We don’t have iPhones with Bluetooth 6 yet—in fact, only a couple second-tier Android phones even claim to support it so far. But that’s not stopping the Bluetooth group, which is keeping with its twice-a-year cadence and announcing the Bluetooth 6.1 spec.
You’ll recall the Bluetooth 6 spec added an impressive new Channel Sounding capability that would give it centimeter-accurate location and distance tracking similar to Ultra Wideband, in addition to some new features that can improve latency and throughput.
The Bluetooth 6.1 update is focused on a new feature called Randomized RPA (Resolvable Private Address). This feature allows for the timing of RPA address changes, which improves privacy. Your Bluetooth device and those it connects to can change address at times that can’t be predicted, which makes it harder for snooping devices to track your activity or location. To improve power efficiency, this address change operation can be offloaded to the Bluetooth controller instead of the device’s CPU, which will save battery life.
We expect the first premium phones to support Bluetooth 6 sometime this fall, and that could very well include the iPhone 17. It’s quite possible those will support these new Bluetooth 6.1 features as well, especially given Apple’s enthusiasm for privacy and power efficiency.