Apple spent a decade trying to develop their own car with Project Titan. It never launched, and was finally canceled in 2024, but not before the company had spent ten billion dollars on getting nowhere. In the same time frame, Tesla launched the Model X, Model 3, Model Y, and the Cybertruck. But maybe that's just because manufacturing cars is really hard, and at least Apple had some superior software ready to go? Also no.
We know this because the CarPlay Ultra project has been heralded as the one good salvageable part from the Project Titan disaster. Now it's available in the wild, with Aston Martin being the prestige launch partner, and? It's total shit.
Check out this review from The Straight Pipes of the new Aston Martin Vantage. It's a beautiful, fast, and deliciously bonkers British hotrod, but the CarPlay Ultra integration is so bad that it's the single worst thing about the car, according to the reviewers.
Not only is the integration ludicrously laggy — like 12fps kind of laggy, like can't-even-keep-up-with-the-engine-reving kind of laggy — it's also buggy as hell. It crashed on the reviewers during their short time with the car, leaving them driving blind on real roads without any gauge cluster. WTF.
How does something like this go out the door at Cupertino? How does this company, so famed for its obsessive attention to detail, let CarPlay Ultra ship in such a laggy, buggy, and dangerous state?
Because Apple no longer has anyone left who can say no. You saw it with ad after ad that had to be pulled after getting pummeled by the public. You saw it with Apple Intelligence that was sold as the reason to get an iPhone 16, but in reality just was just dumb gimmicks, like genmoji. And now you see it with CarPlay Ultra.
I guarantee you there are programmers and designers inside Apple who know CarPlay Ultra wasn't ready to ship, but were overruled by managers who felt they needed to stick to their contractual obligations, quality be damned.
That's what happens when there's a lack of leadership who actually care about quality, about customers, and about the product. Who would be pained to let something as dodgy as this go out the door. When that's absent, the train wreck that everyone can see a mile away is going to happen is simply allowed to happen. Nobody reaches for the emergency brake, nobody wants to take responsibility to avoid disaster.
This is why companies led by founders tend to have much better products. Steve Jobs didn't always get it right, but you know that he and Jony Ive would have been in physical pain to see the Apple logo on something this laggy and broken. (Or so you'd hope, Ive did preside, towards the end of his time at Apple, over the five dark years of catastrophically unreliable MacBook keyboards!).
It's the same thing with the alarm bug in the iPhone. My wife, along with millions of others, judging from the endless online reports of the problem, has been struggling with the fact that the phone will randomly, intermittently just refuse to wake her in the morning. The alarm time will come and go, but there's no buzzing, no sound.
This has been going on for years. But that's just how it is, apparently, with the iPhone. Maybe the alarm works, maybe it doesn't. Good luck if you need to get up early for the airport or an important appointment.
Again, the problem is not the bug, it's the lack of ownership. All software has bugs! I've written many of them myself. But when we talk the type that has the criticality of making someone miss a flight or lose the gauge cluster on the road at night, you need to treat that like a CODE RED, and get all hands on deck to deal with it.
Apple has lost the power to do this. Because they've lost the will to say no. Because they've lost the last asshole who could insist that quality should count above quarterly earnings (as if the two even ought to be in opposition)!
If you leave the bozos in charge for too long, the entire organization will be shaped in their image. Tim Cook was a masterful logistics hand to Jobs, but he's been a bozo on product, quality, and care.
He's gotta go.