douger

Does Pioneer have your money? No, it's not likely. The best one can hope for from Pioneer is that they'll produce a feature that they promised when they introduced the model. And once the next model comes out, they'll forget they ever made the one that's in your dash.

There may not be a payoff. For most new cars, the infotainment is so integrated with the rest of the car both physically and electronically that the market for aftermarket audio may be shrinking.

That was pretty much the story for the NEX units. They were about a month late with people bitching that the CarPlay update supposedly due in "early summer" and not coming until fall.

I'm not clear why they can't marry the hardware of a moderately high end tablet... say a Nexus 7... with a quality amplifier and disc drive and not have all of the horsepower needed to practically future proof their units for years, not to mention produce a head unit that is significantly cheaper than the substandard one they're producing now.

If they play by the same rules they've been playing by for years, they've already forgotten that they made last year's NEX units.

My Z150 is 18 months old. There have been two firmware updates which fixed a couple of bugs and tweaked some already available features. If Pioneer holds to form, they'll forget all about supporting the current NEX series when they announce the 2015 models. The business model appears to be: if you want the latest features, buy the latest head unit. Pioneer isn't the only company in the industry to subscribe to that model. I'd love to have Mirrorlink on my head unit. It seems to be a superior interface than the AppMode that is just as shitty in 2014 as it was in 2013.

My Bluetooth connection works consistently when my phone is within about ten feet of the head unit. I believe the standard calls for 33 feet, but I'd think that the intervening metal and glass would make that harder to achieve. I often lose the audio when getting out of the car to check the mail, but the connection remains solid.

Your head unit has a switched power source, unless it stays on when you turn the key off (retained accessory power vehicles excluded.) If I recall, it's the yellow wire that goes to the head unit. With luck, it goes to a yellow wire in the vehicle harness.

GM-D8604. My bad on the output. It's only 100 watts RMS per channel at the 4 ohms my speakers are, which I also replaced with Pioneer units. I'm also running a Bazooka bass tube. It's still miles better than the OEM Monsoon amplifier.

Apparently yours isn't powerful enough. My Grand Prix came with a Monsoon amp. As near as I can tell it put out about 50 watts RMS per channel. I now have a Pioneer 150 watt per channel RMS amp. Setting 20 is as loud as 40 used to be... without the distortion.

Install an amplifier. You can then make it as loud as your speakers can handle. The unit only puts out about 20 watts RMS. You can try pushing the SLA sliders in audio setup to the max. I found that creates distortion. They'll be no SLA slider for your AM/FM radio.

My rooted Android phone works great as a mobile hotspot.

General Motors is. They're putting hotspots in most of their 2015 cars.

The OEMs have made that prospect most difficult. Try putting a double DIN in a Cadillac CTS without doing major surgery. Many manufacturers are integrating their infotainment systems with the heating and air conditioning controls.

Kenwood's top of the line head unit doesn't say boo about Carplay, but does appear to accept a wi-fi dongle. I'm not seeing where the current Alpine lineup offers any sort of internet connectability. Both manufacturers do support iDatalink Maestro out of the box.