I love CarPlay and consider it absolutely essential for safe and satisfying driving.
My feelings about Apple’s in-car infotainment system crystallized on a recent trip abroad, when I rented multiple cars in three different countries. One of them had CarPlay, but the other two did not — and the differences couldn’t have been more stark.
While driving through Germany in my rented Seat Arona mini SUV, CarPlay made it extremely easy to navigate around cities and cruise through the countryside. And listening to polkas or podcasts proved as easy as downing a liter of rauchbier in Bamberg.
But when I picked up a dusty, dented Citroën C3 in the southern Italian city of Reggio Calabria, everything turned to crap. The pathetic hunk of junk lacked CarPlay, so my wife ended up holding my iPhone and helping with navigation.
I couldn’t see the iPhone’s screen while driving and could barely hear the turn-by-turn directions coming from its tiny speakers. It took us an hour of frantic (and, frankly, life-threatening) swerving through the streets of the neighborhood near the airport before we finally made it to our downtown apartment.
Something similar happened after we left the Barcelona-El Prat Airport in a banged-up Fiat 500. Once again, no CarPlay. Once again, a thoroughly stressful, white-knuckle ride spent endlessly careening up and down one-way streets and around construction sites as we tried to navigate to our hotel.
Once we got outside the cities in Italy and Spain, things proved more manageable with just an iPhone and Apple Maps.
Still, after those experiences, I never want to rent another car that doesn’t come with CarPlay. (In fact, I might start traveling with a portable aftermarket CarPlay display like the ones sold by Cult of Mac Deals.)
The bad news is, a disturbing trend in the automotive industry might mean even fewer cars will come with CarPlay in the future. Talk about hell on wheels …
Also in today’s newsletter:
Tired of your iPhone snapping pics (or, worse, taking videos) of the inside of your pocket? You’ll love this tiny tweak in iOS 26.1.
Speaking of iOS updates, here’s everything new in the first iOS 26.2 beta.
Cult of Mac writer Rajesh Pandey loves Apple products — but not these stinkers.
Apple’s plan to boost Siri’s brainpower on the down-low with Google Gemini might cost the company a cool $1 billion for the quick fix.
On this day in 2009, Fortune magazine named Steve Jobs the CEO of the decade. Given his health problems, though, the well-deserved accolade seemed bittersweet.
— Lewis Wallace, managing editor
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Tweets of the day
apple drops a surprise for the winter
all the liquid in liquid glass freezes and now u cant click on the buttons
— #0xforloop (#@forloopcodes)
7:02 AM • Nov 3, 2025
Why is this iOS 26.1 update over 12GB? 😳
— #MattyTheTechy1 (#@mattythetechy1)
10:38 PM • Nov 3, 2025
Wallpaper of the day
iOS 26.1 spatial wallpaper effect.
#iOS26 #ios261 #wallpaper #iPhone17 #apple— #AC (#@ACinPhilly)
9:10 PM • Nov 4, 2025
One more thing ...
[Former Apple CEO John Sculley] came from PepsiCo, and they, at most, would change their product once every 10 years. To them, a new product was, like, a new-size bottle, right? So if you were a product person, you couldn’t change the course of that company very much.
So who influenced the success of PepsiCo? The sales and marketing people. Therefore, they were the ones that got promoted, and therefore, they were the ones that ran the company. Well, for PepsiCo, that might have been OK. But it turns out, the same thing can happen in technology companies that get monopolies.
Today’s poll
Do you like CarPlay?
Results from yesterday’s poll: How much interest do you have in a budget MacBook?
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