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Comment by parkingrift | Hacker News Reader

> Your phone and your car have no reason , absolutely no reason to be connected to one amnother

I completely disagree. I don’t want to login to my car. I want to plug-in my phone. When my wife is driving I don’t want to have to logout of my car and log her in. I want her to just plug-in her phone.

I have absolutely no interest in maintaining contacts, settings, and credentials in some “CarOS.” I don’t want to worry about someone borrowing my car and seeing messages, nav history, or contacts. I don’t want to worry about a thief seeing those things.

As I said I will not consider a car without CarPlay, and it has nothing at all to do with iMessage. I have one phone and I want to take that phone and plug it into a car. Period.

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And I want the car OS because it creates variability and a diverse landscape.

It’s how you end up with natural selection which produced the central wheel console pioneered by BMW in 2005 and has been the standard for 10 years.

There is a reason why BMW makes cars and Apple makes phones. Right out of the box you cant even charge that brick while listening to music because they killed the 3.5mm jack….at a 1500$ non subsidized price tag.

I would like more diversity too. More importantly, for these systems to communicate over a standard protocol; so I can build my itenerary/playlist(non-Spotify)/location based alerts etc on my desktop/laptop/phone throughout the day and it is ready to go the moment I step inside a car. If I’m on an interesting road or I spot something, I want the voice assistant to seamlessly save the location and my thoughts for later. If I’m talking about something in the car, I want the screen to display useful contextual information (in a privacy safe manner so Google and Amazon are out right off the bat). If I need to make a quick decision about what chores I can take care of while on the road, the car should display immediately what I can realistically achieve given my current location/traffic etc. All without me having to pull over and play with the phone or the car.

Apple gets pretty close with custom apps (that I can build myself) and it’s ecosystem. Car manufacturers are probably a decade away from catching up to present day functionality with phones, let alone be good enough to become dominant by “natural selection”.

Modern lives are complicated. There are a lot of moving parts. We have developed elaborate “second brain” systems to make all this easier, and it not being available in something as significant as transportation (I spend a lot of time in my car), is a huge negative. Why explicitly choose that when there’s a solution already? And when the competition has shown no competence in this area of being able to catch-up ever?

> functionality with phones, let alone be good enough to become dominant by “natural selection

Apple is at the very bottom of the list of companies that can claim to be where they are due to "natural selection".

Without the DOJ there is no Apple, they were essentially chapter 7 bankrupt and were saved by DOJ lawsuit against Microsoft.

Further what natural selection compelled Apple to kill the 3.5mm jack? As it stands a phone with a full listing price of 2000$ and you cannot listen to music while charging it. Absolute nonsense. Further nonsense is the elimination of the home button.

I don't want that kind of nonsense in my car. Maybe I'll look repetitive but BMW central wheel console is the kind of no-nonsense that is unbeaten. Physical buttons and toggles are also unbeaten.

Tesla is a projection of what an infotainment system built by Apple would look like, and it's a nightmare. There is a reason why some things are built in Detroit/Stuttgart while some things are built in California.

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