On this edition of modern cars suck

[Fried_Chicken]

https://9to5mac.com/2019/05/09/bmw-carplay-outage/

Sorry: your head unit won’t work because a server somewhere is having issues.

Makes you wonder how things will be 10 or 20 years down the road. I don’t imagine cars from 20 years ago will have a head unit that doesn’t work.

[az3579]

ConnectedDrive apps not working is not the same thing as the head unit not working. You made it sound like the whole thing stops working based on your post, but that is simply not true.

In essence, all the functions that 20 year old cars had (ex: radio, climate functions) still work on this unit, so I'm failing to see the correlation there. Those are the essentials, and all the essentials work just fine.

Yes, it's stupid that BMW decided to lock CarPlay behind a paywall - as equally stupid that they don't offer Android Auto. Making it standalone/local would be the solution.but, then you're stuck with outdated technology in a few years. Being "connected" is a solution to that problem; you can get updates years after the car was released. I would be much more frustrated having an outdated car within a couple of years than dealing with an outage once in a blue moon.

Sent from my Pixel 3 using Tapatalk

[Fried_Chicken]

ConnectedDrive apps not working is not the same thing as the head unit not working. You made it sound like the whole thing stops working based on your post, but that is simply not true.

In essence, all the functions that 20 year old cars had (ex: radio, climate functions) still work on this unit, so I'm failing to see the correlation there. Those are the essentials, and all the essentials work just fine.

Yes, it's stupid that BMW decided to lock CarPlay behind a paywall - as equally stupid that they don't offer Android Auto. Making it standalone/local would be the solution.but, then you're stuck with outdated technology in a few years. Being "connected" is a solution to that problem; you can get updates years after the car was released. I would be much more frustrated having an outdated car within a couple of years than dealing with an outage once in a blue moon.

Sent from my Pixel 3 using Tapatalk

Well apple carplay is to some extent quite essential, and the question remains if this functionality will somehow be broken 20 years or so down the road. Tech moves way faster than cars, and what we might see with these connected cars is that certain functionality will be broken down the road. The car may never act as new ever again due to arbitrary reasons.

Another example could be Audi's google maps integration (itself an Orwellian mechanism that can't be escaped). Will google's servers still provide GPS functionality 20 years down the road? Will that be a feature that never again works as it should?