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Comment by paulrosenzweig | Hacker News Reader

Is Bluetooth less open to innovate on than the 3.5mm jack? I agree that it's important to be able to create hardware add-ons "without Apple's permission", but wouldn't most of those use cases just use Bluetooth today?

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Is a headphone plug cheaper than a bluetooth chip?

It's certainly better form a usability perspective: plug it in, and you're done. Bluetooth has to be paired, and can be jammed.

Also you can't really screw up the 3.5mm plug, while on the other hand a low-quality Bluetooth chip will ensure you constant sources of irritation when you try to use cheap wireless headsets. Source: bought a few different kinds in Shenzhen, and was universally disappointed by the BT issues (mostly pairing problems and random audio lags on the BT stack, though one particular headset managed to consistently hang up my S4).

There's orders of magnitude of difference in complexity between Bluetooth and 3.5mm jack. Also, last time I heard, you couldn't even use Bluetooth to transfer files from an iPhone to a non-Apple device, so there's that.

EDIT changed "data" to "files", because that's what I meant.

Yes you can. Of course you can; If you couldn't transfer data, bluetooth headphones wouldn't work.

I meant files, not audio datastreams. Edited the comment to reflect that.

I guess they mean transferring files.

> Also, last time I heard, you couldn't even use Bluetooth to transfer data from an iPhone to a non-Apple device, so there's that.

What? Isn't it just a protocol?

There's protocol, and then there's implementation.

https://www.quora.com/Why-does-iPhone-not-pair-with-other-no...

I don't have an iPhone, but my cow-orker whose friend has one tells me that it's still the case that you can't transfer files between an iPhone and a non-Apple device over a Bluetooth connection.

I can confirm this, I've never tried before but my wife has an iPhone and I wanted to transfer something from her phone to mine in an area where neither of us had good service. Apple has some "AirDrop" nonsense that uses bluetooth to set up a direct wifi file transfer between iPhones, but to transfer directly to a non-iPhone, you need a third-party app, generally installed on both phones.

I doubt my wife will get another iPhone, especially without a 3.5mm headphone jack.

So what I'm hearing is that the iPhone doesn't really support Bluetooth, but rather a subset.

Now you also need to power the external device if you use Bluetooth.

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