Just having functional bluetooth would be nice? Bluetooth on my MBP recently decided to turn "off", and clicking/sliding the on/off slider just does nothing. The slider doesn't move to "on", and I get no feedback, errors, information or anything about why I can't re-enable it.

Prior to that BT devices would just drop the connection, AFAICT.

Bi-directional file transfer has never worked properly.

And that's only BT…

IDK what's actually that bad about the BT menu UI though? The recent UX changes on notifications have been bad, though. Especially where sometimes clicking the X doesn't dismiss the notification. (There's some bait&switch b/c there's like multiple notifications stacked up… or something.) And that (for a while now) Calendar hasn't reliably notified me, which has been great, as it results in lateness to meetings, since there's no longer an office mate to say "hey, it's time".

BT is broken everywhere. I daily-drive MacOS, Windows 10, and PopOS, all on pretty solid hardware. All 3 have countless issues with BT stuff, whether it's UI and issues with connecting/remembering, or dropouts, or it just failing to work on random days, or audio glitches, or not finding some generic peripherals that the other OSes do find, etc etc.

I use BT a lot, half a dozen devices I use every single day, and I have issues with every single peripheral on at least 1 (usually 2) of the 3 OSes I use.

BT itself seems like such a simple thing to get right too... not sure what I'm missing about it that makes it so technically hard to just work as expected.

  > BT itself seems like such a simple thing to get right too...

apparently its not, its a completely over engineered spec and is probably at the root of all these issues

good hn thread from 2017:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14752719

Do you have an 16" Macbook Pro? There is a hardware bug where plugging in external bluetooth kills the internal bluetooth.

That’s a thing on 13” MBP as well, it happened to me. I needed to use some super antiquated BT USB adapter and provide the digital equivalent of an indigenous rain dance in order to revive it. Apparently Apple was just straight up replacing motherboards because of it but I really didn’t want to be without my machine for a week plus during peak COVID.

No. It is all still the same dumpster fire. I think they may have actually made it worse.

I got a calendar notification of a cancelled event. The notification itself had no buttons to interact with. A hover where the close button would be (top left of the nmotification) causes it to appear and also causes a "delete" button to appear in the bottom right. But if I move my mouse off the "close" button to click "delete" both the close and delete buttons disappear. The only way to delete it is to click it (opening the calendar) wait for the calendar to open (5-10s on a 2019 i7 MBP) then open the event itself to delete it.

The hidden close button is so dumb. Why make it so small and make it hide if I go 5 pixels away from the notification?

It’s one of the least user friendly patterns in the OS that I can think of off hand, yet one that I have to interact with dozens of times per day. It’s bizarre.

I just realized that the button is impossible to interact with on Monterey. The only way to get the "options" drop down (something that used to be individual buttons on the notification) to appear is to hover over the "X" but if you move the mouse away from that the options drop down disappears. There's actually no way to do something like snooze a notification from the notification itself.

It's an astonishing regression in functionality, even for Apple. And with Apple's recent UI "improvements" I'm not sure if it is a bug or deliberate. I'm probably holding it wrong but I can't figure out the combination of interactions to get that button to persist.

I was hoping someone would mention this.

Shoving everything into a sub-menu made device statuses invisible and involved extra clicks to interact with them. It's user-hostile design.

Did you know you can drag the controls out onto the menu bar?

"show bluetooth in menubar" checkbox in bluetooth prefs also works as it always has.

No, I did not.

It's in the macOS User Guide. Here's the link for the Monterey version:

https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/control-center-mchl...

(Note the Tip sentence.)

Always read, or at least browse, the macOS and iOS/iPadOS User Guide. Even advanced users will learn a thing or few.

Not to be rude, but this has been a thing for some time now.

How very rude.

lol ;-)

> rude

to Apple?

Why can't this be a predictable hold and drag, like everything else?

They expect users to... what read a manual?

There is an alternative, make it so that users can intuitively discover features by playing around. I believe Steve Jobs told some pretentious story along that line when he launched the iPad.

> There is an alternative, make it so that users can intuitively discover features by playing around. I believe Steve Jobs told some pretentious story along that line when he launched the iPad.

And of course the technology hasn't evolved since then. Society hasn't gotten more complex. The problems we're solving are the same. Nothing has changed and people aren't asking for new things and demanding more convenience.

Everything is static.

?

> technology hasn't evolved since then... everything is static.

Maybe read again, no one said that. If anything it used to be the norm to have clunky products that require a manual. Many products these days don't need manuals.

I mentioned Steve Jobs to say he was full of shit, I don't believe for a second that Apple did actually pursuit that philosophy, let alone that they should stay doing it

You just blew my mind. Thank you!

This just saved me several minutes every day. Thank you!

holy shit

Bluetooth menu structure is god-tier compared to how it used to be, what do you mean "abomination"?

Apple took away a key feature, where you pressed a key combo (shift+alt) and clicked on the Bluetooth menu bar item, and you'd get an option to reset Bluetooth; this helped for the inevitable case where people have bugs and devices won't connect, or Bluetooth just won't work.

https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/reset-mac-bluetooth-module/

That no longer exists on Monterey.

They might be referencing Control Center, though.

...are you sure? When bluetooth was broken as all hell in the Monterey betas I believe that the reset trick was the go-to for people to get it to reconnect to devices properly.

Unless they removed it entirely in a later beta and I'm simply unaware.

I can only confirm that it's gone from Monterey RC1 and RC2 (& therefore the release build).

How are secret features better than the now-discoverable option of simply shutting it off and turning it back on? It's an all-time computing classic and now it's using the UI classic toggle language. This seems superb to me.

Turning bluetooth on and off doesn't reset anything, so it doesn't help when people have deeper problems with their Mac's bluetooth.

Ok, I understand. That is a regression. The UI piece as a whole is still superior in my opinion, wrt UX at least, even if this is a regression in functionality

been using since first public betas months ago. hated this for a couple weeks, but then once I realized it how it unified everything in one place, now I love it. It took a while for me to adjust to though.

the notifications change makes me actively angry

I'm sitting on catalina for as long as possible on my non-work laptop

I still don’t understand why clicking the menu date/time opens the notifications? Someone at Apple was paid $million/year to implement that? It still trips me up once a day.

This. The Bluetooth menu icon used to change if a device was connected. Also devices under the Bluetooth menu used to say connected, and not just turn a light-blue shade.

No joke I could not actually work out how to change the audio device on my mac the other day. Took a while to realise it's hidden in the little menu.

Exactly, thank you! At least they should implement some easy cli commands for those who don't want to deal with the awful UX.

blueutil. I connect my bluetooth headphones to macOS by issuing ‘hp’ in iTerm2 which is an alias to blueutil to connect to my headphones by ID number