this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2024
698 points (94.9% liked)
Showerthoughts
29325 readers
1 users here now
A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- Posts must be original/unique
- Be good to others - no bigotry - including racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I'm too young to know what Bluetooth was like 20yrs ago, can anyone elucidate?
It wasn't so much that it was put in stuff that wasn't useful it was more that it was put in stuff that needed something better than Bluetooth but they put in Bluetooth because it was new and shiny rather than old boring radio.
The problem with Bluetooth, especially back then, was that the range was terrible (about 1 ft in my experience), you couldn't connect to more than one thing at a time, it consumed quite a lot more power than radio (we have ultra low power modes now), and the bandwidth wasn't great either (still somewhat the case but the bandwidth has improved). So you had things like Bluetooth car keys which were like keyless entry systems we have today, but rather than using radio they used Bluetooth so half the time you'd go near your car and nothing would happen.
A lot of the cases where things used to have Bluetooth now use Wi-Fi today. Of course there were always things that had Bluetooth for a gimmick, but the vast majority of it was simply things that had Bluetooth when something else would have been the better option. Back then Bluetooth headphones were seen as a gimmick because they basically didn't work, now they work, so they're not a gimmick anymore. The perception of if something is or is not a gimmick is more about if it works rather than if it actually is a useful product.
Pretty accurate except Bluetooth is also radio of course, so it sounds weird contrasting them like that.
Radio in this case meaning an analog signal. Just fire the appropriate good vibes energy at the car rather than trying to send some packets over a wireless network. It didn't work mostly due to the lack of any kind of redundancy. If a packet got dropped then it just dropped, it was gone.
When we started adding some decent protocols to Bluetooth it became more reliable, but it's still not great range because of the frequencies used. Of course these days you would use Wi-Fi not analog radio, to get all of the advantages of Bluetooth but a much greater range and reliability.