside is that it doesn't have a billion specialised profiles, it generally just has to pretend it's encapsulating network frames the same way ethernet does. As long as it can do that, people can make use of it.

[k4ch0w]

You know, I think if you look in the home automation space you'll see a lot of interesting protocols in the works. Zigbee, Z-Wave, Thread, and Matter. I think people are working on this problem for the IOT space. Bluetooth is really a strong easy to support protocol and BLE is also an amazing feat when it comes to battery life. Terribly boring to reverse engineer though. I think you also see it more because phones support it by default.

I think a lot of the time it can be devices that implement the protocols poorly because I share your pain with my airpods max. However, I have a pair of a bluetooth headphones that have been amazing for 5 years.

[zemo]

it’s just so device-specific. My JBL speaker, aftershokz bone conducting headphones, and iPhone all play nicely and I don’t have any problems. My Windows machines consistently have problems with bluetooth, but poor quality is a standard of the Windows experience so it doesn’t surprise me. My Sony stereo receiver is always a nightmare to pair.

Honestly the JBL Charge speaker has the best and simplest solution to this: it just lets two devices pair to it simultaneously.

[duped]

Have you ever bought a product because "the Bluetooth integration is so good?"

I'm sure a few people have. But it's not like you choose a car or phone because of it.

[bombcar]

I'm slightly embarrassed to say that my first "almost new" car purchase (Hertz Used Cars) came down to two - both of German make amusingly enough.

Since everything else I cared about (price, legroom, etc) was basically the same, the brand I went with was the one who's stereo worked better with my iPhone.

[CivBase]

When was the last time you saw a review that audited the Bluetooth implementation on a device? I couldn't even make that kind of purchasing decision if I wanted to.

[zemo]

I bought a stereo receiver because it has bluetooth up and down and I preferred that to the proprietary protocol used by Sonos. I actually bought a Sonos first and returned it because I hated it so much. The latency makes it completely unusable for half of the desired applications though. So … not “so good” but “the one thing with Bluetooth that I found at the time”.

[david927]

That was my argument above. It's something Adam Smith didn't realize: Capitalism optimizes to discomfort.

Over the decades, airlines have found more ways to put more seats in the same space, more ways to optimize a full plane even if it means more people are bumped, etc. They've made more money but it has also made flying a much poorer experience. Not patently horrible, but not comfortable either.

[neilc]

I think the wireless pairing/device switching experience with AirPods is a big reason (not the only reason) why they are so popular.

[asdff]

I've otoh bought products specifically because they have non wireless fallbacks or are wired only (even better, no batteries).

[amelius]

Perhaps certification is the solution then. You can't sell Bluetooth unless it's been certified.

[greenthrow]

Only some of the issues you list are inherent to Bluetooth. Others are a result of trying to balance doing the right thing for the 80% case which results in sub optimal experiences for edge cases. I don't see a lot of evidence that just coming up with a new standard would address many of these.

The main issue with Bluetooth is the sound quality sucks. That is actually due to the Bluetooth standard.

[vkoskiv]

Even after the pairing hassle, every time I play music on my Apple AirPod Pros (that cost over 200€, btw (!!)) the first second or so of songs consistently sound like garbage. Evidently whatever transport they are using can't handle sudden changes in bitrate, and they have to use a lower quality for that bit. Absolutely crazy to imagine that this passed QA at Apple!

[mewpmewp2]

I have PowerBeats Pro which also cost over €200.

And the most annoying thing is that usually I have to attempt connecting them multiple times to get both pieces to work. Sometimes I have to put them inside box and take out multiple times. I'm not sure what is up with that. If it doesn't connect the first time and only finds one earpiece it will stop trying to find the other earpiece?

Another major annoyance I had is, if I have them paired with both Android Phone and my MacBook, the Android Phone and I'm currently connected to them with MacBook, and I have my phone bluetooth on, my phone periodically will take over the connection. This may be the phone fault though, to constantly try and open the connection even if I didn't ask it to?

Overall they are just plain frustration to use. And I've had to reset PowerBeats Pro's countless of times to have them work at all.

[zajio1am]

People who want reliable operations use wired connections (e.g. USB).

People who prefer wireless are anyway accustomed to things that suck.

[andyjohnson0]

1. It's basically good enough, despite its problems.

2. It has brand-name recognition.

3. People who need it know that its the "wireless thing" for audio and music, often without their being able to articulate precisely what it does.

4. It's baked into enough hardware that a competing technology would struggle to enter the market.

[Pxtl]

Honestly, the latency is the biggest problem for me.

I've got a bluetooth game controller and headset for my phone (Pixel 4a), but the latency makes using them both at once impossible. If I switch to a wired headset the controller bluetooth gets better and the game becomes playable.

[user3939382]

I can’t believe it works at all. Have you seen the spec? It’s thousands of pages. We can barely get small RFC implementations cross compatible on the web, how any of this stuff is actually interoperable is totally amazing to me.

[mmphosis]

We do. Maybe too many alternatives. USB with some non Bluetooth radio connection, Wi-Fi, Ethernet, Fiber, and more. I was setting up a shared connection recently, and there was the option to use FireWire.

[senectus1]

I use BT every single day. for 99% of my use cases it works just fine 99% of the time.

I'd like more features but really on a pure consumer elevel. it works out of the box and does what i want fairly reliably.

[layer8]

> Can't connect multiple headsets to one device

Bluetooth 5.0 allows connecting two headsets simultaneously.

[jeroenhd]

For what it does, Bluetooth works fine in my opinion. We expect Bluetooth to work like magic and to follow all the standards but we also expect it to work around issues we have with the standard (codecs, interference, etc.) because we don't want a bad experience. You can't have both!

If you stick to the stuff that works with every device (no automated switching, no proprietary codecs, no out of spec bandwidth and timing requirements) Bluetooth works quite well in my experience. Only when companies try to invent their own solution or very cheap, crappy, standards avoiding devices get involved does Bluetooth really start to break down.

Another issue is driver stability. I swear to god, Windows just hates Bluetooth. Somehow, Windows drivers for even common chipsets are worse than Linux drivers. On the other hand, on some Linux kernels, having Bluetooth on while putting a device in sleep can cause a kernel panic... It's all so unstable. There's nothing in the spec that says your software must hang and become unresponsive when an (un)pairing attempt fails, but here we are!

As for some of your complaints:

- connecting devices will make them behave like they were made to do. If they play default music, that sounds like a product feature that's off, not a protocol problem.

- pairing multiple devices is not governed by the spec (nor should it be, in my opinion). What a device will do depends on what makes sense for a device; a party speaker may want to connect to whatever device is available, but headphones or a keyboard prefer connecting to the device they were last connected to. Again, this is more of a device implementation feature, not really a protocol thing.

- connecting multiple headsets to a device is possible. In fact, I've done so in the past. You're limited by the throughput of your Bluetooth version (quite high, these days!) and any interference, but there's nothing preventing a device from playing to two devices at once. In Linux you can create a dummy device to stream to multiple audio endpoints through some config or command lines; on other platforms you'll need custom applications. This is an OS design issue, not a protocol issue, and it's no different from playing audio to both your TV and your headphones (quite useful for watching movies together with people with hearing aids and the like!)

- Can't connect multiple devices to one headset: this is a protocol issue. Devices join a piconet which needs to be synchronised and is controlled by a single master device. In theory that master device could be your headphones, with both other devices acting as clients, but in practice this is often not the case. Such a system can be quite finicky to work with when one or both devices go out of range or if multiple devices try to send high definition audio over the same channel at the same time.

Like all things Bluetooth, I've often wondered why WiFi Direct hasn't been more of a success. It'll eat more power, but it solves so many issues with Bluetooth, especially with modern 5.2GHz WiFi. For battery life purposes we'll be stuck with Bluetooth for a while, but I'd like to see WiFi Direct get a second chance for sharing files. Hell, it could even work as a cross platform Airdrop alternative (though Apple will obviously never join in).

[robotnikman]

There is an xkcd for this

https://xkcd.com/927/

[gibspaulding]

I was thinking of this one: https://xkcd.com/2055/