This is Technology Bytes, episode 188 for October 11th, 2026.
Technology Bytes is a microcast where I share brief bytes on interesting technology.
Enjoy, and here we go.
This week I’m going to be talking about CarPlay, and I know I’ve spoken on this subject before.
In fact, how I like it and how I use it and how much I wish that automobile makers would update their systems so we can use CarPlay, Ultra, and whatever automobile we happen to drive, if it’s at all possible.
But this episode is going to be a little bit different.
I have a technology challenge with CarPlay that I still have not solved.
I don’t understand it.
I don’t know why.
I can’t figure out what’s happening.
I’ve reached out to Apple because I’m running betas on my phone, and I don’t think it’s related to that, but it’s really hard to tell.
The next time I take my Kia in for service, I will be speaking to them about the issues.
So I’ll just share it here, and we’ll go from there.
So the short story is, when I get in my car to go to work in the morning, I have a cable that I use that I think I bought at Target.
It’s a fairly inexpensive cable, and I plug it in and plug my phone in, and CarPlay comes right up and takes me to work and lets me listen to my podcasts or whatever I want to listen to.
It reacts well.
Everything works exactly as it is supposed to work.
But then in the afternoon, when I come home and I use that same cable, it connects and disconnects, connects and disconnects, and I have a shortcut that sends a message to my wife when I connect to CarPlay if I’m not in the town where we live, and it tells her that I’m on my way home.
One day she got 24 messages because of the fact that it would just continue to connect and disconnect, connect and disconnect.
And that would happen for probably about the first 10 or 15 minutes I’m in my car, and then it would pretty much stay connected most of the balance of the way home, but very frustrating.
I also have a Belkin cable in my car, and I purchased that one only because I thought the cheap cable from Target was not charging my phone properly, and I thought this Belkin cable would work better.
And it’s a pretty nice cable.
And so then I thought, well, I wonder if I switch to that cable if things would be better.
And yeah, kind of no, kind of yes.
I’ll explain that here in the next few minutes.
So I decided to use the Belkin cable on my way home because that is when the problem occurs.
My morning drive, no issues.
It’s kind of interesting when I go to church in the morning on Sunday, same thing, no issues.
As soon as I come out of church, I cannot get CarPlay to connect.
So I decided to use the Belkin cable and see if that helped, and it did not help.
The one thing it doesn’t do that the Target one does is it doesn’t connect and disconnect, connect and disconnect, like in a rapid succession.
It just doesn’t connect.
And then when it finally does connect, it’s pretty steady, and then it might disconnect one more time, and then it reconnects, and then I’m pretty good going home.
But it still takes a good, you know, three, four, five, I don’t know, maybe five to 10 minutes for that cable to actually work in my car.
And then the funny thing is that when I get in my car the next morning to go to work, that Belkin cable is having the same issue.
It just does not connect.
But if I switch to the Target cable, it connects right away, no issues all the way to work, no problems.
So what have I tried in troubleshooting methods?
Well, one of the things that I thought about, I live in Arizona, and so on my drive home, my car is Fairly warm inside, and I thought, well, I wonder if there’s something happening with the cable.
So I took the cables into my office so that they wouldn’t be in the hot car for the day.
Came out to go home, connected the Target cable, and it connected right away, but then it started its connect-disconnect problem.
And then I put the Belkin cable in, and it connected right away, and then it disconnected and didn’t connect again for another five or ten minutes.
So it didn’t feel like that was the problem.
And then I thought, well, maybe it’s getting cooler, and that will change how the car reacts.
Well, so far it hasn’t gotten cool enough for me to see if that makes any difference at all.
But it is so frustrating, and I just don’t know where to go next.
Buy another cable?
That doesn’t feel like that’s going to solve the problem.
I have two.
I can’t believe they’re both bad.
They both react very differently.
I have no understanding of why the Belkin cable won’t work in the morning, just like the cheap Target cable does.
That makes absolutely no sense to me.
And I’ve tried unplugging at the phone interface and replugging.
I’ve tried restarting the phone.
I haven’t gone so far as to forget my car and repair to my car and CarPlay a second time.
But the fact that it works so well in the morning with the Target cable makes me feel like that isn’t going to solve anything either.
I just don’t get it.
And then there’s one spot on my way home, regardless of which cable I’m using on my way home, once I get it to connect and it’s pretty solid, there feels like there’s just, you go by this one exit.
And it’s almost the same place every time.
It just disconnects, and then a couple minutes later it reconnects.
And sometimes it reconnects on its own.
Sometimes I unplug it and plug it back in and it reconnects.
I am kind of at wit’s end.
I don’t have an answer.
It’ll be interesting to see if it gets cooler, and it’s going to be cooler this week, if I have any more success than I’ve had in the last weeks.
I can’t figure out why it started.
It doesn’t seem to be related to the beta versions of the iOS that I am running.
We’ve updated a couple versions, a couple beta versions, since I started having the problem, and the problem persists.
I have written to Apple through the beta program and said this has started.
I can’t quite figure out why or when or how, and haven’t heard anything back from them.
I haven’t really shared it with any of the tech podcast people I listen to that allow you to send things in, but it is just the strangest of things, and I just don’t get it.
And it worked so well for so long, it just doesn’t make any sense to me.
So that’s my struggles with CarPlay.
I don’t know if it’s my phone.
Oh yeah, I did one other test.
I connected my wife’s phone when mine didn’t work, and hers worked flawlessly.
So again, is it the phone?
Is it?
I don’t know.
Maybe it is my phone.
Maybe I have to reset the whole thing.
But it works so good in the morning.
I don’t want to go through that whole mess of resetting.
So right now I just complain, live with it till it connects, use both cables, and try to make the most of my CarPlay woes.
That is all I have for today.
If you have comments, suggestions, or questions, you can send them to technologybytes@merrigfamily.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.
