Bluetooth implementations are so stupidly quirky I can totally see proprietary dongles as being required to guarantee connectivity.

Fitbit won't pair with my phone, but works OK with my wife's and my tablet. Garmin fitness tracker syncs with all 3 devices, but will stop syncing with my wife's phone within 2-3 days and will need to be paired again.. My bluetooth headphones work with my phone and my wife's phone, but not my tablet. Every 6 months or so I still have to use a paperclip to reset the headphones to be able to re-pair them with my phone after they stop working for no reason.

I've seen similar problems with phones I've owned before.

Another example of this is with 'Windows Mixed Reality' VR headsets. The controllers connect with the computer via Bluetooth and will often be noticeably laggy or unreliable when using onboard Bluetooth due to interference from other devices on the motherboard. Switching to an external Bluetooth dongle on a USB extension cable results in significantly improved controller tracking, and this issue is partly to blame for the poor reputation of WMR controller tracking.

I suspect that's one of the reasons Valve put a Bluetooth receiver inside the original Vive headset.

They also didn't use it to connect to the controllers. They used two nRF24L01 transceivers which use Nordic's proprietary shockburst protocol. Easier to set up and better latency.

Yeah, the second-gen[1] Samsung Odyssey+ headset likewise has a built-in dedicated receiver in the headset and it's a significant improvement over the first gen. (I like the first gen better in practically every other way though.)

[1] There's much debate about what 'first gen', 'second gen' actually mean in terms of VR, I just mean it's Samsung's second WMR model after the Odyssey HMD.

I remember a friend had a PDA with Bluetooth over 15 years ago. It's dumbfounding that after being around for so long it's still such a train wreck even on mainstream products.

If apple made a new protocol called APAN (apple personal area network) where they get rid of all the BS in bluetooth and did it properly, kept it proprietary for 5 years and then released it to the general market, I bet they will sell like hotcakes.

Make AirPods 3 APAN & BT compatible, with the same latency characteristics of theatre wireless mics (really low). Same with the mice & keyboards.

Bruh, they did! They call it „W1 chip“ and its in airpods and beats.

It's still BT inside. The W1 adds some convenient new pairing logic. It's not a new stack.

I have the same problem with bluetooth in my car, it unpairs my phone at random

What the author means: if you ever worked with actual Bluetooth you'll see that it's full of insane quirks and vendor bugs. This opens up the risk that your product will be seen as bad because the user has a crappy BT chipset in their computer. Just see the debate about Bluetooth headphone latency here on HN: even engineers don't realise that experience is very much dependant on what kind of chipset they have on BOTH sides.

This is why manufacturers build their own 2.4GHz proprietary dongles using proprietary protocols - it ensures consistency for the users.

Supposedly the drivers are also full of hacks. Blacklists and Whitelists for which devices actually support certain features. A device might say it supports a specific codec, but then when the phone starts streaming audio it causes the headset to lock up.

It's a bunch of hacks all hacking around the other hacks.

The BT protocols are quite complicated and therefore the different implementations will be full of quirks IMHO. Try debugging an audio BT issue on a phone and you will see the amount of complexity.

Interoperability is tested, but not in an organized way and not repeatably - AFAIK 3 different teams are supposed to check that a new protocol works against each other. The different vendors verify their BT implementations but not against each other. That would be expensive, I guess.

The firmware in BT devices can also use a number of hacks which are not breaking the spirit of the specs as such .. and this is not being tested. On top of this often BT and WiFi has to work together (shared antenna) and this means that BT will not get all the time it needs but a percentage based on what Wi-Fi is doing at the time.

I try to use Ethernet every time I get the chance.

> it's full of insane quirks and vendor bugs

As someone not familiar at the low level, can somebody explain how this can still be happening today? Are there not libraries that help ensure proper implementation? I really don't understand.

There's multiple effects going on. Firstly the bluetooth spec itself is quite complex: the 'core specification' document is near 3000 pages of very dense technical details, because it's aiming to allow anything to connect to anything. Secondly, many bluetooth devices are both heavily power and cost optimised: you don't have a lot of silicon and you don't get to use it very often if you want your product to have a reasonable battery life. This is especially true of the raio in a bluetooth device, and adds a whole other level of complexity to your implementation, and is one area where bugs are very easy to introduce. It also requires a fairly complex dance between hardware and software (most of the bluetooth spec is implemented in software, usually C. The hardware mostly consists of a radio capable of transmitting on the right 2.4Ghz signals with the right modulation scheme, but when you add power management to that it gets gnarly).

Thirdly, hardware companies are generally not great at software. A lot of effort goes into physical testing and validation but the base level of quality of the code isn't great. Also the quality of a given bluetooth device often depends on the quality of the custom code for it: there's a generaly trend of running application code on the same CPU as the bluetooth code, and in an embedded context there isn't generally great seperation between the two (nordic's approach is probably the best here). A third-party making a cheap pair of bluetooth headphones is not likely to make a quality result, even if using a library which is relatively bug-free.

Finally, there's a vicous sprial effect: because you need to interact with a wide variety of other implementations, which may all be buggy or quirky in their own ways, you wind up needing to test with a wide array of other devices (expensive and may not always happen) and play whack-a-mole with the remaining issues which appear, which in turn creates more quirks and more opportunity for bugs.

Hardware makers basically can't write good software.

That doesn't explain why Bluetooth is the protocol that causing the most trouble. Proprietary 2.4Ghz devices appear to work just fine.

A Bluetooth device is much more complex than the proprietary wireless devices. The complexity is largely because Bluetooth hardware must support many different types of devices all with differing requirements. A proprietary keyboard dongle doesn't have to be able to deal with the audio traffic coming from a microphone or going to a headset. Furthermore, it doesn't have to support proper identification and authorization of each individual device; many of them will accept input from any compatible keyboard that happens to be near by.

Not an expert in this kind of low-level stuff, but bluetooth is mostly implemented in hardware. I don't imagine you could get a compact lightweight headset that can last 10 hours on a charge if it needed to run even something as lightweight as a C library. And obviously, you can forget something like Airpods.

No, bluetooth is pretty much entirely in software. I say that as someone who has worked on Bluetooth devices at CSR/Qualcomm. Embedded software quite routinely runs hours on batteries. Indeed, some (entirely software) devices, last many years.

Are you basing this off of an assumption or do you have a source?

I think the author might not know that the dongles that Logitech ships are not Bluetooth. They use Nordic's nrf24L01 chips, which run a much simpler protocol, very fast and robust for simple communications.

I use a Logitech MX Master, and while I do enjoy its Bluetooth capability (for laptops), I use a dongle with my desktop, which results in zero latency, no stuttering, and perfect synchronization.

I think the primary culprit is the power management on both the host and client

I have an MX Master and a K380. The MX Master has a noticeable lag in Bluetooth and both will have a noticable delay when first used after a period of inactivity before springing to life. The K380 seems to have a key buffer to mitigate the delay.

If however I have my Bluetooth headphones powered on and active to the host, keeping the bt radio active, most of the issues go away.

Then there's also Bluetooth Low Energy, which is Bluetooth only in name and mandated in the 5.0 version. Apparently most news products use BLE instead of BT, unless they use a well-known profile for say, audio or game controller accessories.

I think this differs per keyboard. The dongle of my Logitech diNovo Edge is Bluetooth.

Right. Those old diNovos are a nightmare as well and not only did they ship with their own Bluetooth adapter but required you to install their driver which would install its own Bluetooth stack (the Broadcom one and they used to use I think BlueSoleil before that) over the Microsoft one.

I still have nightmares about those things failing to pair constantly.

It's many years ago so may be inaccurate, but I remember the dongle being the one stable solution. With the onboard BT of a raspberry pi on Ubuntu (or was it Raspbian?), recurring issues. With the dongle, perfectly stable, and IIRC no drivers not in the mainline repos.

The 'Logi Options' software has been buggy for me on Mac Catalina and constantly stops remembering my custom MX Keys or MX ergo/MX Master shortcuts until I relaunch the app. Anyone else dealing with this?

I simply stopped installing the terrible Logi software. I'm fed up with the crap, the resident CPU-eating daemons, the insistence on reporting what I do to Logitech or registering online for a cloud account — enough of this garbage.

Fortunately, the mouse works just as well without the crappy software, once you get it configured.

The reality is that if you poke yourself out of the Mac & laptop world, there's plenty of desktop computers without integrated Bluetooth support, and Bluetooth <-> USB adapters are pretty cheap, so vendors usually ship with one bundled to ensure they don't have to deal with tech support issues from people thinking they have Bluetooth support in their computer when they don't.