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I disagree with this love of hooking my $1000 phone to my $30000 car. Everywhere else in my house, I try to make gadgets independent of one another. I remember
by massysett 3y ago
I disagree with this love of hooking my $1000 phone to my $30000 car.
Everywhere else in my house, I try to make gadgets independent of one another. I remember when a printer worked only when it was hooked to a PC to be its server. That was bad. It’s much better for my printer to hook to the network directly.
Some thermostats require a phone to program them. That’s bad. The thermostat should have full functionality as a stand-alone device. My dishwasher requires a smartphone app to work some of its features. Bad. My old dishwasher was fully controllable from the panel on front.
A car is no different. I don’t want to have to plug my phone into my car like a dongle, even wirelessly. The car should connect to the network itself and have needed applications like nav and music. Maybe car-makers suck at making this software, so maybe Apple or Google should make it for them. Or maybe carmakers should get better at it.
But no, I’m never going to think that plugging my phone into my car is any better of a kludge than is forcing me to get out my phone to work my dishwasher.
- ScoobleDoodle 3y agoIf I were to place a bet, I would bet on car manufacturers abandoning updates to the vehicle software far earlier than I desire, rather than maintaining it appropriately. I’d also guess ads or other unwanted intrusions will be coupled with it. I’d rather connect my phone, for which I’ll update the hardware 4+ times over the time I own my car, and get the corresponding OS and software updates yearly or more frequently. Send that data to the car’s reliable and dumb screen(s) from my chosen phone and I’m in control and happier for it.
- jrmg 3y agoHave you used CarPlay?
- massysett 3y agoYep. My car has it. Not a fan. I have an old-school phone holder and usually I prefer that.
- kenjackson 3y agoI so much prefer hooking up my phone, rather than having to authenticate every device I own to all the services I want to use. And given that most of the services that I want to use in the car are also services on my phone, e.g., GPS maps, music, podcasts -- why would I want to have to use a whole new app for this purpose? I love that when I search for something with Google Maps it knows, typically in a letter or two, what place I'm trying to go to. I don't want to use a different music service in my car -- it has all my playlists and my "likes" already. Do I want Ford to write its own implementation of Google Maps or Pandora? Why? Seems stupid to have 10 different implementations of the same service.
- massysett 3y agoYou make a great case for why your car should have Google Maps built in. That wouldn’t require you to hook your phone to the car. Having to hook the phone to the car is s giant leap backward. We’ve got Gmail: email from any device. We don’t say: My phone has all my email, I hook it up anytime I want to read mail, if the battery is dead or I forgot my phone, I’m screwed. No, we use Gmail from a tablet, phone, PC, etc. But for some reason people believe it’s an awesome advance that we can hook the phone to a car, as if it’s impossible to build Google Maps into a $30000 car.
- hypothesis 3y ago> as if it’s impossible to build Google Maps into a $30000 car I’m dreading the day when they start shipping Chromium with your car and thus force you to jump through 0-day hoops. Is Tesla basically this? Do they still update old models?
- BHSPitMonkey 3y agoGuess I'll just have to learn to love paying for two cellular data plans!
- lmz 3y agoThe lifecycle of a car and those gadgets are quite different. Without upgradable hardware in your car you'd be stuck with a very old version of Gmail on your car. This is the same logic as why some people would rather buy the dumbest TV they can and let the smarts live in an external replaceable box.