Comment by dinkleberg
21 hours ago
I recently discovered that you need to have Siri enabled for Apple CarPlay. I expect we're going to see a lot of this where when you disable the AI functionality the devs won't have put in fallback states and you'll be effectively locked out. With CarPlay for instance there is no reason that I shouldn't be able to listen to my music or use the map without Siri. But things like responding to texts does rely on Siri, so just gate that piece. It is rather unfortunate.
I had a similar experience when I tried to search through reviews on amazon on the mobile website.
The search box is gone and you're supposed to ask Rufus now.
completely off-topic but the names they give these dumb ai tools is so cringe
What would you call it?
2 replies →
[flagged]
13 replies →
Spotify on CarPlay is absolutely miserable because of this.
No search, no album or artist pages, only “ask Siri”. I’m not even mad that there’s no keyboard, I will happily use voice dictation instead. Instead, what you get is essentially an “I’m feeling lucky” button that fails unless you want to listen to a specific playlist.
I agree it works terrible. If I say "I want hear album X from artist Y" it replies with "Here is 'This is Y' playlist", or worse "This is Z by D". This is especially annoying if I drive with someone who requests music. Eventually, I always end up pulling up my phone at the stopping lights. Kind of makes me miss the Old Ways (CD player, or AUX in).
I was very upset about this. I had a rental car and I needed to enter on the map where I wanted to go. Even with a damn keyboard it wanted Siri. It’s just gps and i had to dig my phone out and do the typing there instead.
That's why I'm all for appliances. Stuff should just shut up and have buttons all these arguments with hardware are getting very tiring.
This only happens (should happen?) when you're moving, when stationary there is a keyboard that appears; which feels like a reasonable safety precaution for me.
Yes, the "okay if you want to disable AI, we're going to remove non-AI features" paradigm that Gmail is also doing.
I used CarPlay yesterday with Siri disabled. Am I missing something?
I don't understand why anyone likes CarPlay. It has always seemed like people like it because it's better than nothing. It's just not a good system in an objective sense.
CarPlay and Android Auto aren't popular because they're good, per se. They're popular because they're good enough compared to the status quo ante, which was a sea of craptastic infotainment systems.
[dead]
What does “not a good system in an objective sense” even mean? In what objective measures do you see it fail in?
I and basically everyone I know love it because it and android auto are made by actual UI/UX designers that aren’t embedded systems engineers- resulting in an infotainment screen that isn’t a complete and utter piece of shit, and has actual functionality. I use my phone for everything in my car anyways, especially navigation, which historically is not included in a cars infotainment system without subscription and/or vendor lock. In that one singular regard, CarPlay is literally infinity percent better than every single built in infotainment system, because I can use my fucking cars built in screen instead of my tiny phone display to navigate using software that is infinitely more well made than whatever shit is on my cars native system (a brief note: my angry tone is not directed at you or your lack of agreement with my opinion, but at how awful I perceived the car infotainment systems of yore to be. God they were useless.)
For every objective measure I can come up with in my head and not type out, it passes with flying colors compared to the alternative- so I’d love to know where your perception differs.
Carplay is sort of interesting because the UI does generally suck less than the UI of most infotainment systems. But it is much worse than my phone UI. Various apps seem to be missing their search abilities entirely.
It isn’t as bad as most built-in over developed systems, but it has not quite reached the perfection of a cheap phone mount and a car that is dumb enough to act as a Bluetooth speaker.
My old car was a Toyota Rav4 2001 and my only usage of the infotainment system was to play music and get directions from google map (voice via bluetooth). I think the only controls I used on the head unit was the volume knob and the call button (to receive a call). I've never needed anything else.
This is not a counterpoint to your argument. It's more a context about the following question: Is the infotainment on a car actually useful?
1 reply →
See how defensive people get about CarPlay? Why so emotionally invested? It's buggy and sucks when you are driving someone else's car or a rental. You proved my point too, which is that it's liked because it's better than everything else, not because it's objectively good.
13 replies →
Is this maybe dependent on country? I have used carplay, and don't have siri enabled.
I'm not excited for iOS 27. I tried out the beta and decided to reset my phone to get my back to iOS 26. I find the new Siri is far worse and slower to respond, if that's even possible. It also adds new features that are hard to remove. I only use it for timers and playing music and the current Siri is just fine for that imo.
i feel relatively comfortable with carply + basic siri, leaving apple intelligence off. basic siri is pretty limited in scope of what it has access to and what it can do.
while it's an arbitrary line ive drawn, basic siri doesn't feel like "ai" in the same sense as context-aware assistants do for me.
I’ve never once been able to use CarPlay because I objected to Siri uploading information about my contacts list unencrypted to Apple’s servers.
it's a bit more nuanced than you are making it out to be, but that's absolutely a fine and understandable choice to make.
Apple considers siri essential for CarPlay and I don’t really disagree. Don’t forget that a big part of the design of CarPlay tries to explicitly discourage tactile use while driving, with siri as the alternative input/output method.
I start my music and navigation route before leaving my garage, and any other interactions (volume up/down, skip song) are buttons on my steering wheel. What do I need voice input for?
(I use Android Auto, but it's basically the same thing for these purposes)
Do people really use navigation apps often enough for this to be an issue?
31 replies →
Hard disagree. Checking the accelerometer to disable tactile functionality when moving would have been a more intelligent way to go about discouraging this behavior over mandating use of a historically unpopular technology (Siri) in order to use a popular one (Maps, Bluetooth music streaming).
This reeks of the metrics-gaming desperation that we've seen in Google, Amazon, and Microsoft as well.
Shoehorn unpopular technology to gatekeep popular technology. Either way the consumer's quality of life goes down.
Interestingly, I have Google Assistant more or less disabled on my Android phone, but it still works when I have Android Auto enabled (which is fine by me since that's the one time that I ever want to use it).
I got the email that they're burying Assistant in September...
I use it on the phone to set alarms, add tasks or calendar events, I swipe up on the home screen to launch the app, and talk. For calendar, speech ("add calendar event dentist appointment on September 22 at 4pm") is even much more convenient than scrolling to the right month/date, using the UI to pick the time.
I'm currently vibe-coding a replacement app to use on-device speech recognition and setting alarms or adding calendar events. Sadly third party apps can't add stuff to Google Tasks without further interaction (or without OAuth) like Assistant/Gemini can.
Moreover, you cannot turn off Auto, as it will forcefully turn on WiFi even if you explicitly disable it.
And Google considers necessary to report (using tactile use while driving) if there are blockages in the road, construction, lane closures, an accident, etc.
The discrepancy of using both with an iphone is disconcerting.
Would be interesting to see anti competition law applied here, too. Essentially bundling the two together, leveraging the market for car play to gain adoption for Siri.
Is every utilization of CarPlay inside a car performed "while driving"?
On our car I can hook up my iPhone via Bluetooth to listen to audio books and music, bypassing carplay.
With Apple intelligence turned on, when I take a screenshot on my iPhone, it wants me to do this search that goes to temu, instead of the text selection that it used to do. So I turned it off, but I have to turn it back on to have auto translation in iMessage.
yes! i just did this today as well. the product direction at apple is completely messed up imo
This got me mad too. And also restrictiveness of it - i can't see messages - WTH seriously? Why some tech stuff decides what is "safe"? (i guess it was the main driver)
Fallback states are generally a ton of work that don't benefit the direction that the PM or broader business would want to go anyway.
It's a pet peeve of mine that we often say "devs" when we really mean "the business". It seems to be gamers who started this language. They'll even call the publisher "the devs".
A developer made whatever tech is currently pissing me off. I don't care about the supply chain.
How do you feel about other hot button issues like LLMs, privacy policies, Flock cameras, etc.? By your reasoning, developers "make" those things too.
My point is just to make sure we're pointing the blame at the business where it belongs. It seems very strange how we generally do that, but make exceptions for features. Developers don't control features either. Always blame the business.
This language around "devs" is so twisted and inconsistent that I'm convinced someone is seeding this every time to deflect blame. i.e. "oops just a slip up by the devs" as if features could ever be anything but a massive premeditated effort involving dozens if not hundreds of people planning at least several months ahead of any code being written.
If you want to make a difference, you look at who is running the business. It means what a lot of fanboys cannot admit to themselves. Their favorite companies and CEOs might just be assholes.
5 replies →