Thoughts on Apple

I’m literally sitting in a rental with CarPlay right now, and we’ve been using it nonstop this week while traveling for the holiday. CarPlay is great for daily life, but it’s a lifesaver when traveling.

I don’t trust this report—and wouldn’t buy a Tesla in any case—but this would be quite the reversal. Maybe it would signal to others going down this path that they’re making a mistake.

Yet another reason to not trust GM with their commitment to do anything other than attempt to extract subscription dollars from people who buy their vehicles. They don’t care about their owners’ experience, they just want the money.

This is a good overview of the state of things, as well as a warning of what’s to come if consumers don’t push back on automakers.

At the bottom, in the section called “Apple’s Values”, Snell contrasts this year’s statement on how Apple expresses its values through action and their statement on that subject this time last year. It’s worth the quick read.

I’m particularly happy about the profile picker: my family never changes it, and pollutes my Up Next, Recently Played, etc. I’m hoping that other apps will be able to map these profiles to theirs and make it so I don’t have to pick a profile in every single app.

The whole thing is good, but this point about rental cars is an important one: I won’t take a GM rental car that can’t use CarPlay.

One interesting part of this review about the foveated rendering on Vision Pro reminds me of how the original iPhone rendered a grid for the parts of the screen that it couldn’t render real detail for to keep that smooth flowing sensation, and it caught up when it could.

It’s a false premise that GM must offer either its “deeply integrated experience” OR CarPlay. GM doesn’t want to offer CarPlay next to their own experience, not because they can’t, but because they know that people want the apps that are on their phones, not GM’s.

Ads like these are product cancer. Apple made its success by offering the best experience for people who paid the premium for its offerings. This is a terrible direction.

Too bad. I probably wouldn’t do it for this one anyway, but the ease of Apple’s trade-in (vs. selling it myself) might have been a factor in my decision to upgrade at a later time.