@stroughtonsmith But the UI in cars is almost universally terrible. So bad that it’s taken for granted.
And, really, of course it’s going to be? I want to use the podcasts app on my phone. I don’t want to have to sync up a podcasts app in my car. That sounds hilariously bad.
A car that makes it hard for me to pipe my phone through to its stereo is a car that gets a mount stuck over its terrible UI so that I can just use my phone instead.
@stroughtonsmith I keep hoping governments will wise up to how bad this all is for driver distraction and for actual usability of in vehicle controls but they never seem to.
There is a bit of techno-utopianism going on with modern control design in automobiles. Physical controls are really important for minimizing eyes-off-road time for common vehicle controls but no one seems to care.
@stroughtonsmith Counterpoint: companies like Dell and Lenovo ceded their UIs to Microsoft decades ago.
A car is just a computer. Using a third party OS or third party skins/dashboards is going to be the new normal in the coming years. It’s untenable for every car manufacturer to maintain their own complex UIs in a world where car dashboards and infotainment systems are so complicated.
@stroughtonsmith I don’t necessarily think CarPlay2 is the one everyone should settle on, but there will be a coming duopoly of car dashboard software that most manufacturers will use. I personally hope that’s not Apple and Google, but given how much people like their phones and how much people want to integrate their phones with their cars, these seem the most likely.
@stroughtonsmith@9to5Mac
Competitive strategies aside, am I the only one who finds this mockup... underwhelming? It's not just aesthetically bland, but also functionally dubious, given the information they chose to prioritize. Air quality? Time zones?
@stroughtonsmith@9to5Mac the systemic challenge with car manufacturers is that they have invested too little, with people that are not well versed in building a consumer product and too late.
Many went the “open source is a cheap way”, rather than “open source gives us autonomy but will be just as costly”
@Migueldeicaza@stroughtonsmith@9to5Mac That’s fair, but Apple’s input devices leave a lot to be desired recently and I’d suggest that would be more important in a car than pretty dials
@Migueldeicaza@stroughtonsmith@9to5Mac Don’t get me wrong, I won’t buy a car without CarPlay, but I don’t see what Apple will bring to the table outside infotainment.
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