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CarPlay Ultra, the next generation of CarPlay, begins rolling out today
- jcims 1y agoCan't wait to see ads on my speedometer.
- aethrum 1y agoCause apple is famous for tasteless ads, right
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- parineum 1y agoCan't wait to see tasteful ads on my dashboard.
- CGMthrowaway 1y agoiPad pro ad https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_zT5O9xygwiP https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_zT5O9xygwiP
- ape4 1y agoBut it says automakers can customize it
- fkyoureadthedoc 1y agoThey can already customize the dash they own completely end to end. If some manufacturer is already doing ads there, makes sense they'll try to continue. If they aren't, I don't see how CarPlay would encourage them to start. They are certainly all hoovering up any data they can about you and selling to 3rd parties though.
- gruez 1y agoIn that case I'm not sure how this is a relevant comment? They could have injected it at any point in time.
- Mistletoe 1y agoYes they made the one with the kid asking “What’s a computer?”
- zuhsetaqi 1y agoYou just proved that that’s one of their greatest ads ever. Ads need to stick in the head and are talked about and this ad did exactly that.
- Timon3 1y agoNow just imagine how the ad that causes you to have an accident will stick in your head! Possibly even physically! Amazing work by Apple.
- hiatus 1y agoWho said anything about taste?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- mohsen1 1y agoI rent cars frequently and most of the cars I rent support CarPlay. Literally all cars in the past few months had been pretty buggy when it comes to CarPlay. Sudden disconnects. Not connecting again after first try. Wireless or wired CarPlay has been so buggy for me that I'm horrified of the idea of the entire car's infotainment system running on this stack. I tried cars from BMW, Peugeot, BYD and VW.
- closewith 1y agoI also rent a fair amount of cars and I've found Carplay to be rock solid. Only ever used wireless Carplay, though.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 1y agoWired CarPlay is even more seamless. There’s no pairing you just plug the cable in and go
- MBCook 1y agoPlus every car I’ve used wireless in (a small number though) the lag on the interface has driven me nuts. Plug in a wire, it’s great.
- microtonal 1y agoInteresting, we have a VW ID 3 and never have issues with CarPlay. The Skoda that we had before that (2016 or 2017) had a glitch every few weeks or so where it would hang. Though I guess the bugs hadn't been ironed out in the CarPlay support yet (that car did not have a net connection, so we never updated the software).
- buggeryorkshire 1y agoWe've had issues with Carplay and AA over wired and non wired connections in our motorhome (camper van for you yanks) So we've got a 5g router with wifi in there - if that's on whilst you're driving the phone, whether iphone or android, will not connect to the headunit so no Carplay / AA. These things are still extremely buggy which is hilarious considering how long they've been around. (not to mention losing the connection on both AA and Carplay when going through a toll booth in France)
- closewith 1y agoI already use Carplay as my de facto dash, as I trust the GPS Speedo in Waze more than the car and I shift on sound, not the tacho. I won't buy or rent a new car without car play so this is a smart move. Hopefully the OEM customisation is on tight rails so they can't mess up the UX too much.
- fkyoureadthedoc 1y ago> I won't buy or rent a new car without car play Same. When GM announced they were going to drop Car Play and Android Auto I was like this is going to be a historically bad move lol.
- senordevnyc 1y agoI feel the same, but I’m curious how you avoid rentals that don’t have CarPlay?
- closewith 1y agoI just call the agency and ask which cars have it.
- guidedlight 1y agoI can’t help feel this is too late. Android Automotive has been out for a while, and it seems like half the manufacturers have either moved or are moving to it. Google wins this round I’m afraid.
- Mashimo 1y agoBut Android Automotive could integrate CarPlay (Ultra) no? I mean it's an OS, and CarPlay is some kind of communication framework?
- neogodless 1y agoI don't think that's how these things work. First, at least in the U.S., Apple iPhones are more popular than Android. Second, there aren't "winners and losers". It's not anywhere near that black and white. And Android Automotive is... annoying when the automakers choose to block actual Android Auto and force you into only using apps that Android Automotive support, and in the case of GM, after 3 years you have to start paying a $40/month subscription to keep using apps. That's not winning in my book. A lot of people (at least on the internet) seem vocally opposed to the GM vehicles that do not support Android Auto. If automakers are strictly only supporting Android and not iPhone, they will likely lose out on sales to the buyers who really prefer iPhone + CarPlay.
- rekoil 1y agoYou can have CarPlay on top of Android Automotive. Volvo and Polestar have gone this route for example.
- neogodless 1y agoYes, and I wish Volvo/Polestar would OTA their support of Android Auto on top of Android Automotive for my Polestar 2... But also, they can block CarPlay and Android Auto, like GM does in their electric vehicles.
- SirMaster 1y agoI can also block them by not buying a car that doesn't support CarPlay. Pretty much all my friends feel this way too.
- mrwizardno2 1y agoPersonally, I'm over the displays. Give me real dials and knobs, please.
- closewith 1y agoThe beauty of carplay and Android Auto is using your car's physical controls to control your phone's features.
- neogodless 1y agoYou're conflating two things: displays... and controls. Yes - all-touch controls suck. I know, I have a car that's mostly all-touch. It's so stupid. But the displays are lovely. As long as they don't take over UI in a car and replace physical controls for key functions that you control while driving, like climate, lights, wipers, volume.
- glowiefedposter 1y agoa button that only lets you post after you read the article
- neogodless 1y agoIdeally, this is the logical progression that balances automakers desire for having some level of influence on the experience, while still giving drivers the phone-driven CarPlay experience they prefer. Though if the balance isn't quite right, the automakers could gain "too much" control over it (and ruin it). It will be interesting to see what the real world experience is with it, though. Android Automotive, pay attention. GM, I'm looking at you.
- echelon 1y ago> phone-driven CarPlay experience they prefer. Oh god, no. Not only is this awful, it gives the big tech companies huge leverage over the automakers. It's another industry where they'll embrace-extend-extinguish. These companies will use smartphones as leverage to crush the automotive giants. It's another reason why we need antitrust enforcement to catch up with 30 years of being asleep at the wheel. The automotive companies should be in charge of their industry and their destinies. Tech companies shouldn't be ensnaring them. The phone giants already control how software is made and distributed (and they tax it 15-30%), insert themselves into digital payments and communications, place ads on your maps and navigation, etc. Soon they'll be taxing the car companies for integration, forcing the car companies to do what they want, and those car companies will pass that pain onto you, the consumer.
- neogodless 1y agoIs your argument that automakers should not support Apple CarPlay or Android Auto, and should instead each individually create their own software and digital interfaces?
- bombcar 1y agoA dream world would define a standard for video/audio/controls interface with a vehicle/device and it would just "work" - like how connecting your TV over HDMI to your laptop just works (usually). Of course, that will never happen, because standards take centuries to develop and the cars need to be sold now NOW NOW.
- gniv 1y agoI don't understand how they plan to update my 4-year-old Toyota.
- neogodless 1y agoI don't think that's a thing. This says "CarPlay Ultra joins CarPlay" - not that it will update or replace it. So if you've got CarPlay in your Toyota, you will continue to have CarPlay in your Toyota. If you want CarPlay Ultra, you will have to replace the whole car.
- guestbest 1y agoI like my simple analog controls next to the infotainment system. Lucky for me I can’t afford a new car, especially an Aston Martin , so I won’t be affected .
- lupusreal 1y agoIt really helps streamline the car shopping process. Insisting on physical buttons and knobs for everything narrowed my search down to Mazda quite nicely.
- Marsymars 1y agoThe problem is that you can only really have a single one of these “streamlining” requirements, or your potential vehicle list ends up empty. I’d have preferred a compact pickup (a Maverick or Santa Cruz) in manual (only a couple of cars per manufacturer) with physical buttons (Mazda) and modern structural safety (so no old vehicle) - so I had to compromise on a couple of those wants.
- i_am_jl 1y agoTacoma's probably as close as you can get, compromising on compact and buttons. What did you end up in?
- Marsymars 1y agoMaverick. Tacoma seems great for what you get, but is just more truck than I need. And they’re totally different price points - the cheapest hybrid Tacoma (which is still much worse on gas than the hybrid Mav) is nearly double the price of the base hybrid Maverick.
- throwfaraway4 1y ago"Drivers can also use onscreen controls, physical buttons..."
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- turtle408 1y agoI love CarPlay. Seamless integration with any car I rent. Gone are those days where you need to carry a car phone-holder and distractions. Game changer imo
- nicolaslem 1y agoDo you know what would be better than CarPlay? An open protocol. It's my phone and my car, why do I need both companies' blessings for connecting them?
- MBCook 1y agoFor who? There are no other phone OSes for the car makers to bother caring about. They’re way way too small.
- theshrike79 1y agoHow can the car manufacturer cover their ass if your Blorg OS phone takes over the car infotainment and gauges and shows you complete bullshit. Then you wrap your car around a pole, who is to blame? This is why certification is needed on both sides for integration this deep.
- nicolaslem 1y agoGauges I agree. Infotainment, who cares? It's not like CarPlay today is perfect. It routinely crashes on me mid-drive and requires a series of reboots to go back to working conditions.
- theshrike79 1y agoExample: Having movies playing on infotainment wile the car is not parked is illegal in many countries, thus car companies want to make sure no 1st party integration will do that without the customer explicitly circumventing something. If someone crashes when watching Alaskan Housewives or something on the infotainment screen, the car company wants to CYA by saying their system wasn't involved in the crash, it was an unauthorised 3rd party modification.
- mbesto 1y agoThe only question that matters is - can you replace Apple Maps with Google Maps for the in-dash display?
- dmitrygr 1y agoCurrent Car Play allows any maps app, so likely, yea?
- mbesto 1y agoYa but the in dash mock-ups on the landing site look like they're "native".
- Marsymars 1y agoI find the ads in Google Maps to be unbearable. I’d pay $10/month to get Apple Maps on my Android phone. I have paid thousands of dollars to upgrade the trim level on my vehicle to in in-dash nav.
- RobT7k 1y agoI'm a big fan of carplay, but I'm not sure I want whatever this is. Some better integrations, sure. I can see wanting the carplay maps able to know the charge of the battery/fuel levels to plan out trips that include chargers/gas stations on the way. But, taking over the entire dash? Nah, let's not overcomplicate things too much.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 1y agoThis is mostly a direct response to automakers removing CarPlay entirely so that they can own the end to end experience. Now these automakers such as GM won’t be able to justify doing so as improving the user experience. So even if you never use this feature, you should still want it, because it’s the feature that is meant to keep CarPlay relevant
- MBCook 1y agoThey announced this 3 years ago before car makers started removing it.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 1y agoMaybe, but do you think they would have bothered doing this if automakers weren’t putting up hurdles in negotiations around CarPlay support? Writing on the wall for this was long before the announcements
- 404mm 1y ago100% this. I want exactly none of this new CarPlay. Car and phone integration has been notoriously bad since the beginning. Software updates on your phone break BT or CarPlay with some specific car or brand… or car entertainment software being buggy and not working well with a phone… and never getting updates. CarPlay is mostly good at what it is today. I certainly don’t want it to became more integrated into my car. I really hope the “full dash takeover” is just an option that can be switched off.
- hiatus 1y agoHow is this ad frontpage news?
- neogodless 1y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > Anything that good hackers would find interesting > Please submit the original source This fits those two guidelines.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- hiatus 1y agoWhat do the guidelines have to do with this? I'm curious why people are upvoting an ad especially when most of the comments are non-sequitors.
- neogodless 1y agoWell, it's not against the guidelines, so yes it's up to the votes. And clearly it interests the readers of the site so that's why it's front page. It's a major announcement by a leading technology company. Is that not a thing that interests technology nerds?
- pjc50 1y agoBig tech product announcements are arguably more in the remit of hacker news than most of the stuff on the front page.
- jeffbee 1y agoCan't wait for my car to remind me that my iCloud storage, which I've never intentionally used, is full. Still.
- coder543 1y agoDoes CarPlay Ultra add support for pinch-to-zoom?
- gruez 1y agoI'm pretty sure carplay not having pinch-to-zoom, along with overall simplified UI was intentional to avoid being overly distracting to the driver.
- coder543 1y agoEveryone I've talked to about this has consistently agreed that the convoluted multi-step interface required for scrolling and zooming is far more distracting than a simple pinch-to-zoom... so that intention would be misguided, to say the least. It also seems like every in-car map interface except CarPlay supports pinch-to-zoom these days, including the OEM maps from manufacturers like VW and Tesla, Android Automotive, and Android Auto. VW won't even let you see your backup camera while you're driving because they think it might be too distracting to have another way to see what's happening behind you, but they think pinch-to-zoom is just fine.
- chromehearts 1y agoI don't know the details, but I am sure it's not possible for any car to open the backup camera while driving (at least for every single car I've driven in my life) I remember someone tried to flash the car settings & set the km/h "limit" on when the backup camera closes higher than default, but the system just encountered an error. Can't really say for sure why that's the case, maybe because it's mandated (in the EU?).
- pjc50 1y agoEverything old is new again: all-glass all-digital Aston Martin dashboard. From 1976. https://www.jalopnik.com/the-aston-martin-lagonda-was-a-technological-marvel-1842918144/ https://www.jalopnik.com/the-aston-martin-lagonda-was-a-tech...
- t1234s 1y agoThis is actually a good thing. Car manufacturers (aside from Tesla) have terrible UI.
- chromehearts 1y agoCarPlay is the best thing to ever happen Tesla has the most terrible UI of ALL cars by far. I personally think the Volkswagen cars up until 2021/2022 have the best UI (and I even dare to say the only good UI), although some things (like the map) could have benefited from a better design. (Of course, only my personal preferences, but I work with a lot of cars so yeah)
- neogodless 1y agoYou've tried all car manufacturers' UI? I don't think that you have. (I haven't either!) I will say my wife's Mazda has a UI I love. You push buttons and turn knobs to control things.
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- conartist6 1y ago"Rolling out" how you refer to shipping a product when you don't intend to ask your users if they want the product or not
- Philadelphia 1y agoApple needs to be broken up. They’re much worse than Microsoft in the 90’s.
- btown 1y agoCarPlay is a really interesting co-branded design challenge. Each automaker wants their own look and feel (this is the industry that led to the computing usage of the word "chrome" after all! [0]), so Apple needs to deliver a design system that can find the right balance of customizability and standardization of the actual UX. How do you design a widget that car designers might want to give different fonts, different levels of visual density, crammed into unexpected shapes and sizes, that must never get into a situation where information appears glitchy in a way that could cause a real-world accident? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLf44BXd0SE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLf44BXd0SE is a WWDC 2024 presentation that speaks to some of these challenges. I recall a great prior discussion thread on HN about this, but can't find it at the moment. [0] https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/a/15618 https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/a/15618
- fanatic2pope 1y agoI know it is not necessarily for everyone, but I like the idea from this "Slate" startup of not having a secondary dashboard interface and keeping physical controls for all the usual basics. Then they just give you a convenient spot you can mount your phone for everything else. https://imgur.com/a/5GoIhja https://imgur.com/a/5GoIhja
- SirMaster 1y agoWow took 3 years from the announcement at WWDC 2022 to finally start rolling out.
- kalleboo 1y agoHonestly it just about what I'd expect for the car industry. Or really any huge manufacturing industry. If the EU said today "Apple you have to use USB-D now", it would probably take them 3 years. The next 2 years of iPhones are probably pretty close into the bag already.
- masteruvpuppetz 1y agoHow much extra would it cost compared to plain vanilla CarPlay? /s
- xnx 1y agoIn a better world, cars would be dumb peripherals to user-controlled phones.
- jauntywundrkind 1y ago(No side is going to give up control to make it happen but,) I'd love love love the Chromecast model of software here: There is a competent powerful computer here, running a standard platform (the web). Load whatever software you will! Add some new web-sensors that are car specific like throttle, rpm, fuel efficiency. A little trickier is harnessing the physical inputs of the car. Sure many of these could probably map to gamepads fine, but there's probably some extra needed. Of course it keeps going. There's so many peripherals. Multi-zone climate control, windows, adaptive cruise control display. Projecting backup and 360 cameras into getUserMedia. Ideally you don't stop at a single user mode, ideally somehow side & rear passengers also fit into the model. But the root idea holds very well in my mind. A powerful canvas for software, using perhaps the world's best hypermedia engine. "Run this URL" is kind of all it takes! Shout out to defunct Webinos, a very interesting project that had some inroads on automotive, where the car privately securely made itself accessible over a secure virtual private network to the owner. Less about porting interfaces in, but still amazing pro-user IoT that the world has only ever fallen away from in the decade since.
- FredPret 1y agoThe killer feature I want from CarPlay is not blasting my audiobook when the car turns on. I've gone so far as to create a Shortcut to play a silent song on Apple Music, but it's a hack and it only works sometimes.
- bouke 1y agoUgh it looks pretty hideous to me, i wouldn’t want my instrument cluster to look like that. The styling of for example BMW’s instrument cluster looks so much better than this.