[mulletbum]

Apple has had a Bluetooth software issues in ios 17 and 18 that makes both 15 Pro Max and 16 Pro Max randomly disconnect Bluetooth and all sorts of weird issues. They waited over a year to finally address it in 18.3, then proceeded to break Bluetooth now where it just all together disconnects over and over.

Apple has gone WAY down hill.

[godelski]

  > Apple has gone WAY down hill.

There's just so much low hanging fruit and I don't get it. Worse, it seems to be not just limited to Apple. There's just so many infurating things that I do not understand how they exist. How are you an Apple dev and not pissed off by this stuff? As just a simple example, why is my iPhone, iPad, and Macbook constantly telling me that my airpods have connected? I'm actively listening to music on my phone and have been doing so for the last 30 minutes! Fucking hire me, because I will do the meme. Problem is, I'm not sure when I'd quit because there's so many. Will there ever be the sigh of relief?

I know you guys are lurking. There's similar low hanging bullshit annoyances on so much software, so someone that is working on one of these things, please let me know. Google Maps? Search? Calendars? Email? Browsers? iPhones? Androids? AirPods? Pixel Buds? Name your team, and I'm sure I got a complaint for you. If not, I'm sure someone can. You all are killing my productivity.

[latexr]

I believe a major source of Apple’s software decline to be the self-imposed yearly deadlines which started after Steve Jobs. Prior to that, new macOS releases came out whenever they were ready. Maybe they were buggy, but by the end of each cycle they were fairly solid.

Compare to now, where they announce major features (Apple Intelligence), keep them in beta for over half a year, then have even less time than that before the next WWDC where they are expected to announce new stuff.

It’s bananas and unsustainable. There’s no time to do anything properly. No wonder everything is falling apart.

[manmal]

AFAIK the engineers are aware of all this, they just aren’t allowed to work on things that haven’t been prioritized and blessed. Since there is no bug database that can be read outside Apple, we can‘t +1 the most annoying ones. Instead, they rely on manual (semi-automated?) deduplication of the bug reports. Bugs also need to somewhat fit into the „theme of the year“ to get prioritized.

[harrall]

Don’t work for Apple but some bugs just take a lot of work to identify.

I work on a well trafficked consumer product and even though I have a full latitude to fix bugs at my job, I will wait weeks for the right report to come in to make it easily reproducible. I will pull the ticket out of backlog and it will take only an hour to fix it rather than frustrating me and wasting an entire day tracing a bug only to fail at reproducing it anyway. It’s constant triage.

[achierius]

What've you got for the browser?

I personally probably won't be very helpful for whatever it is -- I work with the compiler team, so nothing visible -- but I'm happy to +1 your issue during the next feature review cycle or &c

[yuters]

It's really incredible that I have such a better experience pairing my new airpods to an old machine running ubuntu than a recent macbook. When using my macbook, the airpods just randomly disconnect and start glitching with static noise and I have to pair them again. On linux, there is no random disconnect and the sound clarity feels way better.

[cookiengineer]

Did I hear someone is ready to switch to Linux?

Come to the dark side, we got lots of freedom here.

[GeekyBear]

Bluetooth in general is (and has been) broken forever.

Look at the comments on Google rewriting their Android Bluetooth stack for the fourth time.

> I know the guy that heads up the team that did this work -- he and I spent 2+ years fighting Broadcom's old, god-awful bluetooth code. Our whole team used to play what-if games about replacing the thing while massive code dumps came in from vendors, making the task ever larger.

> I had to write a service on the RPI and the only way to reliably connect was to restart bluetooth before every attempt.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26647981

Apple has finally gotten fed up enough to roll their own Bluetooth/WiFi hardware implementation, which is a huge undertaking.

It is said to start shipping this spring.

> Apple is switching over to a new Bluetooth and Wi-Fi chip that it designed in-house starting in 2025, reports Bloomberg. The combined Bluetooth and Wi-Fi chip will replace components from Broadcom

https://www.macrumors.com/2024/12/12/apple-custom-bluetooth-...

[Reason077]

> "Apple has finally gotten fed up enough to roll their own Bluetooth/WiFi hardware implementation, which is a huge undertaking."

This has more to do with do with Apple wishing to pay less for WiFi/Bluetooth chips than wanting to fix bugs. They've gradually been replacing more and more silicon with their own designs for years, and tomorrow we'll likely see the next step: the debut of Apple's 5G radio chip.

Personally I have no issues at all with Bluetooth on my iPhone 13. It seems rock solid to me and never disconnects unexpectedly. (I do have some long-standing, annoying but relatively minor, issues with Bluetooth audio on macOS though).

[iwontberude]

Adjacent: didn’t the founder of Ubiquity pitch this concept to Apple and failed which is why he left to found his own business?

[liveoneggs]

> Apple has gone WAY down hill.

I need a place to rant about my recent apple frustrations. :)

I recently got a new laptop - I can airdrop to it once or twice before the notification to accept the airdrop stops showing up until reboot. Just that flow is broken, other notifications continue to work.

I got an apple watch for my kid as an "upgrade" - software is a complete mess, connectivity issues abound, it's less reliable than the gizmo watch it replaced.

The iPad just got a calculator last year.

I am randomly not allowed to delete some photos from my phone. I have no idea what this is about.

[Argonaut998]

I switched to an iPhone for the first time in 2022 with the 14 Pro. I got it on the release day and immediately there was a glaring visual bug when running a timer on their “Dynamic Island” (a huge flop). Ever since then I’ve encountered so many bugs that I can’t believe that this is the famed Apple. It’s the buggiest phone I’ve ever owned. Even now there is a bug on timers when the screen freezes and I can’t scroll through the timers, or start a new one. Constant bugs on their default apps that are SIMPLISTIC (or should be). How is there a bug on timers when it’s existed for 15 years? It also deleted all my of my locally saved notes when I bought a Mac and signed into iCloud. Completely unacceptable.

The mail app is so bad that even their anti-competitive design policies can’t salvage it (reading an email on one device will show the email as unread until the app is opened). It’s just embarrassing for the so-called “premium” company.

[bigfatkitten]

Even if Apple does everything right, there will be problems.

One major problem with Bluetooth is that the spec is so complex that it is unlikely that any device you try to interoperate with implements the relevant parts correctly.

To compound that, most implementations in use came from half arsed SDKs that silicon vendors rushed out the door 5 or 10 years ago, and the devices have no update capability so they are never getting fixed.

[stevenwoo]

I have that problem with SE and sometimes use apple wired headphones with my SE and lately there’s a cycle of use phone with headphones, put down phone, do something else, come back and unlock phone and somehow it does not think there are headphones connected, I can’t push them in any more either when this happens.

[pjmlp]

Those of us old enough to remeber Mac OS classic, know Apple hasn't always been top quality, regardless of the quality expectations of their price points.

[r00fus]

Neither I nor my family have this issue. We're all on iOS18.3 - what kind of issues are you seeing?

[LeoPanthera]

> Apple has had a Bluetooth software issues in ios 17 and 18

Can you link to some documentation about this bug?

[nothercastle]

Idk about docs but my home pod has had terrible static since iOS 18

[SoftTalker]

Bluetooth has sucked since it was introduced. I've never had a Bluetooth anything that worked well and reliably.

We need a total rethink on close-range wireless communication for accessory devices. Preferably something patented with an expensive license so fly-by-night chinese hardware shops can't dump their garbage on the market using that protocol.

[jwr]

That kind of generalizing isn't helpful and isn't true, either. I am sorry you didn't have a "Bluetooth anything" that worked reliably. I did. In fact, everything that I own that uses Bluetooth works very well.

There are two important things about Bluetooth.

1. There are actually two kinds of Bluetooth. The "traditional" mostly connection-oriented Bluetooth and BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy). They share very little with each other, except for the marketing name. BLE works way better in practice. Many people still remember their old headsets that used Bluetooth and that took ages to connect to their phones and associate those with the "Bluetooth experience".

2. Bluetooth is complex. Many manufacturers get it wrong. But the problem is not with Bluetooth. You could invent a different set of protocols, and if they were to do everything that Bluetooth does, they would get very complex as well, and we would have the same problem, except in a less popular and less broadly adopted protocol.

[6SixTy]

There is an alternative protocol for wireless communications, only problem is that it's Chinese. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42443750

[CharlesW]

> Apple has had a Bluetooth software issues in ios 17 and 18 that makes both 15 Pro Max and 16 Pro Max randomly disconnect Bluetooth and all sorts of weird issues.

My iPhone 16 Pro Max Bluetooth has been rock solid with everything I've used it with. Your comment is a good reminder that (1) it's impossible for vendors to test with all possible devices, and (2) at Apple scale there will never not be some customers who experience problems. I recommend reporting it if you haven't — I had glitchy audio with an earlier phone and an older Honda Odyssey's Bluetooth connection, and a few months after my report a subsequent OS update fixed it. (Correlation, not causation, I understand.)

[judge2020]

Also note their hardware isn’t 100% good. They tested an old iPhone 16 I had and the NFC sensor out of all thing was broken (I had massive issues with wallet not adding cards). It’s worth going into an Apple Store to have them diagnose it.