Last night, Apple CarPlay was going to take over all the screens in the car.
Latest update time：2022-06-07
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8-year-old Apple CarPlay receives its biggest update since launch
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James
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Xiaohan
Early this morning, Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC 2022) opened online. As in previous years, Apple released a new version of its operating system at WWDC and also launched the M2 chip, which is more "explosive" than the M1.
During the nearly two-hour press conference, Apple also unveiled its new car mapping system CarPlay. Although Apple only gave a brief introduction of the new CarPlay based on iOS 16 for three and a half minutes, it can be found that CarPlay, which is 8 years old this year, has received its biggest update since its release.
▲Apple CarPlay
Judging from the demonstration at the press conference, the new CarPlay has a number of important changes.
1. CarPlay supports all screens in the car, regardless of screen size or horizontal or vertical screen format.
2. The CarPlay interface supports car instruments, which can display various data such as speed, engine speed, oil temperature, and oil volume. The functions of the instruments are almost identical to those of the original car.
3. CarPlay supports controlling hardware devices such as in-car air conditioners and seats.
It can be said that Apple's new CarPlay is a complete smart cockpit system. As long as it is connected, users do not need to use the original system. All screens in the car have a CarPlay experience.
In 2014, Apple cooperated with some car companies to install the iOS-based mapping system CarPlay into models of Mercedes-Benz, Ferrari, Volvo and other brands. Since then, CarPlay has almost become a standard feature of joint venture imported models, making up for the shortcomings of overseas car companies in the field of smart cockpits.
However, although CarPlay has been updated to a certain extent with the iOS system, it still shows some inadequacies in the face of the explosion of smart cockpits in 2022.
Can CarPlay, which has undergone a major design overhaul and supports all screens in the car, become the core competitiveness of the intelligent joint venture imported brand models, and can it compete with new power car companies?
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The design can be completely changed and the instruments can be customized
In Apple's main speech at WWDC 2022, an "ecosystem" section was specially opened. One of the important ecosystems of iOS is CarPlay.
Emily Schubert, Apple's senior manager of car experience engineering, said in her speech that 98% of models in the United States now support CarPlay, and 79% of American new car buyers believe that they will only consider buying a car equipped with CarPlay.
▲Emily Schubert, senior manager of Apple Car Experience Engineering
However, with the development of automobile intelligence, major changes have occurred inside the car. From a hardware perspective, car screens are becoming larger, and the number of screens in the car is also increasing. If CarPlay still only supports a single screen, it will obviously not be able to support the rapid iterative updates of the automotive industry.
Therefore, the iPhone, as the core computing device of CarPlay, has greatly improved its computing performance and has more uses in the car.
In the CarPlay demonstration animation, the most eye-catching thing is that it supports all screens in the car.
Whether it is the instrument, central control, or co-pilot, or there is a "hairtail" screen in the car, CarPlay can perfectly support it, unlike before, which could only support a single horizontal screen.
▲New CarPlay preview
In terms of software experience, the new CarPlay also has considerable upgrades.
First is the instrumentation. As a core driving component, automobile instrumentation has very high safety and stability requirements, and usually car companies will not open it to third-party manufacturers. Apple's CarPlay supports instrument display, turning the car instrument into an iOS system by obtaining various data such as vehicle speed, engine speed, oil temperature, and oil volume.
▲CarPlay instrument
At the same time, the instrument can also be customized by the user. Like the Apple Watch dial, the driver can choose the instrument display method he likes. It can be a traditional pointer type or a modern and simple style. The background and layout of the instrument panel can also be customized by the user. .
▲CarPlay supports different forms of screens
The second biggest change in the new CarPlay is the ability to control hardware devices such as air conditioning and seats. This is due to Apple’s in-depth cooperation with car companies and the upgrade of the car’s electronic and electrical architecture. Users can directly control the temperature and air volume of the air conditioner, seat ventilation and heating on the CarPlay homepage, and the radio can also be turned on directly from CarPlay. .
▲CarPlay controls seats and air conditioning
The third major change in CarPlay is the addition of widgets in the iOS system. Common widgets such as weather, navigation, calendar, weather, world clock, and smart home in the iOS system can all be displayed on the car screen. Drivers can also add these widgets to the instrument for easy viewing. When the phone rings while driving, it can also be displayed directly on the instrument panel. This means that the driver can see CarPlay or even the core information of the phone by tilting his eyes slightly, without having to click on the central control screen.
▲CarPlay widget
In addition, CarPlay also adds a split-screen display, and there is a Dock bar at the bottom of the home screen similar to that on the iPad.
▲Brands that support the new CarPlay
However, this system may not be unveiled this year. Apple plans to put it on the car at the end of next year. By then, the new CarPlay is likely to be a mobile phone mapping system based on iOS 17. At the press conference, Apple announced that the first batch of car companies to use the new CarPlay include Land Rover, Mercedes-Benz, Porsche, Nissan, Ford, etc., but there are no Chinese brands yet.
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Apple has greater ambitions to support more than 600 car models
In 2014, Apple officially launched CarPlay at the Geneva Motor Show. At that time, it supported only a few models, with only three brands including Mercedes-Benz, Ferrari, and Volvo supporting it. Later, it expanded to major overseas brands such as BMW, Ford, General Motors, Hyundai, and Toyota.
▲The first generation of Apple CarPlay
Today, there are more than 600 models supporting Apple CarPlay, covering a large number of joint venture imported brand models, and many independent brand models also support CarPlay. It can even be said that CarPlay has long become a standard feature of imported cars jointly owned by traditional car companies, and has made up for its lack of intelligence and ecological acclimatization.
▲CarPlay supports more than 600 car models
However, judging from the press conferences in the past few years, Apple has greater ambitions in the automotive field.
At the 2020 WWDC, Apple launched the Car Key function. After pairing with a vehicle that supports Car Key, you only need to touch the phone with the door handle (NFC pairing) to open the door. Place your phone on the wireless charging pad in the car and the vehicle will start. This feature is already in mass production on many BMW models.
▲Apple Car Key function
Starting with the iPhone 11, Apple has added the U1 ultra-wideband chip to the iPhone. This chip can also be used to unlock car doors. Compared with NFC unlocking, users do not even need to take out their phones. This feature is already in mass production on the BMW iX.
At the same time, there have been constant rumors about Apple building cars in recent years. What kind of car Apple will build and whether it can change the automotive industry are also the focus of the industry's core concerns.
Therefore, the new CarPlay launched by Apple demonstrates to a certain extent Apple’s vision for travel scenarios in the next few years, and also demonstrates Apple’s true definition of a smart cockpit system.
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Conclusion: Apple accelerates its deployment of smart cars
Intelligence has long been a major trend in the automotive industry, but each car company has a different definition of intelligence and does not have rich R&D experience, so the products it produces are mixed. Even some products only have an intelligent appearance, but the experience is non-intelligent.
Therefore, companies such as Apple, Huawei, Baidu, and Google are all deploying mobile phone mapping systems, using the computing power of mobile phones and the understanding of software and user experience by technology and Internet manufacturers to make the car system more like a mobile phone.
In the past 7 or 8 years, mobile phone mapping systems represented by Apple CarPlay have established quite a niche. Today, with the explosion of automobile intelligence, Apple is once again at the forefront of the industry, accelerating the deployment of smart cars.
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