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iantmcfarland

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Mar 29, 2021
4
4
Los Angeles
I've been thirsting to have CarPlay at my disposal since it was first announced, but have been waiting for EVs to become more practical. That wait ended this weekend, when I purchased a 2022 Kia EV6. I excitedly plugged in my iPhone 13 mini and noticed the picture wasn't . . . great.

After a second, I realized that it looked just a little stretched. Not so much that the normal user would notice, but being someone who works in a visual medium, I could tell the tiles weren't equally wide and tall and the Cupertino font suddenly looked less slim. And having just gone on a roadtrip in someone else's Nissan, I was sensitive enough to notice that the time / reception info was coming way closer to the edge of the screen than is standard. I kept looking and realized that the display appeared a little less sharp in CarPlay than when displaying Kia's internal software.

The EV6 has a pretty big screen - or more importantly it has a very wide screen. I can't find the resolution, but it's 12.3 inch diagonally with an aspect ratio of something like 2:5 (or 250% as wide as it is tall).

My best guess here is that Apple currently does not support such a wide frame, so Kia is manipulating the native signal being sent from my phone to fill the frame (and also maybe pulling it just a bit in the vertical axis as well to make the horizontal growth less noticeable, even if that means it crops a little bit off the sides of the picture and brings the text very close to the edge). Though I suppose it's also possible that Kia has just done a poor job of implementing CarPlay.

Does anyone know what I'm talking about? Have other models ever displayed anything like this? And if it's just a matter of Apple not supporting the screen size, any idea if they would rectify this in the future?

Appreciate your time and thoughts on the issue!
 

Sheepish-Lord

macrumors 68030
Oct 13, 2021
2,532
5,149
CarPlay/Android auto is primarily left up to the manufacturers as it would be impossible for Apple to try and support all the various displays. Similar to how app developers need to update their software when Apple decides to add a notch or change a device aspect ratio.

So while there may be improvements overtime, larger screens or unique aspect ratios and how CarPlay interacts with them fall on the manufacturer. Regardless, CarPlay isn’t really HD to begin with and depending on the type of display used it could just be the reality as most car manufacturers could car less about screen quality especially with the current shortages.

Try someones Android phone to see if it looks similar and if so then you’ll have your answer.
 
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