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Yeah, I'm so not into this. While I would love a more visually compelling and useful in-car infotainment system, something being tied to iOS or Android is a har

Yeah, I'm so not into this. While I would love a more visually compelling and useful in-car infotainment system, something being tied to iOS or Android is a hard no from me. I don't trust Apple to be anything other than a closed ecosystem, and I don't trust anything by Apple or Google to made obsolete well before the end of a vehicles useful lifetime.

infinityio 4y ago
I wonder if this will be the default interface for the car (with iOS devices the only first-class citizens, and very limited Google offerings) or if its going to be a mode that gets activated when an iPhone is present...
scarface74 4y ago
And you trust the car manufactures to write good software? The one reason I wouldn’t buy Tesla is because of its infotainment system. The on device display is basically a dumb remote terminal. Those are easy to stay compatible forever. I can still AirPlay from my an old 1st gen iPad to a new Roku TV. I can still print from an old IPad to a new printer.
- ocdtrekkie 4y ago
  Car manufacturers often build software using an entirely different set of constraints: Real-time operating systems with extremely reliable code. Because when they fail, the vehicle recall often involves hauling every car into a dealership and having them flashed. The occasions these fail lead to scenarios like "the car accelerates suddenly" or "the car abruptly stops in the middle of the road". The fact that Apple and Tesla aren't good stewards of mission critical car software is, in fact, the fact it's trivial to push updates. It means they can shove out stuff with less validation and fix it in post. I would contend that easy patching nearly guarantees poorer software development correctness. Consider the fact that no Nintendo GameCube game has to be post-launch patched, and while some flaws do exist that speedrunners can exploit, all of the games still work, decades later. Compare that to modern games, which often require a "day one patch" to fix them. I absolutely trust a traditional car manufacturer to release better software than Apple or Google. It may not be as pretty or have as many bells and whistles, but it probably isn't going to kill me.
  - infinityio 4y ago
    > Compare that to modern games, which often require a "day one patch" to fix them. It could be argued that this is for slightly different reasons - because of the delay between a game being submitted to console manufacturers for testing and release, and the "crunch time"-style industry of game dev, I'd argue this is mostly to try and get the game launched sooner, because its cheaper/faster to ship a buggy game on disc and fix it on release day than to wait until the game is entirely fixed first, now that it is a viable option (Not to disagree with your point - I completely agree)
  - scarface74 4y ago
    CarPlay doesn’t control anything directly. It sends commands to whatever onboard system the car uses. Your car isn’t going to crash because Apple Music is flaky.
    - ocdtrekkie 4y ago
      This is half accurate. CarPlay doesn't control anything directly, true. However, CarPlay is providing information that users need to drive safely, and that can probably fail spectacularly. So your claim that the car isn't going to crash because Apple Music is flaky is false.
rektide 4y ago
> I don't trust anything by Apple or Google to made obsolete well before the end of a vehicles useful lifetime. Car dashes should just have an DisplayPort or USB port we plug chromecast-like or a hypothetical apple-cast-like device into, imo. And those can mediate the experience with our phones/devices, but are themselves affordable & replaceable. This would be much more sensible if there were a coherent, sensible, reasonable, fair reasonable and non-discriminatory standard for IoT that was available, for communicating things like sensors, camera views, dealing with multi-zone audio, setting brightnesses/heat, adjusting chair shape... Right now we're still in goofy world where everything is ultra-proprietary and there's not even a common base we hypothetically could extend/build around.
- neuralRiot 4y ago
  > IoT that was available, for communicating things like sensors, camera views, dealing with multi-zone audio, setting brightnesses/heat, adjusting chair shape... It gives me headaches just thinking of it.
- dfadsadsf 4y ago
  There are practical considerations. You need top end device with mobile connections to drive experience similar to Carplay or Android Auto with fancy map animation, fast touch response time and music streaming apps. That device cost at least $700+. Nobody wants to use slow as death chromecast like IoT to drive car experience when you have phone in your pocket. Why build something when there is no demand? Besides there are all sorts of security consideration in not allowing random devices to change to many things in the car.
  - rektide 4y ago
    > You need top end device with mobile connections to drive experience similar to Carplay or Android Auto with fancy map animation, fast touch response time and music streaming apps. That device cost at least $700+. I'm pretty sure a boring $50 Chromecast could drive this experience just fine & without challenge. An 8-core ARM chip with a decent GPU is remarkably affordable in this day & age, and more capable than most people realize. It would be significantly different to try to drive multiple experiences at once, versus a Chromecast which runs a single app at a time. But there are just so many cores now. Even if they're low performance Cortex-A510, I don't see the need for big CPU. And nothing I've seen on any of these videos gives me the feeling big complicated GPUs are necessary: the whole thing experience is powered by pretty lo-fi simple Widgets, "glancable" experiences.

infinityio 4y ago

I wonder if this will be the default interface for the car (with iOS devices the only first-class citizens, and very limited Google offerings) or if its going to be a mode that gets activated when an iPhone is present...

scarface74 4y ago

And you trust the car manufactures to write good software? The one reason I wouldn’t buy Tesla is because of its infotainment system. The on device display is basically a dumb remote terminal. Those are easy to stay compatible forever. I can still AirPlay from my an old 1st gen iPad to a new Roku TV. I can still print from an old IPad to a new printer.

ocdtrekkie 4y ago
Car manufacturers often build software using an entirely different set of constraints: Real-time operating systems with extremely reliable code. Because when they fail, the vehicle recall often involves hauling every car into a dealership and having them flashed. The occasions these fail lead to scenarios like "the car accelerates suddenly" or "the car abruptly stops in the middle of the road". The fact that Apple and Tesla aren't good stewards of mission critical car software is, in fact, the fact it's trivial to push updates. It means they can shove out stuff with less validation and fix it in post. I would contend that easy patching nearly guarantees poorer software development correctness. Consider the fact that no Nintendo GameCube game has to be post-launch patched, and while some flaws do exist that speedrunners can exploit, all of the games still work, decades later. Compare that to modern games, which often require a "day one patch" to fix them. I absolutely trust a traditional car manufacturer to release better software than Apple or Google. It may not be as pretty or have as many bells and whistles, but it probably isn't going to kill me.
- infinityio 4y ago
  > Compare that to modern games, which often require a "day one patch" to fix them. It could be argued that this is for slightly different reasons - because of the delay between a game being submitted to console manufacturers for testing and release, and the "crunch time"-style industry of game dev, I'd argue this is mostly to try and get the game launched sooner, because its cheaper/faster to ship a buggy game on disc and fix it on release day than to wait until the game is entirely fixed first, now that it is a viable option (Not to disagree with your point - I completely agree)
- scarface74 4y ago
  CarPlay doesn’t control anything directly. It sends commands to whatever onboard system the car uses. Your car isn’t going to crash because Apple Music is flaky.
  - ocdtrekkie 4y ago
    This is half accurate. CarPlay doesn't control anything directly, true. However, CarPlay is providing information that users need to drive safely, and that can probably fail spectacularly. So your claim that the car isn't going to crash because Apple Music is flaky is false.

rektide 4y ago

> I don't trust anything by Apple or Google to made obsolete well before the end of a vehicles useful lifetime. Car dashes should just have an DisplayPort or USB port we plug chromecast-like or a hypothetical apple-cast-like device into, imo. And those can mediate the experience with our phones/devices, but are themselves affordable & replaceable. This would be much more sensible if there were a coherent, sensible, reasonable, fair reasonable and non-discriminatory standard for IoT that was available, for communicating things like sensors, camera views, dealing with multi-zone audio, setting brightnesses/heat, adjusting chair shape... Right now we're still in goofy world where everything is ultra-proprietary and there's not even a common base we hypothetically could extend/build around.

neuralRiot 4y ago
> IoT that was available, for communicating things like sensors, camera views, dealing with multi-zone audio, setting brightnesses/heat, adjusting chair shape... It gives me headaches just thinking of it.
dfadsadsf 4y ago
There are practical considerations. You need top end device with mobile connections to drive experience similar to Carplay or Android Auto with fancy map animation, fast touch response time and music streaming apps. That device cost at least $700+. Nobody wants to use slow as death chromecast like IoT to drive car experience when you have phone in your pocket. Why build something when there is no demand? Besides there are all sorts of security consideration in not allowing random devices to change to many things in the car.
- rektide 4y ago
  > You need top end device with mobile connections to drive experience similar to Carplay or Android Auto with fancy map animation, fast touch response time and music streaming apps. That device cost at least $700+. I'm pretty sure a boring $50 Chromecast could drive this experience just fine & without challenge. An 8-core ARM chip with a decent GPU is remarkably affordable in this day & age, and more capable than most people realize. It would be significantly different to try to drive multiple experiences at once, versus a Chromecast which runs a single app at a time. But there are just so many cores now. Even if they're low performance Cortex-A510, I don't see the need for big CPU. And nothing I've seen on any of these videos gives me the feeling big complicated GPUs are necessary: the whole thing experience is powered by pretty lo-fi simple Widgets, "glancable" experiences.