Rage Against the Standards

Gruber snarking on consortiums working on open standards:

The good news is, Bluetooth is an open industry standard, governed by a consortium.

Hear me out here, but I actually think it's good that Bluetooth exists, and I think it's good that USB-C, Qi, Wi-Fi, and Matter are net good things in the tech world. I get that Bluetooth is a whipping boy, but I think it's unfair to extrapolate out that consortiums who work on industry standards are therefore worthless.

I'm not saying Bluetooth is amazing, but I am saying that I think it's good that we live in a world where our wireless devices can work wirelessly with a whole assortment of devices from competing companies. It's a much better world than if Apple rejected Bluetooth and headphone companies would have to get their devices approved by Apple to use whatever proprietary wireless format they came up with. Although then Apple would get a cut of all headphone sales to iPhone uses, so it's actually very on brand.

Also, I know someone will say, "Lightning is so much simpler than USB-C!" to which ok, but it also does about 5% of what USB-C does, and Lightning has effectively gone unchanged in a decade. You're comparing a charging port (and a very slow data port) to something completely different. It's basically like saying "this app with a single checkbox is so simple, but this task manager with actual features and updates sometimes has bugs."