The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) today announced the new Bluetooth 4.2 specification, which promises enhanced privacy measures, increased speed of data transfers, and an update that will allow Bluetooth Smart sensors to directly access the Internet.
The group emphasizes connected home scenarios as being able to take the most advantage of Bluetooth 4.2's new direct Internet access feature, promising low-power connectivity using the standard and with IPv6 support available by year's end.
“Bluetooth 4.2 is all about continuing to make Bluetooth Smart the best solution to connect all the technology in your life – from personal sensors to your connected home. In addition to the improvements to the specification itself, a new profile known as IPSP enables IPv6 for Bluetooth, opening entirely new doors for device connectivity,” said Mark Powell, executive director of the Bluetooth SIG. “Bluetooth Smart is the only technology that can scale with the market, provide developers the flexibility to innovate, and be the foundation for the IoT.”
The new 4.2 spec also promises speedier data transfers between devices, up to 2.5 times faster than previous versions. Bluetooth SIG promises that "increased data transfer speeds and packet capacity reduces the opportunity for transmission errors to occur and reduces battery consumption, resulting in a more efficient connection."
The new privacy features also take aim at lowering power consumption, while protecting consumers from being tracked through their Bluetooth devices. As more retail stores and public places accept Bluetooth beacons and similar applications, Bluetooth SIG hopes to be at the forefront for protecting every user's personal and private information.
The new privacy features put control back into the hands of the consumer by making it difficult for eavesdroppers to track a device through its Bluetooth connection without permission. For example, when shopping in a retail store with beacons, unless you’ve enabled permission for the beacon to engage with your device, you can’t be tracked.
The standard Bluetooth 4.2 specification is available now, with the new direct Internet access feature due within a month.
You'd think things would be slowing down heading into the holidays, but this week saw a whirlwind of Apple leaks and rumors while Apple started its next cycle of betas following last week's release of iOS 26.2 and related updates.
This week also saw the release of a new Apple Music integration with ChatGPT, so read on below for all the details on this week's biggest stories!
Top Stories
i...
Monday December 22, 2025 11:30 am PST by Juli Clover
Apple hasn't updated the Apple TV 4K since 2022, and 2025 was supposed to be the year that we got a refresh. There were rumors suggesting Apple would release the new Apple TV before the end of 2025, but it looks like that's not going to happen now.
Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more videos.
Bloomberg's Mark Gurman said several times across 2024 and 2025 that Apple would...
Tuesday December 16, 2025 8:44 am PST by Joe Rossignol
Next year's iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max will be equipped with under-screen Face ID, and the front camera will be moved to the top-left corner of the screen, according to a new report from The Information's Wayne Ma and Qianer Liu.
As a result of these changes, the report said the iPhone 18 Pro models will not have a pill-shaped Dynamic Island cutout at the top of the screen....
Friday December 19, 2025 10:37 am PST by Juli Clover
Since the beginning of December, Apple has been pushing iPhone users who opted to stay on iOS 18 to install iOS 26 instead. Apple started by making the iOS 18 upgrades less visible, and has now transitioned to making new iOS 18 updates unavailable on any device capable of running iOS 26.
If you have an iPhone 11 or later, Apple is no longer offering new versions of iOS 18, even though there...
Tuesday December 16, 2025 4:42 pm PST by Juli Clover
There has been a whirlwind of rumors over the last few days, sourced from leaked internal software designed for the iPhone and the Mac, and news sites like The Information. Below, we have a quick recap of everything we've heard this week, which serves as a guide to Apple's product plans in 2026 and beyond.
We've organized the info by likely release date, though there are some products that...
Apple is significantly increasing its reliance on Samsung for iPhone memory as component prices surge, according to The Korea Economic Daily.
Apple is said to be expanding the share of iPhone memory it sources from Samsung due to rapidly rising memory prices. The shift is expected to result in Samsung supplying roughly 60% to 70% of the low-power DRAM used in the iPhone 17, compared with a...
Too bad iOS users won't ever get a full Bluetooth implementation, unlike those of competing mobile operating systems.
Hilarious, iOS users had Bluetooth 4.0 LONG before the competing mobile OS's and it went completely unnoticed. Yet a profile or two not being supported because the OS offers other methods to do such things is just completely horrible, right?
Hilarious, iOS users had Bluetooth 4.0 LONG before the competing mobile OS's and it went completely unnoticed. Yet a profile or two not being supported because the OS offers other methods to do such things is just completely horrible, right?
Have you ever tried exchanging files (photos etc.), contacts etc. with non-Apple devices wirelessly? Obviously not.
Who uses bluetooth anymore?... oh, wait, never mind.
Uh... Everyone?
It's been getting better and better and more and more common each day for years, now.
This new 4.2 spec being IPv6-only is also a great thing. It will hopefully get a lot of lazy network people off their asses and get IPv6 working in more places. So many places (especially in the US) have been putting it off and putting it off for years.
Do you understand that one of the goals (of iOS from 2007 was to NOT have a general use file system that a user has to maintain? Obviously not. :rolleyes:
Do you understand that iOS also has
- Camera Roll to store incoming photos in / serve as a source for outgoing photos
- a Contacts database acting both as an input / output
- etc?
So much for "there's no point in having OBEX" on an OS not supporting direct access to the file system... importing to / exporting from the above system databases would certainly be feasible without a visible filesystem. Too bad iOS doesn't support even this.
