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Comment by rezonant | Hacker News Reader

This isn't accurate, normal Bluetooth works much better than you might imagine. The kind of things that are added on top with Apple's solution are things like fast pairing and instant device switching. They also have their own custom codecs, but most other Bluetooth communication devices also support custom codecs which, on Android for example, are enabled by installing a companion app.

Re: Bluetooth being better than you portray: Don't get me wrong, you can certainly run into problems, but in normal usage it works just fine. And Apple isn't fundamentally improving on the potential issues with their proprietary solutions.

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Normal BT drops to very low sound quality when the mic is in use, because it goes into "headset" mode. Apple got around that with an extension. Combined with the jank pairing and device switching, the difference is pretty big.

AirPods also drop audio quality severely when their mic is active, just as with Bluetooth. Apple hasn’t solved that in any way with some nefarious extension.

This is the reason consoles do not support Bluetooth audio and wireless headsets all need a dongle.

Reminds me of how wireless keyboards and mice often don't use BT despite it being totally designed for that use case. They use some random 2.4GHz USB dongle. And well there are BT kbms, but they're unreliable.

I actually love Bluetooth mice and keyboards, especially when they support multi device so I can switch between my phone/laptop/watch with the press of a button. Currently using [0] for a few years, love the build quality and form factor. Then a random Microsoft BT mouse. No problems with reliability.

[0] https://www.logitech.com/en-us/products/keyboards/mx-keys-mi...

My Apple BT keyboards+mice run out of battery very quickly and sometimes randomly disconnect/reconnect. A newer non-Apple BT keyboard seems ok on its own, but then there are issues on the other end. My fairly new Windows PC can't wake up from Bluetooth keyboards/mice, so I have to keep a USB one attached. And the BIOS menu requires a USB keyboard too. Dongle eliminates all that complexity.

There are also some BT limitations at play. Key rollover is capped, and mouse polling rate is lower. But that'd only matter to me if I were playing PC games. Ability to switch devices is a plus for BT.

> but in normal usage it works just fine.

I emphatically disagree. Not in my experience at all. Nearly every single time I use Bluetooth it is a dance of connecting, forgetting, re-pairing, reconnecting, looking for old connected devices to shut them off, etc. Half the time I give up and don't use it. This happens to any combination of Bluetooth devices I have, at all locations, in any situation.

So why is there such a difference between my experience, and the experiences of the other posters here, so different to yours? Could it be that there's something about your situation leading your experience to suck that I'm not having?

I'd put my money on buying cheap devices and painting your experience with them in broad strokes on the technology as a whole. After all, if you have no faith in the tech, why spend money on a good experience? After all, why would $5 earbuds from Walmart have a different experience to a quality pair of headphones for a few hundred dollars to pair with your nearly thousand dollar smartphone?

I don't mean to gatekeep good Bluetooth, because try as I might I can't get my mom to stop getting her own and let me buy the expensive stuff for her, but she still manages to reliably get her Bluetooth paired, connected and working at the start of the phone call whenever I call her despite using budget headphones.

She does have a Pixel though. But it's just the budget one.

I have expensive Bluetooth stuff, and in my experience it's always glitchy. Also, even the cheapest wired stuff doesn't have these problems.

> normal Bluetooth works much better than you might imagine

And then..

> The kind of things that are added on top with Apple's solution are things like fast pairing and instant device switching.

So I guess you admit they add improvements.

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