Ask HN: Anyone else find Bluetooth to be frustrating?
I'm a relatively late adopter of Bluetooth, having mainly used cables up until recently. I own a pair of cheapish Anker earbuds and now Audio Technica headphones.
I find Bluetooth to be a frustrating experience. Almost every day I encounter issues when I'm trying to pair say, my headphones, with my MacBook. I hold the power button the headphones to turn them on or they're already on standby. I do a few clicks to pair them on my MacBook. macOS says it's paired but I didn't hear the pairing sound. So I try clicking again to unpair. No unpair sound. I toggle Bluetooth off and on and try pairing again. No dice. I power cycle the headphones and they pair with my phone instead. I hold the up and down volume buttons to force them into pairing mode again...
Not to mention that Spotify randomly decides to switch devices sometimes and refuses to switch back unless I kill the app. Or it says my headphones are paired even though Android does not.
On the London Underground, my music often goes crackly/distorted presumably because of interference from the trains and other devices around me. Frankly I never even considered that could be an issue. And it's not a faulty product or anything like that.
This isn't just a complaint about my AT headphones. My Anker earbuds are just as frustrating.
It would be so nice if you could just like, I don't know, bump two devices together and they use NFC to pair or something.
I can’t remember ever being frustrated by having a simple 3.5mm headphone cord; I remember often being glad to have it when I would drop my phone or iPod or earbud and it would catch on the cord.
I’m am frustrated almost DAILY by Bluetooth and various connection issues. If I drop an earbud while running or cycling it’s basically an immediate $100+ loss.
I couldn’t imagine being a teenager in current year trying to watch romance films in my moms basement and accidentally connecting to the living room surround sound
> I can’t remember ever being frustrated by having a simple 3.5mm headphone cord
I've got a couple devices with bad jacks, and I've ruined the cables on a couple of sets of headphones, but overall, wired headphones continue to just work and don't have batteries, so any device intended to use headphones that doesn't have a 3.5mm jack is defective.
Bluetooth seems to work ok enough in my cars, most of the time.
I don't know what we expected — it's (literally) intentionally less secure WiFi.
I don't know that it's the expectation vs reality at this point, as much as it is the denial of reality. But then again sometimes I feel like that's a hallmark of our time.
"Romance" films? Lol
It's truly fucking horrible. It's supposed to be the "just works" wireless protocol, and it never actually just works.
I bounce between an M1 Macbook Air, a Windows 10 PC, and a Pop_OS Thinkpad. What complex thing am I trying to get all 3 of those to do? ... connect to my bluetooth headphones. The headphones themselves have all 3 saved and is happy to rotate through finding which ones are nearby... but every single time I have to completely delete the headphones from MacOS and re-pair them... completely kill the bluetooth daemon on Pop_OS and restart it, and on Windows I just generally can't get it to connect at all unless I both turn BT off/on + re-pair the device + reboot the device. Even then it won't work half the time unless I repeat the process a few times.
As for my Bluetooth mouse (generic Corsair one)... I have to do all of the above but then it also randomly just disconnects every 10-15 minutes and wont reconnect at all until I reboot everything involved.
Bluetooth and USB goals have both failed us completely and need to either be re-done from scratch or scrapped completely and replaced with something better.
The bluetooth stack on osx is pretty bad. I have much better experience on linux. Anyhow, whenever bluetooth is acting up on OSX, just run sudo pkill bluetoothd and it will fix itself.
Interesting, I’ve had the opposite experience, although it was a few years back last time I really tried to get Bluetooth working on Linux.
FWIW my work MacBook has occasional issues with audio cutting out while my personal MacBook almost never has issues.
It's been some time since I have had issues on Linux. I regularly use headphones, mouse, and keyboard with bluetooth, and just today got a bluetooth Wacom tablet. All of it was just pair and go, and if things turn off and back on, they reconnect, sound gets redirected to the most recently connected thing, etc.
I remember it used to be pretty terrible and would break if you looked at it funny. Those days have gone, for me at least.
Haha. You should see it on Win 10. "PC disconnected" after 2-3 seconds "PC connected" , sometimes up to 10 times in a meeting. Frustrating. I tried to listen to music (500 € Plantronics headphones). It sounds like those one time wired phones that you get in long distance flights.
I worked on integrating a Nordic Bluetooth chip into a smartwatch, it was a nightmare. Some of the problems I encountered:
* the SDK kept changing, not just in minor ways but drastically. My suspicion was that this was so customers would hire Nordic to implement their drivers.
* The hardware kept changing. The chips would go out of production on the order of months or a year. Get your design working, go to order the parts, and the chips are no longer available (and the new chips use the new SDK so you have to rewrite the firmware).
* The Nordic API was nothing like the Bluetooth API, it was a wrapper around it, designed to make creating apps/drivers "simpler". But that means a lot of the Bluetooth documentation is useless to you, you have to translate it to the Nordic API. It also locks your software into one chip design.
* The firmware on the chip changes at will. There is no guarantee it will behave the same when you upgrade it. You only have access to the wrapper source code, not the source code of the stack that runs on the radio MCU.
I spent two years working on what should have been a project of a few months (I previously integrated an ANT+ radio with the smartwatch and it was dead simple.) One thought I had was that Bluetooth was designed to be a barrier to entry. It's become the default on phones and ANT+ doesn't have the market penetration, so if you can't make your gadget or phone support Bluetooth, your product is not marketable. The complexity is there to keep the smaller players out. The spec manuals are like 1500 pages long!
All of this means that many Bluetooth implementations and drivers are faulty because the developers can't spend the time to fully understand what they are doing. Larger companies can afford to hire the Nordic developers to write their drivers.
BT is shit. The only consolation: it seems to be equally shit no matter the device/OS/etc provider.
With one exception, a "JBL Go" portable speaker I bought years ago. Rock solid, I take it on every holiday.
But otherwise, yeah. BT sucks, although slightly less than "casting", jeeeeez.
BT sucks. Full Stop.
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Windows 11 "system settings" constantly crashes, which is how I need to access the BT panel....
But in all, with BT headsets galore (I have a literal bag full of different BT headset types) -- they all SUCK.
And dont even get me started on "buds" <-- $150 USD+++ for a fucking earbud set.
Fuck all of this.
They are LITERALLY just microplastics++heavyMetals in the oceans in <5 years.
Completely non-recyclable.
Absolute consumer fucking garbage.
Other than a bluetooth speaker I use in the shower I don't consider bluetooth reliable technology. Any bluetooth earbuds I had were triple the cost of wired ones that I usually use, they were worse quality, battery died much sooner than I manage to mess up the jack on wired ones. Additionally not being able to have my phone in my pocket while I walk and listen to music on bluetooth headphones in winter was a no-go for me. I went back to wired and I never looked back.
> It would be so nice if you could just like, I don't know, bump two devices together and they use NFC to pair or something.
That's a thing on higher end kit. Has been for years. Obviously only works if both devices support it though - you won't pair your macbook for example.
Other than that, I find Bluetooth and wired set-ups both have their advantages and disadvantages: - Bluetooth gets difficult when there's interference, wired gets weird ground loops and interference. - Bluetooth can be tricky to connect, wired gear gets yanked out of my ear when it catches on my door handle, or an airplane seat armrest, or my dog. - I can walk around listening to something on my laptop with Bluetooth, but with wired I don't have to worry about battery life.
Bluetooth is an essential part of my life and has been for probably 6-8 years now, so I've worked out most of the tricks and kinks of the gear that I use.
I regularly get crackling on my bluetooth headphones at the gym despite both my phone and headphones being on my person. And pairing is always an annoyance, my strategy at this point is basically to pair my headphones once and never unpair them if I can reasonably avoid it.
It's really first-world-problem territory, but it's a little frustrating that all phone manufacturers are going all-in on dropping headphone jacks without a rock-solid replacement technology. This is prime territory for one of the big tech companies to come up with something better than BT, force it into the industry, and earn some significant loyalty points from me at least. Looking at you Apple.
I hate Bluetooth. I was trying to pair NY wife’s phone with a newish Mercedes last week. It was like a three stooges skit.
I’ve got a Bluetooth helmet. It cost a crap-ton. It’s infuriating. I basically never use it because it’s not worth the trouble.
Who the hell decided hold for three seconds to turn on? (It’s so common it must be in the spec) Why not a hard power switch? Why can’t pairing just work? Here’s an idea. Two switches. Power and pair. How hard would that have been?
We suck. Bluetooth is an example of why humanity will never deserve the stars.
My Elecom deft pro mouse have the physical switch and a button for pairing. But that takes some space though.
I just found out that my new phone can't pair to my 10 year old car anymore. I googled it and it may or may not be a new version of the protocol that's incompatible with my car. I might have to go see whether my car has an AUX input, since I never take calls in the car anyways...
I've avoided Bluetooth for a long time, but recently been using them. I felt that perhaps newer versions of it had improved?
I think most of the times I've been flustered by it recently, my headphones had already connected to another device and then silently failed on the device I wanted to connect to. Possibly some geekier UI to expose that would help.
Though, I was slightly confused by your terminology. I thought 'pairing' was a one time thing, and I don't need to press any button to connect, except maybe turn them on for the ones that don't do that automatically when removed from their case.
I cannot use my Airpods Pro for playing instruments on my Ipad Pro, because of latency. I have to use my old great cable headphones and a flimsy adapter, because the Ipad Pro has no headphone jack.
I really miss the deactivate a device in the bluetooth settings. Have multiple bluetooth devices like headphones and multiple phones and tablets etc. and unpairing and pairing is a pain in the ass.
I have 0 problems with Bluetooth on all the devices I have, from speakers (Bose, WonderBoom, generic AliExpress/Amazon), headphones (Bose, Sony, AeroPex), smartwatch (Pebble), laptops (XPS13 + Fedora), desktops (Fedora), vehicles (all aftermarket decks) connecting to my mobile devices (Graphene and Lineage).
I do live in a very small city that doesn't have a congested 2.4GHz band, that definitely helps, but I never have issues traveling either.
I'm not sure if it's just the "aura" or what, but it just seems to work all the time.
I also have almost(not quite 0 but close) problems with BT. Most of my devices 'just work' all the time. When it doesn't, it's almost always because there is more than one host device involved and it usually hijacks the connection; I just turn off BT on whatever I don't want to use at the time and then the other device picks right up. It would be nice if I could set my default on my truck to be my phone though; sometimes it thinks I'd rather listen to my housemate's phone.
Other than my Oppo Android phone to car BT connection, I try to avoid BT in general. Pairing tends to be a huge pain.
I find BT headphones to never be loud enough. Battery life tends to become ridiculously short after 3-6 months of use.
I think that BT suffers from sharing the same 2.4GHz ISM band as microwave ovens, WiFi and all manner of unlicensed RF devices. The band is unlicensed because it is so noisy and microwaves at the frequency are massive attenuated by rain, fog, etc. Which is actually the reason they work well in the microwave oven.
I have conditioned myself to first turn off BT on my phone, then take the earbuds out of the case and then connect on my Lenovo ThinkPad. With this sequence it works quite well. To change to my phone I disconnect on the ThinkPad then connect on the phone. (Both devices are always paired)
The text reads to me like the author goes into pairing mode every morning. That should not be needed. Once the device is on you should be able to connect it in any prior paired devices. Give it only one choice that will help.
Bluetooth audio is a burning dumpster of monkeypoxed clown corpses.
I have two sets of BT headphones, and I avoid using them b/c of the unpredictable pairing behaviors.
It needs to be replaced with something dedicated to audio-- because I think the attempt at generality (object data transfers, mice, keyboards, etc.) and backward compatibility has made for a standard that isn't capable in a multi-device world. When buying hardware, I look at Bluetooth as a feature, but at best, just for input devices. Audio is a lost cause.
Bluetooth, to me, is representative of the current state of mainstream tech in general.
We have a lot of things that are build well enough to work, but few things built well enough to work well.
I gave up on bluetooth a decade ago; it just can't be relied upon. Once upon a time, we wondered: "wouldn't it be lovely if devices could just talk to each other, wirelessly, and we didn't have to fuss around with cables?" Now I know: "isn't it lovely that I can just make things definitely work, for sure, with cables, and I don't have to fight with the endless flakiness of some hacky wireless protocol?"
I get weird looks when I tell my friends I still use wired headphones. They don't seem to share these issues we seem to have, or more likely they put up with it.
I bet they watch ads too.
I have found Bluetooth to be a very smooth experience, but only when using more recent devices.
For example, my Bluetooth Pixel Buds work great with my new Samsung S22 phone and my new MacBook. My Samsung S22 and my 2021 car work great and pair together very reliably.
However, I also have a 2016 car, a 5 year old Asus laptop, and some older Bluetooth headphones. If I throw any of those into the mix, Bluetooth becomes frustrating and unreliable again.
The major issue I've had with Bluetooth has been one of two things:
- Microphone quality sucks and unless your headphones emulate two BT devices, your audio quality has to drop to a terrible early-2000's codec. - Now that I have a nice pair of headphones, it's paired to 10 different devices. They fight over what connects first. Most of my devices run with BT off to make it easier to connect.
Your second point is so true and hilarious.
And not in the "extreme" way your exemple give, you get in trouble much earlier.
I want to connect my headphone to my phone, and randomly my phone will decide to pick up the hi-fi system in the living room instead that I connected once at Christmas to play music, or if I dared opening the door it would connect to my car.
I assume everyone who use Bluetooth on their phone has at some point connected it to some sort of hi-fi system or car or TV or whatever so what, do we all face that problem? And why is Android so terrible at letting me pick which device it can connect automatically VS those it must have a manual request for me? Even wifi settings have that...
A _very_ consistent issue I have is my car did not come with Bluetooth audio (it was a $800 option at the time). I bought a Bluetooth adapter that just plugs into AUX. My current Android phone will not automatically connect to this device, but it will connect to the car's hands-free. Yes, the car has hands free but no BT audio, that's BMW for you. When I'm out of the car, the adapter will not let go of my phone so my phone will just keep broadcasting music for hours.
A fault of the phone? Probably not, it's more like the adapter works _too well_. It really only needs to be tuned for a few feet, realistically, but yet works up to practically 30 feet away with the adapter IN THE CAR 3 FLOORS BELOW ME. The adapter is marketed for use in the car.
Anyway, every so often when I had an iPhone it would prefer playing over the hands-free instead of the BT audio adapter... because that's preferable for music apparently??
I feel like the spec needs to be revamped. BLE was a good addition, but I'd love to see introduction of some sort of mesh and more accurate proximity detection. Apple had to mash two different techs together just to get AirTags to work.
Yep. The multiple device connectivity issue is a complete misdesign on BT part.
I understand that it's hard to add UI for selecting who to connect to on a device with limited human input and output (such as headphones), but this could be solved by every trusted BT device being able to manage every other trusted BT device. This way, you could have a app on your phone or PC for selecting where the headphones connect. I hope the BT standard goes into direction like this at some point.
Best solution so far: Make your own Bluetooth-3.5mm connector box. Then you can use any plugged headphones you want and yet you are not physically connected to your phone.
They are all based on same chip. So if you buy 5€ BT-headphones and plug them into 1000€ dumb headphones, they very much sound the same as 1000€ BT-headphones.
Also your box can have much bigger battery, does not matter as it is in your pocketsies and not in your ears.
> They are all based on same chip. So if you buy 5€ BT-headphones and plug them into 1000€ dumb headphones, they very much sound the same as 1000€ BT-headphones.
That is not strictly true. While the vast majority of microcontrollers used in BT headphones come from a handful of companies (usually Qualcomm, Realtek or JieLi), the DAC and amplification stage is going to be different. Cheap headphones use the microcontroller's built-in DAC while higher end models can have a discrete chip, or sometimes a custom ASIC that also handles noise cancelling.
The protocol itself and the SBC codec are still a bottleneck of course, but in my experience an ESP32 paired to a decent quality I2S DAC module sounds much better than a random cheap BT receiver module (and has no annoying voice prompts).
At least for me, the fact that BT is decades old and most ppl still have issues with it is enough to think that is just a hot pile of garbage.
The bluetooth specification is such that there are exactly zero compliant implementations of it. Bluetooth LTE is a damn sight better than Bluetooth 4.0, in this regard, but the specification is still literally longer than War & Peace. This guarantees that people will always hit some bug or broken use case, no matter the device that they're using, sooner or later.
Copy that. My Apple AirPods do a terrible job pairing to my Apple iPhone Mini 13 and my Apple Mac Pro. On the other hand my wife’s 4 Apple HomePods never worked in stereo. Now they’ve been discontinued. I pay a premium for Apple because It Just Works, but… It Just Barely Works.
NFC is a different protocol and unsecure. I think much of youre issue might be how long it takes your phones chip to initialize, etc. Bluetooth aint great but there isnt much better currently for almost secure short distance communication.
Isn't it up to the vendor to implement their own encryption scheme for NFC ? and there seem to be 2 different use cases.
I honestly don't thin there is any use case yet for streaming large payload of data (or music ) via NFC.
So bluetooth might be better compared to NFC for use case where NFC haven't been designed for. but in that case I could say that microwave communication is better than bluetooth
Link to NFC insecurity resource(s)?
I have a pair of Samsung earbuds, can't remember the modelname. They cut out all the time and lose connection or drop out of sync regularly. They are unusable.
I have some BT headphones that automatically connect to the last two devices. Like, who wants that? I am always connecting to my Macbook as it never sleeps!
Bluetooth on OSX was an excellent experience, but fell off the cliffs right after the 11.0 release. After so many releases, it still hasn't been fixed.
My Bluetooth headphones interfere with the wireless internet adapters on Ubuntu 18.04 Linux on both my desktop and notebook. How to fix that?
I've heard of that, in some devices it can be a hardware issue where the bluetooth and wifi are in one module and one upsets the other. Maybe look into the model numbers of the devices and see if other people report similar things.
Bluetooth? Frustrating? Surely you're joking
Seriously, though...is there anyone who DOESN'T find Bluetooth frustrating? Cos I haven't met them
"When asked for a PIN, use 1111."
Me: "Isn't the PIN meant to be there for security?"
Mostly "Just works" with Mac and Android. Had more problems on Linux.
Appropriate XKCD: https://xkcd.com/2055/
On top of all this, let's not forget the lipsync issues.