Apple’s CarPlay has fundamentally changed the way people interact with their vehicles, and the next generation of CarPlay goes even further by deeply integrating with a car’s hardware. Apple promises that CarPlay will be able to provide content for multiple screens within the vehicle, creating an experience that is unified and consistent, but will vehicle makers really cede that much control?
Deeper integration with the vehicle will allow users to do things like control the radio or change the climate directly through CarPlay, and using the vehicle data, CarPlay will seamlessly render the speed, fuel level, temperature, and more on the instrument cluster. Users will be able to personalize their driving experience by choosing different gauge cluster designs, and with added support for widgets, users will have at-a-glance information from Weather and Music right on their car’s dashboard. More information about the next generation of CarPlay will be shared in the future, and vehicles will start to be announced late next year.
Andrew J. Hawkins for The Verge:
The Verge reached out to 12 major automakers about the updated CarPlay, and most responded with some version of “sounds cool, we’re working on it.” To be sure, Apple itself wasn’t ready to reveal which car companies are on board, promising to announce later this year which vehicles would support this more maximalist version of CarPlay. And a spokesperson for the company didn’t respond to questions about which automakers Apple was targeting.
Was this another case of Apple sending automakers scrambling to develop systems that can accommodate its vision for in-car domination?
This isn’t the first time Apple has promised multiscreen CarPlay interoperability. When it unveiled iOS 13 in September 2019, the company promised a major overhaul of CarPlay to bring… the ability to support various-sized screens and display information on two different screens in the vehicle at the same time. “Automakers can develop CarPlay systems that show information in a second screen, such as in a cluster or HUD [heads up display],” the company said at the time. (Although that sentence no longer appears on Apple’s iOS 13 support page.)
MacDailyNews Take: As we wrote of this next-gen CarPlay the day it was announced:
We can’t believe Apple talked (at least some) vehicle makers into including it.
Maybe Apple really hasn’t talked them into it.
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