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I’ve heard it called “lock in”. Once enough infrastructural and technology is built on something else, it’s locked in. You can’t change it. That’s why it’s so important to get platforms right the first time.

Sony uses it for PlayStation controllers and it works great. So more than just Apple but it is a small set for some reason. On Mac I don’t even think about it or have issues but on windows I end up using the Logitech adapter because the Bluetooth is unreliable or laggy.

Defining a wireless connectivity protocol, but starting from UX requirements instead of the engineering perspective would be a refreshing approach 😃

Bluetooth SIG (Special Interest Group) is the organization behind Bluetooth and a lot of the problems start with the specifications they create. This group chose to define the standard by predicting the all possible types of devices that would use Bluetooth.

If I was a betting man, I would say that this the root cause for most of our bluetooth issues. A committee trying to predict everything for everyone. 🤔 Contrast with Apple which is an single entity building for specific devices.

Exactly. The lower levels and radio technology in Bluetooth is awesome. It's an extremely robust protocol. It's the upper layers relating to applications that cause all the headache.

Think of this as if ICANN would not let people define new domain names but instead have a standardized list of allowed domain names that you can use. The list would be updated with new approved names once a year. That was how the Bluetooth SIG defined the standard.

The effect is that it was nearly impossible to expand on the Bluetooth technology, because the abstraction level was too high. Adding new features was very difficult. To fix this the group added more and more profiles to cover all the use cases that appeared. This did not work out well.