“My first encounter with Bluetooth on my Mac was a mystifying experience,” Alexander Fox writes for Apple Gazette. “Whether devices were discovered seemed to be determined by eldritch forces beyond human comprehension.”
“File transfer was hilariously unfinished, despite theroretically existing. The magic of Apple did not seem to extend to this backwater of wireless connectivity, and I shelved it in my the back of my head with all the failed, flash-in-the-pan computing ideas that have come and gone. And yet, despite its terrible reputation, Bluetooth has clung on,” Fox writes. “Its essentially the only widely-supported wireless connectivity standard that used by all companies. A lot of this is thanks to the standard’s widespread availability and lack of patent encumberance.”
“But surely there must be something better?” Fox writes. “Fortunately, there is, and you need look no further than the AirPods to see it. But why is Bluetooth so bad, anyway?”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: It’s not your MacBook, it’s Bluetooth (or, more precisely, cheap, chintzy Bluetooth hardware).
The “cheap, chintzy Bluetooth hardware“ in my iPhone or iPad keeps turning on the Bluetooth radio in another room even when I don’t ask it to when I run audio on the iOS device. As a result I have to constantly pair and unpair this device so that doesn’t unexpectedly happen and wake up half the house.
Two issues:
Bluetooth sucks. Wired or wifi is and always will be superior in every way.
This is Cooks Apple now. Can’t be bothered to offer superior quality. Apple now just wants to sell cheap ass consumer electronics with a designer label and a jacked up price tag. Service and product quality have both declined.
Part of the issue is that BT is actually a hodgepodge of many different standards. AirPods work so well because Apple can control both ends of the transmission and they choose the part of the standard they feel works best.
I’ve had good experiences with quality devices connecting to Apple devices.
AirPods work well with iOS devices, but when paired with a Mac, I struggle to reconnect them to my iOS devices. So I exclusively use them for my iPhone, Watch and iPad, but not for my Macs.
Bluetooth on my mac is a mystery. Volume adjustments.. good luck. My cheap android phone does it perfectly.
Yes right, nothing wrong with bluetooth tech, actually it’s just Apple bluetooth that is terrible. £4k for this rubbish is outrageous.
Hey Rich – Your words are balm for my soul. Bluetooth was always cumbersome and the excuse was some lame not existing patent issues. Since the update to OS 14.6 some days ago Bluetooth stopped working. (PS: my Mighty Apple Mouse is now perfectly powering a HUAWEI Laptop !!!! – took me less than a minute !!!)
Bluetooth mouse and headset worked great on my pc but they are unusable on my macbook pro. I read even apples bluetooth mouse doesn’t work well. I was expecting a great experience with the mac. Quite the opposite. Best feature outs terminal is a real unix shell instead of Microsoft garbage shell.
I think we call all agree Apple’s efforts with Bluetooth are all targeted at their Airpods and iPhones. Apple’s bastard-child – macOS is barely an afterthought, which is why it keeps breaking. Software QA, amongst all the major tech companies, these days, is non-existent.