Rant: Why Bluetooth Sucks [video]

I concur. He rants about things that aren’t actually issues, and is simply wrong on some of the things that are. For example, WiFi has transitioned to 5ghz and will be moving to 6 so the coex story solves itself and isn’t the biggest problem. Your device isn’t in discovery mode all the time because, unlike your router, it’s not plugged in always. Unless you want a standby time of an hour instead of a day, you can’t always be in discovery. Additionally it’s a UX and security thing - currently people expect that pairing also connects. If you make the device always discoverable the complexity of negotiating that goes up. Multipoint BT audio works so poorly that AirPods went with a totally different UX solution that works way better.

Unfortunately the author is wrong in the substance enough that the condescending lecturing style makes it even more of a turnoff. I just hope people don’t take this too seriously but it does speak that the BT engineers driving the standards need to do a better job focusing on issues that end users have. The challenge is that the bulk of these (excluding Google and Apple) are chip designers looking to sell more chips so they’re incentivized to solve different problems.

Yep, I was hoping for some technical info as to why implementations of the BT protocol are so bad on many devices. I've heard rumors of the firmware stacks being horrifying, but no firsthand experience.

Curious as to how Apple implements their Bluetooth stack because I’ve never had issues the end user devices with the Apple wireless chips in them. Their implementation seems to just work for me.

I know the Bluetooth spec and most implementations are messy and spaghetti-ish, but I feel like whatever Apple is doing works really well.

The heavy coiled cable on my sennheiser headphones has killed the sound jacks on two laptops, I believe due to the strain the weight of the cable puts on the jack when the cable is unsupported. I expect a slim headphone cable wouldn't have this problem, but I switched to bluetooth instead because of this. It also makes me less likely to accidentally pull my laptop off a table.

I agree that 'it's old' is a shitty reason to dismiss something though. I've had somebody suggest I replace my USB intellimouse because it's so old, but that's just not going to happen. It still works great.

I remember reading an article some time ago on how bluetooth audio transmission works. I was surprised to learn that audio is actually compressed (in A2DP and HFS/HFP mode) so for audio some file formats it will effectively be compressing the stream a second time, reducing its quality.

I have to say your profile made me laugh:

"Important: If you are looking at this profile because you thought something I posted was Wrong, dismissive, disrespectful, douchebaggish, what have you, I would really like to hear from you so that I could understand how you got that impression. I won't get mad, I won't "retaliate" I just want to hear what you have to say. It is important to me to communicate clearly and if something I said struck you that way then I failed and I would like to correct it."