This is Technology Bytes, episode 149 for January 11th, 2026.
Technology Bytes is a microcast where I share brief bytes on interesting technology.
Enjoy, and here we go.
This week I want to talk about Apple CarPlay.
It feels like maybe more than in the recent days or whatever, it seems like CarPlay has been in the news a little bit more.
It feels like car manufacturers, some are just saying we’re not using CarPlay anymore.
Some are saying we will never put CarPlay in our vehicles.
So that relationship, and then Apple is trying to get even more integration with the car, and they have the CarPlay Ultra or something like that.
And so what is the battle and why is it significant?
I think the battle is for us, for where we are, for what we do, for where we go.
And car manufacturers, for whatever reason, feel like they need that information, and I think it’s a matter of selling it to third parties.
I don’t know why a car manufacturer needs to know where I go and what I do.
Some maybe information of how the car is driven so that they know, oh, this is how people use our vehicle, and maybe we can change this or do that to make it more, I don’t know, appealing to the market.
But I think it’s data that they want to collect to share with third parties, and it becomes an advertising battle.
I don’t really like the feel of that.
It doesn’t feel right.
I know that with the Apple environment, that keeps track of where you’ve gone so that it can pull up and say, hey, when you get in the car on these days at this time, I know you’re going to work.
Or you get in the car at this location on these days at this time, I know it means you’re probably going home.
That information Apple uses to make the Apple CarPlay more useful to the user, but it doesn’t take that data and sell it to anybody, and it doesn’t let them know that, oh, most often on the way home, you’re stopping at this gas station to get gas and not that gas station.
Or maybe it’s, you know, I’m stopping at this store or stopping at that store.
It’s not the environment that, or it’s not the information that I want to give to the car manufacturer, but I think that is the battle.
The other thing is that all of my information, where I go, location data, all of those things are on my iPhone.
I am not willing to give that data to a car manufacturer.
I don’t want to duplicate all of that information inside of a car’s operating system, as it will.
I just want to plug my phone in and have it know about me and have it help me get to where I want to go and do those kind of things, searching for places, all of that I want to do from my phone, not from the interface of the car.
Alternately, the car interfaces are terrible.
They don’t do it well.
They don’t know the software.
The interface is often bad.
I mean, I listen to a podcaster who is leasing, I think, a Rivian, whatever they are, R1, the truck, no, I don’t remember if he has the SUV or the truck, I can’t remember.
I think he’s got the SUV.
And he’s talking about mounting his phone so he can use Apple CarPlay.
That’s a, I don’t know, $120,000 car, whatever it is, and now you’re using CarPlay on a, you know, small little screen because the interface for the Rivian is not as good as you would like it to be or you don’t want to give Rivian the information.
I fully, I don’t fully understand the battle, but somewhat I do.
And, you know, I would so desperately like to have Apple CarPlay in my EV6.
Their interface isn’t bad, but to have Apple control all of that, to be able to talk to my phone and have it control the systems inside the vehicle would be great.
Even in my EV6, the CarPlay works well, but every time I have to go load it up, it doesn’t load it automatically because it sees my phone because, I don’t know, maybe Kia doesn’t want to start there.
They’re hoping that you use their navigation system.
They’re hoping that you use more of their system and they are not interested in giving all of that information to Apple.
And it’s not that they don’t want Apple to control the car because even in CarPlay Ultra, the manufacturer can work with Apple and they still have control of how Apple displays the information, but the iPhone then controls all of that information display, making it look like the car manufacturer wants it to look, but not giving them the data.
And in this world that we live in today, data is king.
And we make a decision every day on who gets our data and how they’re going to use it.
And sometimes that decision is taken out of our hands because in order to do a thing, we have to give up some of our privacy.
And I think, I don’t really like that, I understand it, but I really wish that other companies, especially car companies, would respect the privacy of their user and not want to have the data to sell it just to make money.
They make money on their car.
Use that money.
I don’t understand it at all.
And then to let Apple, an interface genius company, not that they always get it right, but they do a way better job than car manufacturers, develop with the car manufacturer a system that works well for the user, for the driver.
I don’t know if anyone will take it up, but man, I wish they would.
I mean, you got Apple CarPlay, that extends to Apple Car Keys, that extends to so many things.
And we use our phone already, and the fact that the car manufacturer won’t let us use our phone to do the things that we already do with it just makes me angry.
Well, that is all I have for today.
If you have comments, suggestions, or questions, you can send them to technologybytes at marigfamily.com.
As always, I want to thank you for listening to the Technology Bytes Microcast, and I look forward to the next time we are together taking another bite of technology.
