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John Gruber from Daring Fireball has already written his review: > “Next year it will work great” should be Bluetooth’s slogan. http://daringfireball.net/link

John Gruber from Daring Fireball has already written his review: > “Next year it will work great” should be Bluetooth’s slogan. http://daringfireball.net/linked/2016/06/10/bluetooth-5 http://daringfireball.net/linked/2016/06/10/bluetooth-5

theGimp 10y ago
That's just gratuitously negative and dismissive. Bluetooth 4 is actually not bad at all in my experience. Pairing is painless relative to old versions; sound quality is flawless; connections are quite reliable. The "strain" is to be expected around other devices since Bluetooth uses 2.4GHz, a very crowded band. I can't speak to the technical bits since I never looked at them, but my experience as a consumer has been positive. Sure, it doesn't have the same range as a WiFi router, but it also doesn't use 1.5-20 watts (My source: http://www.tpcdb.com/list.php?type=11 http://www.tpcdb.com/list.php?type=11)
- kabdib 10y ago
  Depends on the devices. My car, for instance, has about a 50% chance of successfully hooking up to my iPhone. BT needs fewer features and better implementations. But apparently interop and reliability are not sexy enough for the BT standards folks to worry about. Can you imagine TCP/IP being in the same quality hole that Bluetooth is in?
  - theGimp 10y ago
    Right, I agree that it depends on the device. A Chevy model I don't recall had the stupidest bug where you sometimes couldn't pair unless you reset the car computer... by leaving the driver's door open for 5 minutes. I don't blame the Bluetooth standard though, messy as it might be. That's clearly terrible implementation on the car manufacturer's part.
    - kabdib 10y ago
      BT seems over-complicated, especially considering that it's quite often low-level (I really mean that organizationally) firmware engineers working on products that won't be updated after they ship. Given the types of products that are made with BT support, the hostile environments that they're developed within, and the common after-sales abandonment of support, BT should be a simpler protocol that is a LOT more resilient to implementation mistakes. But I don't think that anyone designs protocols to withstand institutional failure :-)
      - com2kid 10y ago
        BT itself is not overly complicated. Bargain basement BT chips, which is what everyone ends up using to save pennies, are full of bugs that have to be worked around. Of the various BT stacks out there, only a few are actually good, and the good ones get to charge appropriate licensing fees, meaning that they aren't in wide use. When you combine randChip with randBtStack, the end result is not necessarily a quality product. The poor engineers who have to work with this combination end up resorting to sending reset commands to their chip in an attempt to get the damn thing working.
        gtirloni 10y ago
        It would be really interesting to have a list of good BT stacks and devices using them. That way maybe we could avoid the bad ones. As a consumer I have no idea which devices will actually work properly (and I assume Bluetooth as a whole sucks).
      - Gibbon1 10y ago
        Fifteen years ago, looking at the Bluetooth spec my impression was the best way to implement it would have been to send the designers to the Siberia and then start over. The two issues I saw were Bluetooth is based on a frequency hopping radio using a dated low performance modulation scheme. The only nice thing you could say is potentially you can build really low power radio's using that design. However that brings up the second issues, a very complicated kitchen sink base band which requires a complex software stack and power hungry processor to support it. There goes your low power, out the window. (I think there were about 20 companies trying to design low power Bluetooth transceivers circa 2000-2003, most of them never could get the power low enough or a working stack) Hardware design issues aside, frequency hoppers have insurmountable quality of service issues for most applications. Professionally I don't think this is fixable. They would have been better off doing the following three things. 1. Define a low speed point to point oriented modulation scheme that can be supported by 802.11 radio front ends. Probably could have implemented this as a sub-band of some sort. 2. A direct sequence spread spectrum physical layer for USB. Advantage of that is the USB stack mostly works as USB had a 10 year head start and more resources than the Bluetooth alliance ever had, or will have. If one thinks a stack like USB is 'easy' consider Microsoft had to redesign theirs three or four times. 3. Dedicated DSSS wireless headphone spec. Seriously this was the original design goal and was totally achievable until the committee responsible for the spec lost their minds.
- lostlogin 10y ago
  > That's just gratuitously negative and dismissive That's the point. If you want a heavily opinionated summary that will likely inflame a fair portion of people, Gruber is your man.
- gtirloni 10y ago
  > sound quality is flawless; I have a headset that supports Bluetooth 3 only and audio quality is bad (especially while making calls where it chooses the HFP profile which is the only one where the mic is available). I vouched to never again buy any Bluetooth audio devices. Are you saying Bluetooth 4 would actually solve my problem? Should I still have hope?
  - gman99 10y ago
    >Are you saying Bluetooth 4 would actually solve my problem Make sure your headset and device (phone?) both support HFP1.6 or above (which supports wideband speech/HD voice) which makes the sound quality semi-decent
underwater 10y ago
If it were anyone else this would be flagged as blogspam. Sometimes he can bring insight, but these Tweet-like posts don't add anything to the conversation.
- bokenator 10y ago
  who is he?
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - underwater 10y ago
    John Gruber is an Apple fanboy who somehow makes a lot of money from his blog. And invented Markdown formatting.
kalleboo 10y ago
Isn't this a problem with anything wireless in general? WiFi is also plagued with connection issues, inexplicable dropouts, and slowdowns. With Bluetooth in particular it seems like there are a lot of poor implementations (if it's rock solid or buggy seems to have to do with which two devices you're using ) - maybe they would benefit from a more stringent conformity licensing process.
- 9935c101ab17a66 10y ago
  But.... it's really not. The WiFi issues you describe affect some people who most likely have 1) bad routers 2) poorly configured routers 3) tons of interference 4) Bad ISPs 5) Other clients on the network I'm not saying that setting up a WiFI network well is super easy, and there are definitely lots of things that can impact WiFi connectivity, but for it's ubiquity, I'd say WiFi works very well. In my three story townhouse with fibre and a decent router in the basement, I have none of the problems you describe.
- flamethroeaway 10y ago
  The stringent licensing is the reason why thunderbolt 3 is dead.
- Gibbon1 10y ago
  I think there are two problems, one yes wireless is 'bad' You can think. 1. Reliable 2. Cheap 3. Low power Pick no more than two. Bluetooth was originally designed to be cheap and low power. The other problem is networking is complicated, and then throwing device API's on top of that makes it very hard to get right. USB had lots of issues originally. And once you leave standard devices like, keyboards, mice, and mass storage devices it gets iffy real quick. (Go scan through the libUSB mailing list archives sometime)

theGimp 10y ago

That's just gratuitously negative and dismissive. Bluetooth 4 is actually not bad at all in my experience. Pairing is painless relative to old versions; sound quality is flawless; connections are quite reliable. The "strain" is to be expected around other devices since Bluetooth uses 2.4GHz, a very crowded band. I can't speak to the technical bits since I never looked at them, but my experience as a consumer has been positive. Sure, it doesn't have the same range as a WiFi router, but it also doesn't use 1.5-20 watts (My source: http://www.tpcdb.com/list.php?type=11 http://www.tpcdb.com/list.php?type=11)

kabdib 10y ago
Depends on the devices. My car, for instance, has about a 50% chance of successfully hooking up to my iPhone. BT needs fewer features and better implementations. But apparently interop and reliability are not sexy enough for the BT standards folks to worry about. Can you imagine TCP/IP being in the same quality hole that Bluetooth is in?
- theGimp 10y ago
  Right, I agree that it depends on the device. A Chevy model I don't recall had the stupidest bug where you sometimes couldn't pair unless you reset the car computer... by leaving the driver's door open for 5 minutes. I don't blame the Bluetooth standard though, messy as it might be. That's clearly terrible implementation on the car manufacturer's part.
  - kabdib 10y ago
    BT seems over-complicated, especially considering that it's quite often low-level (I really mean that organizationally) firmware engineers working on products that won't be updated after they ship. Given the types of products that are made with BT support, the hostile environments that they're developed within, and the common after-sales abandonment of support, BT should be a simpler protocol that is a LOT more resilient to implementation mistakes. But I don't think that anyone designs protocols to withstand institutional failure :-)
    - com2kid 10y ago
      BT itself is not overly complicated. Bargain basement BT chips, which is what everyone ends up using to save pennies, are full of bugs that have to be worked around. Of the various BT stacks out there, only a few are actually good, and the good ones get to charge appropriate licensing fees, meaning that they aren't in wide use. When you combine randChip with randBtStack, the end result is not necessarily a quality product. The poor engineers who have to work with this combination end up resorting to sending reset commands to their chip in an attempt to get the damn thing working.
      - gtirloni 10y ago
        It would be really interesting to have a list of good BT stacks and devices using them. That way maybe we could avoid the bad ones. As a consumer I have no idea which devices will actually work properly (and I assume Bluetooth as a whole sucks).
    - Gibbon1 10y ago
      Fifteen years ago, looking at the Bluetooth spec my impression was the best way to implement it would have been to send the designers to the Siberia and then start over. The two issues I saw were Bluetooth is based on a frequency hopping radio using a dated low performance modulation scheme. The only nice thing you could say is potentially you can build really low power radio's using that design. However that brings up the second issues, a very complicated kitchen sink base band which requires a complex software stack and power hungry processor to support it. There goes your low power, out the window. (I think there were about 20 companies trying to design low power Bluetooth transceivers circa 2000-2003, most of them never could get the power low enough or a working stack) Hardware design issues aside, frequency hoppers have insurmountable quality of service issues for most applications. Professionally I don't think this is fixable. They would have been better off doing the following three things. 1. Define a low speed point to point oriented modulation scheme that can be supported by 802.11 radio front ends. Probably could have implemented this as a sub-band of some sort. 2. A direct sequence spread spectrum physical layer for USB. Advantage of that is the USB stack mostly works as USB had a 10 year head start and more resources than the Bluetooth alliance ever had, or will have. If one thinks a stack like USB is 'easy' consider Microsoft had to redesign theirs three or four times. 3. Dedicated DSSS wireless headphone spec. Seriously this was the original design goal and was totally achievable until the committee responsible for the spec lost their minds.
lostlogin 10y ago
> That's just gratuitously negative and dismissive That's the point. If you want a heavily opinionated summary that will likely inflame a fair portion of people, Gruber is your man.
gtirloni 10y ago
> sound quality is flawless; I have a headset that supports Bluetooth 3 only and audio quality is bad (especially while making calls where it chooses the HFP profile which is the only one where the mic is available). I vouched to never again buy any Bluetooth audio devices. Are you saying Bluetooth 4 would actually solve my problem? Should I still have hope?
- gman99 10y ago
  >Are you saying Bluetooth 4 would actually solve my problem Make sure your headset and device (phone?) both support HFP1.6 or above (which supports wideband speech/HD voice) which makes the sound quality semi-decent

underwater 10y ago

If it were anyone else this would be flagged as blogspam. Sometimes he can bring insight, but these Tweet-like posts don't add anything to the conversation.

bokenator 10y ago
who is he?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- underwater 10y ago
  John Gruber is an Apple fanboy who somehow makes a lot of money from his blog. And invented Markdown formatting.

kalleboo 10y ago

Isn't this a problem with anything wireless in general? WiFi is also plagued with connection issues, inexplicable dropouts, and slowdowns. With Bluetooth in particular it seems like there are a lot of poor implementations (if it's rock solid or buggy seems to have to do with which two devices you're using ) - maybe they would benefit from a more stringent conformity licensing process.

9935c101ab17a66 10y ago
But.... it's really not. The WiFi issues you describe affect some people who most likely have 1) bad routers 2) poorly configured routers 3) tons of interference 4) Bad ISPs 5) Other clients on the network I'm not saying that setting up a WiFI network well is super easy, and there are definitely lots of things that can impact WiFi connectivity, but for it's ubiquity, I'd say WiFi works very well. In my three story townhouse with fibre and a decent router in the basement, I have none of the problems you describe.
flamethroeaway 10y ago
The stringent licensing is the reason why thunderbolt 3 is dead.
Gibbon1 10y ago
I think there are two problems, one yes wireless is 'bad' You can think. 1. Reliable 2. Cheap 3. Low power Pick no more than two. Bluetooth was originally designed to be cheap and low power. The other problem is networking is complicated, and then throwing device API's on top of that makes it very hard to get right. USB had lots of issues originally. And once you leave standard devices like, keyboards, mice, and mass storage devices it gets iffy real quick. (Go scan through the libUSB mailing list archives sometime)