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The major advantage of AA/CP is they are simple screen projection protocols capable of being supported for decades. The "brains" of the system, namely the phon
by YPPH 3y ago
The major advantage of AA/CP is they are simple screen projection protocols capable of being supported for decades.
The "brains" of the system, namely the phone, can be easily upgraded as technology changes. People will get new phones. Operating systems will be upgraded. Apps will come and go. Maps will update. The system will keep working flawlessly.
This can't happen with fixed hardware in vehicle - the firmware and apps will be promptly outdated.
- yborg 3y agoThat is a feature as far as the manufacturers are concerned.
- MBCook 3y agoYep. I got my first car with CarPlay in 2015. That’s 8 years ago. iPhones are always faster than the infotainment systems in cars due to development cycles and cost. Now my iPhone is eight years newer than the one that was already better than my car. So it’s obviously faster. Apple has delivered numerous new features in those eight years, the car never received a single update. That wasn’t even an ability on the car. As John Gruber is a fan of saying, the phone eats everything. You can’t compete with it. It has better specs, it gets updated more often, it’s more customized to the user. It has better connectivity (I’m not paying $30 a month or whatever to give my car cellular service). It has the apps I want to use, not the ones who gave the car company a payoff. If I have to get a rental car on a vacation, all my same stuff is right there. GM will suffer. I’m curious how long it takes them to reverse this. Just one year? Or more? I’m willing to bet a nontrivial number of people just flat walk out of dealerships when they hear the car they’re looking at doesn’t have CarPlay (or Android Auto).
- overgard 3y agoI dunno, I got my first car with Car Play a year ago. I'm not super impressed. It's buggy and slow and the interface is clunky. It's better than using my phone directly, barely, but I still would have bought the car if it didn't have it. All I really want is music and maps anyway, and I can just get a cheap phone mount for my dashboard like I did with my old car so I don't have to look down at it.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- nneonneo 3y agoOut of curiosity, which manufacturer? I suspect that CarPlay quality varies a lot by manufacturer; e.g. it sounds like GM really never tried very hard to get their CarPlay implementation to work well.
- overgard 3y agoSubaru (it's a BRZ)
- rezonant 3y agoIt is definitely true that the display and input latency on the headend screen is in control of the car manufacturer, so not all Carplay/AA implementations are equal. I've seen it on rental cars-- some are great and some are crap. But the software on the screens is great! Not something that can be said about, for instance, Ford SYNC (TM).
- whycome 3y agoYou'd think that would be enough to get Apple to take action. Like "Made for Apple" or "THX" it should require a minimum level of capability. Or else, Apple risks users thinking it's their hardware that is sucking.
- bryanlarsen 3y agoMy wife's car, a Tesla, gets updates more often than my phone, a Samsung.
- aetch 3y agoYou compared the most updated infotainment system to the least updated phone. For most people it’s something like Ford vs iPhone or Chevy vs iphone
- bryanlarsen 3y agoTesla's from 2012 are still receiving updates. Not even Apple is still updating phones from 2012.
- MBCook 3y agoMost people aren’t using a phone from 11 years ago. So that doesn’t matter as much. A phone is way way cheaper than a car, so people upgrade far more often.
- thih9 3y agoTo be fair, this kind of redundancy and reducing likelihood of third party changes seems safer to me. Nothing about “Operating systems will be upgraded. Apps will come and go. Maps will update.” says “The system will keep working flawlessly.” - if anything, the system will accumulate flaws.
- rezonant 3y agoOn the flip side, the custom weird UI the car manufacturers contracted some cheap outside firm to write at low cost, and is filled with paid product placement and data mining, will be flawed from the start and never fixed.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- brandonagr2 3y agoMy car updates every month over the air, so the firmware and apps are never outdated (at least within the life of my ownership of the car, which will be less than 6 years probably)
- ageitgey 3y ago> The major advantage of AA/CP is they are simple screen projection protocols capable of being supported for decades. There's a whole weird gray market for Chinese-manufactured "computers on a stick" that reverse-engineered the CarPlay protocol and use it to display a custom computer/Android interface in your car. You can do things like stream Netflix, use Chrome, install any Android app, play games, etc. I'm not recommending it as it seems both sketchy and unsafe, but it's a funny niche that exists. For some reason, they are usually marketed on AliExpress as a "Car AI Box" but of course have nothing to do with AI. Here's a random example video of what they look like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrFHjrYnoDE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrFHjrYnoDE