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CarPlay Is Additive

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Re: CarPlay Is Additive

#701

Post by davidee »

whh wrote: post #511

I can’t be the only one who thinks we’re going a bit too far with the attention grab of vehicle infotainment. CarPlay is a fantastic system because it keeps you off your phone. But some of these new infotainment systems, and the complete lack of physical controls, are starting to feel extremely unsafe.

Completely agree with you.

That said, Car Play isn't a panacea for keeping me off my phone though, because some manufacturers have the ability to LIMIT what Car Play can show you.

Example - we have two vehicles for our 3 person household.

One is a 7 year old Kia EV, the other a nearly new Ford.

Ford has somehow limited apps like Music and Podcasts to show or give access to only a tiny subset of playlists and songs when the car is moving - exactly when you absolutely shouldn't pick up your phone.

So you pick up your phone because that thing that works in one car, doesn't work in the other - and it's the newer car and car play implementation that's more limiting.

Re: CarPlay Is Additive

#702

Post by icar »

Bluetooth + phone mounted next to the wheel worked nicely (and still does in older models). I wish I had this option still. Better, AUX instead of Bluetooth. It would be so fast to plug&play...

Re: CarPlay Is Additive

#703

Post by fmajid »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #562
s3p wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>For pure interaction, CarPlay as a generic solution is very hard to beat infotainment systems that are deeply integrated with the vehicle itself I can't find one instance of a car UI being as good or easier to interact with than CarPlay.

The Tesla UI is pretty good. It's the only built-in car software I consider good enough to use for navigation. In any other car I use my phone. But Tesla also understands that good software engineers need to be paid Silicon Valley wages. The other car companies hire B- and C-level software engineers and then wonder why their customers prefer to navigate with their phones.

And yet Tesla is working on some form of CarPlay integration because they realize they are losing sales due to this.

Re: CarPlay Is Additive

#705

Post by m463 »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #562
s3p wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>For pure interaction, CarPlay as a generic solution is very hard to beat infotainment systems that are deeply integrated with the vehicle itself I can't find one instance of a car UI being as good or easier to interact with than CarPlay.

The Tesla UI is pretty good. It's the only built-in car software I consider good enough to use for navigation. In any other car I use my phone. But Tesla also understands that good software engineers need to be paid Silicon Valley wages. The other car companies hire B- and C-level software engineers and then wonder why their customers prefer to navigate with their phones.

Tesla is good, but wow it went too far into the phone mentality to the point of unsafe driving.

examples: small targets in a moving vehicle, "modern" grey/white when color contrast could be critical, UI elements that hide, small [x] to dismiss, multiple touches required to get to critical functions, etc

Re: CarPlay Is Additive

#706

Post by tensility »

polarix wrote: post #617
theshrike79 wrote: post #570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, Tesla is a computer with a car as an add on. That’s why it works. Traditional companies do it the other way around.

I’m not sure it “works”. I would still drastically prefer if Tesla had CarPlay.

Agreed. Lack of CarPlay support is just one of the reasons that I won't own a Tesla. (Also, I prefer not to support anything tainted by Elmo's toxicity.)

Re: CarPlay Is Additive

#707

Post by shermantanktop »

someonebaggy wrote: post #351
shermantanktop wrote: post #255

This is familiar to me from an adjacent industry…smart TVs. The reason Samsung, LG, et al develop their own UIs is not because they are good at it. It’s because if they give up and let their device become a dumb host for apps, they lose their relationships with customers (i.e. ad revenue) and accelerate their race to the bottom as commodity hardware vendors. Customers don’t want this stuff. They want to launch Netfli…

Are there really no customers who want the TV to have Netflix built in? At a streaming company I worked at, we put quite a lot of effort into working around all the smart TV firmware quirks so that you didn't need to buy a separate box if you had a supported TV.

Yes, they want the Netflix app to run on the tv. What they don’t want is Samsung’s “launcher” app which tries to create personalized recommendations, direct the customer to some other service that signed a deal with Samsung, and try to jump in and collect the user’s credit card to bill on their behalf.

Re: CarPlay Is Additive

#708

Post by danudey »

dataengineer56 wrote: post #443
thek3nger wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another advantage of the "it's on your phone" aspect is that it follows you when you switch cars. If I use my friend's car, I still have MY system. If I rent a car for a trip, I still have MY system.

Another advantage of the "it's on your phone" aspect is Consistency. You get into a new car, all you need to figure out is how to open CarPlay, no need to learning a completely different and often complicated infotainment system.

For people who use car share services, this is a godsend. It feels like every other trip we take is in a new vehicle we've never used before, but all we have to do is plug the phone in (which we would do to charge anyway) and when we bring up maps to check the route to my in-laws' place it already has the address saved, my playlists available, etc.

Re: CarPlay Is Additive

#709

Post by alias_neo »

lopis wrote: post #550
alias_neo wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can't usually be fucked to login for two nights so I just watch TV on my laptop I recently had the idea of taking the FireStick 4K Max that I bought ~1year ago for the living room smart OLED TV which is getting a little older, I had gotten ready to take it on a few trips I'm doing this year, thought I was being clever, unfortunately it died a literal week after the warranty, boot looping constantly. I won't buy ano…

Hotel TV's often have all inputs blocked out actually. It's really stupid.

Interesting, that's not been my experience in various places around the world (not US), and I've often been able to access HDMI ports.

In the UK, they'll often put a plate in the wall with hdmi for easy connection, literally to make it easier for you to do.

Re: CarPlay Is Additive

#710

Post by doxeddaily »

rkangel wrote: post #346
linzhangrun wrote: post #302

For pure interaction, CarPlay as a generic solution is very hard to beat infotainment systems that are deeply integrated with the vehicle itself. Its advantages are mainly these: - Consistency. You get into a new car, all you need to figure out is how to open CarPlay, no need to learning a completely different and often complicated infotainment system. - "It's on your phone". You can decide what playlist to play or w…

The big thing for me is that the lifetime of a car is a lot longer than the technology development lifecycle. I just bought a 10 year old Toyota estate (station wagon). It's got a reasonable screen and Bluetooth implementation etc. But I'm never going to want to use the built in navigation because it's just not as good as what my phone will do. And the audio integration isn't as sophisticated as it might be - I have…

This is a good point. It's a form of future proofing. Hopefully Apple doesn't drop the ball too hard on backward compatibility.

For me I just want a set of consistent things from car to car. I have a few different vehicles I might switch between on any given day. Carplay works in all of them.

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