> just search google for macbook pro bluetooth audio issues, and you will find a slew of forum posts going back years

Apple has also shipped hundreds of millions of devices over that same time period, so the number of people with failed hardware is non-trivial. More importantly, it is extremely rare for people to perform root cause analysis on the actual failures which combined with the number of vendors and protocol complexity in the Bluetooth world means that a significant number of times the blame is placed on the wrong component.

The main thing I take from this is that vendors need to think about how they can provide a visible way to learn about peer device errors so e.g. your Mac could tell you that sound quality is horrible because the Bluetooth device doesn't support a high-quality codec or sufficient bitrate, is seeing high levels of retransmits or dropped packets, etc.

I think you're assuming that there's an issue with the macbook's implementation instead of the device you're pairing it with.

Like I had mentioned previously, if one side of the paired devices has a garbage antenna setup, it will have poor performance. Things like your soundbar, or a generic bluetooth speaker probably use reference designs for their BT setups and have not tuned them for the enclosure or use case.

not an assumption. given that everything else works together, it's the macbook pro that's the odd man out. my other devices include multiple bluetooth speakers, mice, phones (android and even windows phone), surface pro, iPad, and others. they all work seemlessly with bluetooth, but the macbook pro struggles with most, especially when trying to play audio over bluetooth. like i mentioned, this is a well-documented problem if you do even a basic search.

I haven't had any issues with Bluetooth on a Mac so far, ever since the BT 1.2 days. I've used Mac OS X, macOS and Linux on PowerPC and Intel Macs with both built-in Bluetooth hardware and USB bluetooth adapters, and all of them were fine. Doesn't seem to be an issue in either the Apple-implemented bluetooth hardware or software to me...

My MacBook Pro Retina 2012 had really flakey Bluetooth. Speakers, Apple Keyboards/Trackpads you name, they'd randomly drop out and need to be power cycled. My 2017 seems a lot more reliable though (knock on wood)

Apple to this day doesn't support aptX. It's plain embarassing.

Why? It's not like they say they do, but then don't. I've seen far more implementations where the product is listed as supporting a whole bunch of profiles and technologies, but then either doesn't implement it in a useful way or simply never works no matter the device. Most often this is with devices that originally used audio, but then added support for calling, address book, media controls etc. but implement them poorly or downright broken in a fashion that makes the base functionality even less usable than it was before.

Not supported on iOS true but is definitely supported on macOS.