Anyone gonna play wait-and-see with Alpine?

[koneill]

I've read that Alpine plans on having CarPlay-ready head units available later this year with a price range of $500 - $700. While I know full well that those are wild guestimates, I'm really on the fence about and may consider waiting for two primary reasons:

 

1) I've been in the electronics development biz long enough to know that the "first-to-market" is often times not the best. I'm not saying that Alpine's units will absolutely be better than Pioneer's, but sometimes, when a company develops a product from the start with a particular feature set in mind, it's often more optimized for that particular feature set. Likewise, when a company tries to bolt a particular feature onto an existing product that, theoretically, is fully capable of supporting said feature, the total experience results in something just shy of "what could have been." I'm not saying this will be the case with Pioneer, as it's impossible to say that the NEX units weren't designed from the start with CarPlay in mind. I'm just saying...

 

2) Personally, I would prefer a unit that's a simple FM/AM tuner with good stock amplification, a decent EQ, bluetooth equipped, and backup camera enabled. Everything else? iPhone. Just give me a great, responsive screen with a ridiculously simple, clean industrial design, and walhalla! I really don't need HD Radio (though nice) if I've got Spotify, Stitcher, iPod, and iTunes Radio available via CarPlay. I've had a stereo with HD Radio and a DVD/CD player in it for years and have rarely (if ever) used either, so there's my other "don't need it" feature: an optical drive. Delete it. That's just me. The only other thing I could think of possibly wanting would be a second USB port to allow another iPod or mass storage device (stuffed with high bit rate music) to be connected and accessed in some way via the CarPlay interface. Just a really nice-to-have. I'd rather pay "less for more" than "more for stuff I don't really need." It'll be interesting to see if this is the road Alpine chooses with a less expensive unit (at $500). Could be tempting.

 

Thoughts?

[hella356]

I'm not an Apple user, so CarPlay means nothing to me. The Google equivalent might perk my ears up a bit, but as long as I can get SiriusXM for Howard Stern, and maximum storage for FLAC files, I can live without all the other source options.  Having HD Radio & DVD support are nice, but I can't see myself paying a penny more for either of them.  Currently, the NEX series offers the highest number of files/folders on a USB storage device, along with having two USB ports + SD Card, so for me the Pioneers are the only game in town.  If Alpine (or any other manufacturer) releases new head units which outdo the NEX in the "FLAC support + storage limits" area before I purchase an AVH-4000, I'll take a strong look at their offerings. 

[Spankey]

Carplay is an App. It is nothing more than that and nothing a head unit has to be designed for. the iPad wasn't designed for the apps that run on it but there are thousands running just fine. 

 

No head unit that i know of at this time allows a second "i" device to run at the same time as another. It is either your iPhone/iPod/iPad in one USB and flash or other storage device in the second. 

 

Other than a bigger screen, the Alpine head units do not offer more than either the current gen Pioneer or Kenwood. 

[Kolenka]

To quickly get the second point out of the way, I agree that there is value in a simple head unit with phone connectivity. Pioneer seems to agree with the AppRadio as well. The catch is that I think they painted themselves into a corner with the hardware on the current models wrt CarPlay. CarPlay is very likely sending MPEG-4 down the wire (like AirPlay), and the one thing that the AppRadio was never designed to do was handle compressed video. It all comes in over HDMI or some other raw video signal. So they are either stuck trying to do real-time MPEG-4 playback in software, or waiting until the AppRadio 4 to support CarPlay. Sounds like they picked the latter.

 

As for the first point, while I agree with the idea in a general sense, we do need to pass it through a basic litmus test of "Does this idea make sense within this context?" The thing is, CarPlay asks the head unit to become a dumb terminal of sorts. AppRadio asks the head unit to become a dumb terminal of sorts. Mirrorlink as well. The difference is HDMI + BT vs USB (MPEG4 + HID?). So the bulk of the work is making sure that they can use the existing MPEG4 decoder instead of just displaying the HDMI feed, and the protocol to feed input back over USB to the phone, instead of feeding it over BT, using Apple's protocol rather than their own. And Apple may be using a variation of HID, which would make things easier. I don't think that idea applies in this particular context, because what Apple is doing is already so similar to what Pioneer did. And the NEX hardware already needs to handle live decode of MPEG-2 and MPEG-4. 

 

Pioneer sees an opportunity here, in part because the foundation is already there. And I think they would be nuts to not to do what they are doing here. And it will probably pay out with future models reaping the benefits of doing the work now (like a new AppRadio). 

[DP3343]

I think Carplay will work well right off the gate. Apple has too much invested in Carplay to allow Pioneer to "pioneer" it with a buggy update. If the first review of Carplay comes back "Carplay is a glitchy mess" Apple will never shake that off. Many people are saying that Apple has vastly improved apple maps over its initial launch, and yet the average user still say "Apple maps sux".

 

As far as any other aspect of the purchasing decision, the NEX is a damn good head unit. Now that being said, it isn't perfect. The idatalink functionality is incomplete, avicsync is non existent, the hdmi sizing for videos does not have a setting that is either the wrong aspect ratio, or cutting off part of the image, you can't change between types of devices without practically resetting the whole radio, and it could boot a little faster, like my Appradio 2 which instantly boots.

 

If an alpine head unit fixed just a handful do these grievances while getting the rest right, I'd buy that instead when it comes to the replacement radio for my other car. On that front I'm waiting. Oh and If I could get an Appradio style radio that has multitouch display, Carplay support but not much else at a barebones price I'd jump on that in a second.