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One thing I hope they mention: Apple put in proprietary extensions to give Apple-made Bluetooth headphones an advantage over all others, then removed the headph

One thing I hope they mention: Apple put in proprietary extensions to give Apple-made Bluetooth headphones an advantage over all others, then removed the headphone jacks.

rootusrootus 3y ago
It's hard to tie all that together. Generic Bluetooth devices work just like you are used to everywhere else -- that is, kinda shitty and unreliable. Must we suffer a universally crappy experience by preventing Apple from improving BT for their own headsets? Maybe they should be required to license the tech, if they are not already. But I don't want to degrade my experience just because that's the only way to have a level playing field. Maybe the BT standards group could get off their ass and make the underlying protocol better.
- rezonant 3y ago
  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.
  - harkinian 3y ago
    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.
    - midnightdiesel 3y ago
      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.
    - pests 3y ago
      This is the reason consoles do not support Bluetooth audio and wireless headsets all need a dongle.
      - harkinian 3y ago
        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.
        pests 3y ago
        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-mini.920-010473.html https://www.logitech.com/en-us/products/keyboards/mx-keys-mi...
        harkinian 3y ago
        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.
  - lifeformed 3y ago
    > 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.
    - rezonant 3y ago
      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.
      - harkinian 3y ago
        I have expensive Bluetooth stuff, and in my experience it's always glitchy. Also, even the cheapest wired stuff doesn't have these problems.
  - boxed 3y ago
    > 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.
- harkinian 3y ago
  I'm fine with Apple implementing BT to spec (i.e. crap) and having their own extensions to improve it. I'm not fine with them eliminating the only alternative, the jack. Since the first iPhone, there's been both BT and jack, and people clearly preferred the jack until Apple decided it was time to grow their accessories sector.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- WheatMillington 3y ago
  I don't really know how all this tech works, but when I bought my new Xiaomi buds, the moment I opened them my Android phone recognised I have new buds and asked me to pair them with one click. It was like magic. My understanding is that this would not be possible on an iphone, whereas this exact behavior works with Apple buds on an Apple phone.
  - dlubarov 3y ago
    Hey I briefly worked on that feature at Google! It looks like it's now known as Fast Pair - https://developers.google.com/nearby/fast-pair https://developers.google.com/nearby/fast-pair It's not part of AOSP, but something modern Google phones support. It's not a fully open thing - device makers must register with Google - but better than the iPhone situation where only Apple devices can have a nice pairing experience.
- bmitc 3y ago
  Apple has historically sucked at external, non-Appme Bluetooth device support.
shuckles 3y ago
“Apple improved upon the notoriously unreliable Bluetooth standard and then slightly degraded wired listening by requiring a $9 dongle” is quite a weak anti-trust argument. Almost all innovation comes from this type of vertical integration.
- skeaker 3y ago
  Huh? It sounds more like they deliberately broke everyone's devices except their own so you either have to pay them more to continue using your existing headset with an adapter, or if you have a bluetooth headset you're just shit out of luck unless you buy an Apple headset. How is that not anticompetitive?
  - shuckles 3y ago
    No actually any iPhone with a headphone jack continued to have a functioning headphone jack. And competitors marketed their phones with headphone jacks for a year and ended up also abandoning that feature.
    - harkinian 3y ago
      It's not feasible to use an old iPhone forever, I tried. If the required app updates don't get you, the carrier will. The big competitors like Samsung removed the jack too once they started selling their own wireless earbuds. They realized they could use Apple's strategy too.
      - shuckles 3y ago
        Basically every smartphone vendor removed the headphone jack. So you’re saying Apple is a monopoly because they have good ideas everyone else copies?
        harkinian 3y ago
        The others who did this are also trying to fleece their users. There are loyal Samsung users too, don't ask me why.

One thing I hope they mention: Apple put in proprietary extensions to give Apple-made Bluetooth headphones an advantage over all others, then removed the headphone jacks.

rootusrootus 3y ago

It's hard to tie all that together. Generic Bluetooth devices work just like you are used to everywhere else -- that is, kinda shitty and unreliable. Must we suffer a universally crappy experience by preventing Apple from improving BT for their own headsets? Maybe they should be required to license the tech, if they are not already. But I don't want to degrade my experience just because that's the only way to have a level playing field. Maybe the BT standards group could get off their ass and make the underlying protocol better.

rezonant 3y ago
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.
- harkinian 3y ago
  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.
  - midnightdiesel 3y ago
    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.
  - pests 3y ago
    This is the reason consoles do not support Bluetooth audio and wireless headsets all need a dongle.
    - harkinian 3y ago
      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.
      - pests 3y ago
        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-mini.920-010473.html https://www.logitech.com/en-us/products/keyboards/mx-keys-mi...
        harkinian 3y ago
        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.
- lifeformed 3y ago
  > 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.
  - rezonant 3y ago
    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.
    - harkinian 3y ago
      I have expensive Bluetooth stuff, and in my experience it's always glitchy. Also, even the cheapest wired stuff doesn't have these problems.
- boxed 3y ago
  > 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.
harkinian 3y ago
I'm fine with Apple implementing BT to spec (i.e. crap) and having their own extensions to improve it. I'm not fine with them eliminating the only alternative, the jack. Since the first iPhone, there's been both BT and jack, and people clearly preferred the jack until Apple decided it was time to grow their accessories sector.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
WheatMillington 3y ago
I don't really know how all this tech works, but when I bought my new Xiaomi buds, the moment I opened them my Android phone recognised I have new buds and asked me to pair them with one click. It was like magic. My understanding is that this would not be possible on an iphone, whereas this exact behavior works with Apple buds on an Apple phone.
- dlubarov 3y ago
  Hey I briefly worked on that feature at Google! It looks like it's now known as Fast Pair - https://developers.google.com/nearby/fast-pair https://developers.google.com/nearby/fast-pair It's not part of AOSP, but something modern Google phones support. It's not a fully open thing - device makers must register with Google - but better than the iPhone situation where only Apple devices can have a nice pairing experience.
bmitc 3y ago
Apple has historically sucked at external, non-Appme Bluetooth device support.

shuckles 3y ago

“Apple improved upon the notoriously unreliable Bluetooth standard and then slightly degraded wired listening by requiring a $9 dongle” is quite a weak anti-trust argument. Almost all innovation comes from this type of vertical integration.

skeaker 3y ago
Huh? It sounds more like they deliberately broke everyone's devices except their own so you either have to pay them more to continue using your existing headset with an adapter, or if you have a bluetooth headset you're just shit out of luck unless you buy an Apple headset. How is that not anticompetitive?
- shuckles 3y ago
  No actually any iPhone with a headphone jack continued to have a functioning headphone jack. And competitors marketed their phones with headphone jacks for a year and ended up also abandoning that feature.
  - harkinian 3y ago
    It's not feasible to use an old iPhone forever, I tried. If the required app updates don't get you, the carrier will. The big competitors like Samsung removed the jack too once they started selling their own wireless earbuds. They realized they could use Apple's strategy too.
    - shuckles 3y ago
      Basically every smartphone vendor removed the headphone jack. So you’re saying Apple is a monopoly because they have good ideas everyone else copies?
      - harkinian 3y ago
        The others who did this are also trying to fleece their users. There are loyal Samsung users too, don't ask me why.