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I honestly am not very optimistic about this product. Primarily because I see it like the still-closed Apple TV product.Will Pandora be an option for internet radio? No. Can I leverage Google Maps instead of Apple Maps? No. While I think there's potential here, I'm highly skeptical of this being a breakthrough product.

@eric3000 Aha! Great point, that's got to be it. @adamsigel @ashbhoopathy Yeah, I could believe a small incremental safety improvement. The UI looks like it still requires taking your eyes off the road, and if I use my phone while driving it's usually in my hand near the top of the wheel, so CarPlay would be worse for "time of eyes off the road". I'm not bullish on people actually using voice recognition in real life, but any potential user of this already has Siri. I do think some amount of users will decrease their eyes-off-road time, I just think it'll be a lot less than Apple's marketing warrants, and that it's more of a luxury/live-in-the-future feature than a safety one. I think the most important thing here is that it gets some tech into the car that can actually test/measure/repeat quickly and stay up to date, and what that enables 2-5 years from now.

@adamsigel I'm not familiar with that, what do you mean by "ROKR moment"?

According to Freakonomics, most of the danger from cell phone use *isn't* distraction from talking, whether using hands-free or not. It's taking your eyes off the road, eg to dial the number. http://freakonomics.com/2013/12/... If that's true, this won't actually make the car much safer. BUT as others have said, it'll be way better than what's out there, and attaching updates to the phone will change the "game mechanics" of the market to much faster iterations.

Ahhh didn't notice it was going to be a locked-down version of iOS with no alternative apps. Great, now I'm going to have to jail break my car?? (And I have always found Siri to be a awkward, error-filled experience.)

I also just noticed CarPlay is only available on iPhone 5+. That seems like an arbitrary upgrade-forcing function. Can anyone think of a technical reason? Some kind of bluetooth versioning perhaps?

Aha! Yeah, I would tend to agree with that. I'm more excited about this as a potential inflection point than this specific iteration.

I like this as a way to decouple technology from the car replacement cycle. Today, technology is built into the car, but because replacement cycles are so long, this technology becomes dated quickly. Most systems, like Microsoft's Sync, are hardly cutting edge to begin with. By relying on a phone, as the phone upgrades, the car's smart system upgrades. The way it should be. Also a great move for Apple to expand their accessory ecosystem.

@staringispolite I believe it's because it's being built around the lightning connector vs. 30-pin

Does this mean Siri Eyes Free is dead? I would like to see more voice- and gesture-based controls in cars instead of visual- and touch-based, which detract more attention from the road.

It's an incremental safety improvement IMO. The biggest advantage I see here is simply that the car screen is closer to the windshield than a phone in the hand. It still requires at least one hand off the steering wheel and your eyes off the road. I would *love* to see some clever use of the M7 that restricts functionality or changes the UI while the car is in motion :-)

Apparently CarPlay runs on QNX: http://n4bb.com/apple-carplay-in...

Based on this video, I think we'll be able to look back at some point and realize that CarPlay was the ROKR moment in Apple's plans to create a better in-car experience: http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/04...

@staringispolite The ROKR was a Motorola device that had iTunes built-in. It was a precursor to the actual iPhone. It was not really an "Apple experience" and just had some Apple licensed technology backed into someone else's platform, and it was a flop. CarPlay looks to be largely the same since it's actually built on QNX and is not being marketed (nor does it seem to be built) to Apple's standards.