Apple announces major updates to CarPlay and Maps

Apple held its annual World Wide Developers Conference in San Jose, California, today, and it made several major announcements about many of its products. In addition to the debut of a new 6K display and a first look at iOS13 in Dark Mode, Apple announced both CarPlay and Maps have been heavily redesigned.

This is the biggest overhaul to Apple CarPlay since the groundbreaking smartphone integration debuted back in 2014. As part of the updates to iOS13, CarPlay will have a new "Dashboard" view that allows users to see multiple functions, aka apps, at the same time. For example, it will allow music, maps, and alerts all in a single organized screen. The music app has also been redesigned to emphasize the album art.

Further enhancing the viewing experience, Siri will now be overlaid on top of other apps rather than prompting a dedicated Siri screen. Apple also added a calendar to CarPlay and Siri integration for third-party navigation and audio apps. Apple says CarPlay is now in 90 percent of new cars sold in the U.S., though we have no official way to confirm that fact.

CarPlay in 90% of cars sold in US.

New dashboard/UX. Non obtrusive Siri UI. Works with apps like Pandora and Waze. pic.twitter.com/9GCzO6x2gu

— Rene Ritchie (@reneritchie) June 3, 2019

In a separate but related unveiling, Apple announced an upgraded Maps experience. Apple says it drove 4 million miles to completely reconstruct the "basemap," and it now has more expansive road coverage, better pedestrian data, more accurate addresses, and "more detailed landcover." Here's a brief look of the changes side-by-side with the old Maps:

View post on imgur.com

New Maps features include "Collections," which can be used to share destinations, and "Favorites" for places the user frequently visits. A new "Look Around" feature also uses 3D photography to show realistic street-level views.

The new-and-improved Maps will begin to hit the U.S. near the end of 2019, and the new CarPlay will be available with the new iOS13 update this fall. We will do a more detailed post about the changes when we experience it first-hand. For more info on iOS13, visit Apple.com.