131–140 of 177 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is everyone so sure Apple Car will be a thing?
Because Apple likes money, and cars have high profit margins.
Chocolate has fantastic profit margins. No Apple chocolate. ... mhhhmm, apple chocolate, that sounds yummy.
A bit closer to home, fabbing microchips has great profit margins. Apple pays good money to TSMC.
Just because it's good money isn't enough reason, I am sorry.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You could have that if manufacturers hadn't abandoned the double-DIN radio bay.
No doubt! I did this though: https://imgur.com/gallery/krRXQwP And I even installed extra inputs for a guest to plug into on road trips, and the original CD player.
I have an old car without any sort of fancy infotainment system, and I always end up with my phone overheating during long drives into the sun.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> All we need is a place in the dashboard to mount our phones. Phones already have big-ass touchscreens and anything else we want... That might be your personal prefernece, I particularly abhor the phone-centric world not to mention that a 5 inch “big-ass” touch screen becomes tiny when driving and that its UI is meant to be operated sitting down paying 100% attention to it not while operating a machine at 60mph down…
I can respect that. To some extent, though, that's down to the phone UI. iOS, ummm, 6 if I remember correctly was supposed to be more "car-friendly." Of course, that was another Jony Ive failure... it actually changed the system font to a spindly outline that was hard enough to see in normal conditions, let alone in a car. There was absolutely nothing in that OS that offered a "car-friendlier" experience. I was so gl…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That sounds remarkably like saying "it's ok to drive drunk, as long as you don't hurt anyone"; which, clearly, is ridiculous. If you're breaking the law, there should be consequences even if you didn't _happen_ to hurt someone this time.
Most civil law requires actual damages. It’s the same situation. If you haven’t actually been hurt yet, suing doesn’t result in anything.
Along the same lines, a company gathering extensive details on the communications of and connections of others (especially without their permission) is putting others at risk. And, much like the previous example, the damage isn't actualized until it is. But it needs to be stopped _before_ the damage happens. Which means it needs to be criminal.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is everyone so sure Apple Car will be a thing?
Because Apple likes money, and cars have high profit margins.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> no support for audio over Bluetooth So you rant about Bluetooth in cars ... without owning a car that gas Bluetooth? Just checking, because we put after market radios (with BT) in our last two cars and, while not a miracle experience, music playback and handsfree telephony worked without problems.
I guess you don't think people rent cars, or drive family members' cars, or go on road trips with friends. Bluetooth implementations are trash. Rented a brand-new Toyota over the summer and its radio suffered from all the same playback defects that Bluetooth has been offering for a decade or more. Playback randomly starting when not told to... showing the wrong info on the display... showing that no songs were availa…
They really are.
> Playback randomly starting when not told to...
Yup. Toyota and Subaru are particularly egregious about this. Something about using old cable/ipod implementations which would immediately reach for the default media player and telling it to start playing (and download a list of songs or some other BS).
> showing the wrong info on the display...
Yup. Especially if you have the audacity to use Spotify or something else.
There's some really shitty bluetooth audio interfaces out there. REALLY shitty.
I've been trying to figure out how to disable my trucks cellular antenna without disabling any other systems. It's proven more difficult than I thought.
For most manufacturers, you can purchase access to the technical documentation for a short period. I paid Toyota $20 for 48 hours of access and got PDFs of the official instructions for how to remove the 4G module.
Also, how hard was it to find the section for removing the module, and how hard was removing the module in your case?
I have a Subaru, but still curious about yours.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because Apple likes money, and cars have high profit margins.
Cars have very low profit margins. Last time I checked a few years ago, the gross margin on an average American car was 10-15%. This doesn't count finacing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It means my infotainment system is a dumb screen, so no opportunity for irresponsible development practices to leave an unsecured text message database lying around. I'm not going to go as far as to say it can't be exploited, but that is a significantly smaller risk surface.
Except that to run those in the first place you need to be running non-private spyware on your phone (iOS or vendor issued android ROM), so you give up all ability to maintain privacy in or out of the car.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I spent some time around 2012 working on in car "infotainment" units at a large tech company for a large car company. I was told that the infotainment systems were where a large chunk of their profit came from and differentiating their experience was important to the car company. Of course, they wanted to use decade old CPUs and touchscreens to save money, so the experience was horrible. I left shortly after CarPlay…
Once you bought the car they now have a monopoly on the software that is available. There should be laws against this type of monopoly.
Money talks. I know it's hard when you want that nice car, but considering the above, the only way is just not buying the car with software lock-in. Only this stimulus can have some effect.