[mschuster91]

> 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).

[alias_neo]

> 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.

[AdrianB1]

Consumer protection is much better in Europe than in US, that is a problem for USA.

[mschuster91]

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.