Your last paragraph hits the problem: it’s possible that a car exists with a release-quality Bluetooth stack but I’ve yet to use one. The same is true of most of the non-current or expensive devises, which turns quality into something you need to carefully seek out rather than a given.

In contrast, $2 throwaway headphones work 100% of the time. Sure, the audio quality isn’t great but it’ll be better than any phone speaker and you can drop only a little more for a big improvement.

This annoys me because I like the Bluetooth concept – and have since I bought my first BT-equipped phone around 2004 – but the tragedy of the commons has hit really hard. It’s 2017 and turning Bluetooth off and back on is still a useful way to fix problems FFS!

If Apple and followers want to make this switch, they need to start blacklisting or warning for buggy devices (“x is unable to play back reliably; contact VENDOR support” or “sound quality will be low due to …”) — after fixing anything hokey they’re still shipping, of course. Trying to paper over the skimping just tarnishes the entire industry.

I'm not an audiophile, but I can hear a difference between a good DAC through an headphone cable and a bluetooth set of headphones.

I was also just in an airline lounge last weekend and got a huge amount of drop outs on my bluetooth headphones. I'm guessing because of a strong wi-fi signal to the point where the music was stuttering badly.

So it's got a ways to go yet.

> You just need to buy a decent product!

And there's the issue, the 3.5mm works with something I can buy for a couple of dollars in the supermarket and it just works. A good bluetooth headset costs an order of magnitude or two more and I can't find out if it's good until I take it home and open the packaging.

Even streaming from my phone to my PC is something I've found to be incredibly laggy.

True - but the similar issues people complain about with BT audio are going to be present with $5 cabled headphones... crackly audio, dodgy cables might cut in/out with movement etc...

What about $145 cabled headphones?

Complexity has its price — it’s hard to get right and corner cases continue creeping in with wider use.

If there’s a popular example of over engineering, the replacement of a dirt cheap 3 foot cable that works perfectly 100% of the time, with zero lag and zero signal loss, with an expensive, battery powered wireless signal solution which lags, cuts out, creates security issues and dies after a few hours of use must be it.

Is it really unavoidable? Have you ever had a car 3.5mm port not work?

Yes. Not in a car, but in other devices.

In at least one of the cases, this was because of stuff (some sort of gunk) getting into the port. Before anyone says that wasn't a problem with the port itself, having a physical port allows problems like that to happen. Problems of that sort don't exist with wireless technologies.

Heh I know it's technically possible if you jam a candy bar into it, or spill coke on your phone, etc. It's much less pervasive than Bluetooth cutting in and out because you put your hand over the antenna and similar problems, though.

> Heh I know it's technically possible

it's not merely "technically possible". I've had this actually happen to me, and I'm sure others have too.

Sorry, what I meant by that was that it is sometimes unavoidable using a less than stellar bluetooth device :)

I got what you meant, I just meant that if you had a 3.5 mm jack, you wouldn't have these problems, it would just work. We've replaced a very simple, cheap solution that works very well and has very high fidelity with an unreliable, expensive, complicated one that has worse sound quality when it works. Your problem could very easily be avoided with very old tech.