Well, Jabra and Bose are both shipping some arguably “broken” products (though frankly I find “broken” to be a tad flippant of a description.) That does leave some alternatives. How are people buying bluetooth earbuds supposed to know that buying flagship products from some of the most reputable companies in the field would lead them here? Honest question. I don’t think it’s reasonable to ask everyone in the world to try to blast past the reams of SEO and fake reviews to try to find the random users in Reddit and support forums suffering from serious, poorly-documented limitations and awful bugs.
In my mind, something must be systemically wrong here.
> In my mind, something must be systemically wrong here.
It is. Three things are at play here: The power of consumer protection agencies is way too low, the standardization group (=Bluetooth SIG) doesn't give a fuck, and the Bluetooth standard itself is a horrible mess dealing with a lot of historical baggage.
In an ideal world, cases such as "won't operate with a standard-issue Mac" would cause an investigation by a consumer protection agency and the party found to be at fault by violating the specification would have to remedy the issue and/or face substantial fines (obviously, the larger the company the bigger the fines).
> The power of consumer protection agencies is way too low
In the UK, if they advertise them as working with / connecting to a computer, there's no way you aren't getting your money back.
Consumer protections in this country are pretty solid for this sort of thing (thought sadly not the case for new expensive things like cars, new build homes, etc).
I had PC World try to screw me with the old display panel switcheroo on a first gen flat screen Samsung LCD in the 2000s, a £1000, 32" screen which was supposed to have a "new" chevron pattern to the sub-pixels. Store display and review models had it, and it was all over their advertising, mine were plain old squares.
Trading Standards / Citizen's Advice Bureau had them practically begging me to take a replacement mere hours after an outright refusal to replace a TV I'd been using for a year already.
It's not about getting your money back. Consumers are lazy and usually don't care, which is why companies get away with so much bullshit - they just price in the amount of defects and returns instead of taking care to deliver a tested, high quality product.
Would even a single consumer claiming issues open up a company to severe fines, we'd see a lot less bullshit.
Depending on your country and consumer protection laws, you just buy one and if it has a critical bug you walk back to the store and swap it for a different pair.
Stop putting your trust in popular brands. They spent so much money trying to reach you they need to cutback in other areas to hit their target stock prices.
It's completely reasonable that you need to ignore the ads and do serious research. Sometimes that involves asking friends/family/workmates or listening when they complain. The easiest research involves searching the internet. If you expect google to present you with the best product for you as the first three results you will be disappointed. Go to customer reports, read amazon reviews, read reddit reviews, checkout videos / blogs or try the product out first.
In my mind, something must be systemically wrong here.