Young Woman Yells At Bluetooth®
Hi. This is one of those posts where I randomly saw the title hanging around or whatever, from like weeks ago when I actually thought of writing this and never did, but the title is here so I guess I am writing now. Don’t expect too high quality out of this post.
Anyways. Fuck Bluetooth®. The first issue with Bluetooth® is the little ® symbol I have to put after the name for whatever reason. I’m not sure if this is strictly necessary, but I went to bluetooth.com to research why I didn’t like Bluetooth® in the first place and they were doing that a lot (except not even consistently, see image later). Perhaps there is a legal reason for this, but I believe copyright law to be poorly designed (and if you must put a symbol besides a name to say “someone owns this name and wants to dictate how you use it”, consider if names are even a commodity to be owned first).
As shown by the image, the ® symbol is not applied after Bluetooth® consistently, and failure to account for different screen / window sizes leads to some white text on white background. For this post, I will be using the ® symbol everywhere to illustrate the absurdity of the symbol.
My next problem with Bluetooth® is that wired technology is generally better than short ranged wireless technology, for three reasons: 1. you can tell exactly what it is physically plugged in to 2. there is no awkward pairing process 3. it is harder to lose wired objects, especially earbuds
In fact, it is so much harder to lose wired objects that people are putting cables on their AirPods, making them almost identical to the wired earbuds they are trying to replace!
To be serious, I do not hate Bluetooth®. Rather, I hate the way it is used. Looking at bluetooth.com, it is really just a way for close proximity devices to communicate wirelessly, and could be used for many good things. Instead, it is being used to track people and to create more ways to bypass security. Even so, it is still not all bad. For example, there is GlassOuse, which uses Bluetooth® to make using computers more accessible to disabled people. There is also Auracast™ (again with the weird legal symbols…), which extends Bluetooth® audio capabilities in creative ways, but it does not seem to be widely supported. If you use Bluetooth® in some other nice way, or currently use Auracast™ (I can’t find anything from non-industry people…), please let me know!