Bluetooth headphones are annoying
theverge.com
theverge.com
> Late for a conference call you need to dial into? Hold on — you need to jam your Bluetooth buds in your ears and pair them to your phone if you're not already paired.
Is she serious? In what universe do you have a pair of BT headphones that aren't paired to your device? You do that when you get them.
> Got a sudden burst of motivation to work out? Sorry, no music — headphones are dead.
Right... things with batteries need charging.
The rest of the article is just as poorly thought out.
I agree that there are issues with Bluetooth headphones, but I find the benefits so great that I've stopped using my RHA T10i in-ear phones almost entirely.
As far as pairing BT headsets are concerned, I do have to visit the bluetooth setting and select the headset everytime. This is different from the initial pairing.
> A plastic three-button remote is a poor substitute for an entire phone interface when it comes to controlling music, answering phone calls, or using Siri.
In what way is that different than wired headphones??!!
I'm surprised by your need to select your headset each time you use it, though. If that was her issue, if it was widespread, I'd absolutely concede the point. That's not been my experience at all, though. I've used 4 different headsets (all Jabra, though), a half dozen portable speakers, and am currently using two different headphone/mic models -- JayBird BlueBuds and Turtle Beach Elite 800X. Not a single one of them requires that behavior. I power them on, they connect.
What is more, if I'm getting a phone call, and my headset isn't already on, when I do power it on, it connects and immediately answers the call.
The only time I need to use the device selection preferences is when I switch which device I'm using the headphones with. And that works flawlessly for me. When I leave the house, I turn on my headphones and they attach to my iPhone. When I get to work, I use the bluetooth menu mar item to select the headphones and they switch over to the MacBook. When I leave I select them again on my iPhone and they switch back. If I pull out my iPad to watch a video, I switch over to them.
Hell, not only does that work well, but iOS even tries to guess what app I want to switch to when it detects a bluetooth connection.
Obviously this is a case of YMMV. I don't doubt that your headset doesn't work as smoothly with the iPhone. And if Lauren Goode's article had even a shred of that nuance, I wouldn't call her a hack. But both times I've noticed her work lately I've found it riddled with non-evidence in support of her claims (see her article about why WatchOS 3 is "an admission that Apple had it all wrong when it came to interactions on the first-generation Apple Watch": http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/14/11926314/apple-watch-os3-n...).
>Right... things with batteries need charging.
That's her point. Traditional headphones don't need charging. Bluetooth headphones do. That's a downside of Bluetooth headphones.
(I make the tradeoff and am never going back. I've worn nothing but BT headphones of multiple types for the past year and I've never had an "oops, no charge" issue. The Turtle Beach cans have a magnetic dock I just drop them on, and it's easy for me to plug my BlueBuds into the cable on my desk when I get home from a run.)
I'm not railing against her claim that there are downsides. But... well, consider an analogy. When the iPhone and subsequent smartphones came out, they offered drastically lower battery life than their predecessors. They needed charging every day. People rightly pointed out the inconvenience that represented when compared to the minimal logistical demands a feature phone placed on people. But I would have the same criticisms to level at someone who wrote an article about how "smartphones are annoying."
Taken together with the logical bankruptcy of her other claims (e.g. an in-line 3-button controller isn't as good as using the phone itself is somehow a bluetooth-specific issue??), I'm including this particular point about charging bluetooth headphones as just another poor argument. It's the only one on her list that holds any water whatsoever, but I still disagree with her characterization.
In practice, the number of devices headphones can be paired to varies by model. The limit is simply the amount of storage the device allocates to keeping device hardware addresses and link keys.
What I can tell you is that both my headphones -- Jaybird BlueBud X and Turtle Beach Elite 800X -- are paired with two MacBooks, my iMac, my iPhone, and two iPads. They do not require any re-pairing.
The Turtle Beach cans even support connecting to two devices simultaneously (see section 3.2.6 "Point-to-multipoint configuration" of the latest Bluetooth spec). Whichever one starts emitting audio first claims the channel and keeps it until it's done.
The BlueBuds support 8 devices, you're 3 devices away from having to start juggling what is paired.
I hope you'll agree that there is some number of devices beyond which we don't really need to worry about now many of them headphones can attach to. For me, for now, 2 or 3 would definitely be a problem, while 8 is more than sufficient.
My intention in this conversation is not to make a claim that there are no tradeoffs to be made, but to take issue with the poorly thought out nature of the article.
In fact, I think you make a better point than any of Ms. Goode's. And I'm willing to mention a couple of others.
1) It's not a super common case, but I have been in a situation where I was listening to music on my headphones, and wanted to hear what someone else was listening to on their player. With regular headphones, all you have to do is unplug and plug them into the other player, while bluetooth headphones would require the pairing complication (and un-pairing manually, lest you over time eject your own devices).
2) Wireless interference can be an issue in some circumstances. At one office desk where I sat, the Elite 800X cans had an issue with their connection to my Macbook, which I attributed to the in-office cell phone signal booster that was perched up on the wall above me. The audio stream would cut in and out rapidly. That was annoying.