The Promise of Wireless CarPlay

I've been a huge fan of CarPlay for 5 years and can't imagine a car without it. Lately I've been reading about adapters to make wired CarPlay into wireless CarPlay. This sounded perfect as I wouldn't have to take my phone out of my pocket and still be able to use CarPlay.

There are a number of devices out there that are basically hacks that make a car think that a wired device is plugged in and then have the iPhone talk wirelessly to it. None of how to do this is public knowledge and I doubt the manufacturers got Apple to reveal the secret sauce, so I knew things might not be perfect.

I decided on this device as it was small and supposedly had the latest hardware version. Installation was a breeze and I was amazed that it worked just like wired CarPlay except that there was maybe an additional 15 second startup time. Given the convenience of not having to plug in the phone, I could accept the delay.

I happily used the device for a few weeks on short trips around town and was pretty pleased with it. When we went on a longer trip, the device restarted after about 90 minutes. The dongle was warm to the touch and I suspect a big heat sink would mitigate the problem. In addition to restarting after awhile, the music was sounding garbled. At first I thought it was the streaming connection, but plugged in the phone and the issue went away.

One of the interesting, lesser known features of CarPlay is that if you have a garage door opener connected to HomeKit (I now use OpenGarage connected via Home Assistant, a button will appear on CarPlay when you are close to your house that lets you open and close the door. Why not just use the opener in your car, you ask? My wife has had a lot of problems with the HomeLink connected mirror triggering the door and kept sending me messages to open or close the garage. This feature, however, wasn't working reliably with wireless CarPlay and I couldn't pinpoint the problem.

After a bit of thinking about HomeKit and wireless CarPlay, I have a theory. HomeKit, when away from home uses a hub such as an Apple TV or HomePod Mini to communicate. When you're on your local network, your phone talks directly to whatever device. Wireless CarPlay uses Bluetooth to setup a connection from the phone to the car (or device) and then switches to WiFi for the extra bandwidth. The car (or device) creates a private WiFi network for communication. Normally when apps talk to the network, they'll try to use the primary interface (WiFi usually) and then failover to cellular if needed. When using wireless CarPlay, the WiFi connection always will fail and have to failover to cellular. This causes some delay and may be a bit unreliable depending on how long it takes to failover. Apple has an option called Wi-Fi Assist that is supposed to handle this automatically.

So while wireless CarPlay is a great feature, the dongle I purchased had some issues, but what really caused me to return it was opening the garage door; I was just tired of pushing the door button and not having it work.

Frustration with Wireless Service, Who would have thought?

[What follows is a rant about AT&T. If you only want to read my positive and useful posts, please come back for another entry another day.]

I'm not your average consumer when it comes to cellular service. I've been working with cellular phones for almost 25 years and worked for QUALCOMM for 4 years on a variety of projects. We've been on the same AT&T plan for a number of years now (12 GB of data per month for 2 lines) and thought that was adequate. Recently I saw our usage creep up mostly due to the use of Apple Music. I looked at switching to an unlimited plan and the way to get the best rate was to get a teacher discount as my wife is a teacher. Simple, or so I thought.

In order to get the discount, the account has to be in my wife's name. I called AT&T to find out how to do this The person I spoke to said that my wife had to be around and we could do it over the phone. No problem, I'd call back when my wife was around. A few days later I called back when my wife was around and was told that I could do the transfer online and the link was emailed to me. I started the process to do it which was straight forward. I got through to the point where my wife was emailed the link to do the transfer (the email was sent to a new address so I had to bother her less). I entered all the information for her to accept responsibility on the account and it got to the credit check part. I pushed the button, but the credit check failed because our credit is frozen. I unfroze her credit on all 3 credit reporting agencies and tried again. No luck. Same cryptic error message. I tried a few more times. The next day I called AT&T and when I explained the situation, I was told that I had to wait 24 hours after unfreezing the credit to try again (the credit reporting agencies say after 15 minutes the credit is unfrozen and that has been my experience in the past). OK, I waited 2 days and tried again. Nope.

Last Monday I called AT&T when my wife was home and the first time, the call got disconnected (no idea why, but things happen). The next time, I spoke with a really nice woman who worked with me, tried the transfer, spoke to my wife, and eventually got in contact with the fraud/credit department (or whatever it is called) and got the approval to finish the transfer. After about an hour, everything was transferred over. I hoped I was done, but I wasn't. On a side note, it doesn't appear that they actually did a hard pull on her credit.

After the transfer was all set, I went online, created a new account and linked it to the new account number. Here's kind of where the second part of the mess began. I turned on paperless billing and setup autopay. I went through the process to add the teacher discount and my wife got confirmation on her work email that it was setup. The online account set my watch as the phone number for account recovery; of course I can't receive calls at that number because of NumberSync and my attempts to change it failed due to my old account using the same number (my old online account actually had no wireless accounts associated with it). I decided to punt on this for awhile.

Now I had 2 online accounts and really wanted to ditch the old one as it was useless, but it used my phone number as the login (in addition to an email address). The account showed NumberSync for my phone and watch. I made the mistake of unsyncing my watch thinking that it would remove all traces of the wireless accounts from that online account. That was a really stupid move as it actually removed the watch from the wireless account (remember this online account doesn't actually have access to my wireless account). So I used my phone and tried to setup my watch again. It failed a number of times and at one point it setup a completely new number/account for it. After a number of tries, I called AT&T and while speaking with the rep, my watch was able to sync again. I ask the rep to verify that there were only 4 lines on my account (2 phones, 1 watch and 1 hotspot).

Since I'm a bit paranoid about all this working, I checked my account yesterday. Turns out I had 5 lines on the account; there were 2 watches! Huh? How is it possible to have 2 lines for the same physical device (ignore the devices that have 2 eSIMs)? I called AT&T and reached their offshore tech support and quickly got frustrated because the woman was not all that helpful as I simply wanted to cancel a line and demanded that I speak to a supervisor. I was transferred to a US based support person (note to self, always request a supervisor as my experience with offshore tech support has been poor at best).

The support person I spoke with asked what number I wanted to cancel. I replied that I had no idea because I can't directly call the watch. I gave her the IMEI of the watch, but presumably she had that listed for BOTH watch accounts. Eventually she was able to remove the watch line that didn't have recent activity. While I was on the line, I saw in 1 place on the website it said I had paperless billing and wanted to verify that. The rep said that paper billing was active and I had that changed to paperless (that's a $10/line per month discount with AutoPay); not sure why the website showed it was on when it wasn't. Then I checked to make sure AutoPay was on as the website was now showing it was off; it was actually on. To top off all of this, I verified that the teacher discount was active. It wasn't! I had actually gone through the process TWICE before and my wife received confirmation on her work email that it was active. The rep added the discount and on the account I actually now see "Teacher appreciation" which is good.

Where does that leave me? Throughout last week, I've been threatening to just switch to Verizon as they offer a teacher discount as well. They also offer a first responder discount which I'm qualified for as I'm a certified Emergency Medical Technician (EMT); AT&T's first responder discount requires me to work for or volunteer for an agency which I don't. The Verizon unlimited plans are similar to AT&T, but slightly more expensive. Would Verizon give me better support? My AT&T coverage is fine and we've had service through them ever since I got an iPhone 6 (and had them a few times before that). Up until this week, I really haven't had any complaints, but the utter frustration of trying to switch plans and get the teacher discount have made me consider the switch more than once.

While trying to work through this, I visited my AT&T account many times only to have different, incomprehensible error messages presented to me. In addition, I was taken to different links and some help entries gave wrong information about where to find things. The site is extremely slow to load (it isn't my network) and I kept seeing the loading image every time I navigate to anything. I stumbled upon the Customer Service Summary and it said that my monthly bill was going to be $250 per month! Holy cow. After a search, I found a Reddit thread talking about this and my experience is right in line with others. The summary, however, did show me that AT&T didn’t think I had paperless billing (the website said I did have it). While I'm at it, I got a text message to my hotspot telling me that paperless billing was activated. Huh? Why did my hotspot get a message as it isn't my primary number (it is interesting that it does get text messages)? The icing on the cake is that I've received maybe 15-20 email messages confirming my email address.

Does AT&T care? Probably not. Did they offer me a credit for all the time I spent with this fiasco? Nope. I am probably going to send a letter to the CEO of AT&T to let him know what average customers like me think of their service. I suspect it won't change anything, but will make me feel better.

The bottom line is that wireless plans and billing systems are so complex and probably so antiquated that anything other than a person signing up from scratch is bound not to work properly. What I've done can't be all that uncommon, can it be? I’m sure if AT&T worked to make their systems more reliable, not throw strange errors and let people handle more things on their own, they could cut down on support. Must be cheaper to just offshore the support than to try to fix the systems. For a fee, I'm available to find things wrong with their systems.

Fixing Display Issues on iPad with HDMI out

Several years ago when Apple released Macs with USB-C connectors, there seemed to be a lot of talk about needing a bunch of dongles to connect things. When I got my first USB-C based Mac, I only had 2 dongles and was content. Over time, I saw various USB-C hubs that had multiple USB-A ports, power delivery, Ethernet and HDMI out. I bought one and used it for everything except the HDMI out as I use an old Thunderbolt Display.

When I bought my 2018 iPad Pro with USB-C, I tried the hub on it, but was told by the support folks that the iPad Pro wasn't fully supported; I guess the power delivery didn't work properly. It would have been nice for it to work, but it didn't really matter to me at the time.

Earlier this year I saw a sale on the Plugable 7-in-1 USB-C hub that had all the ports I'd ever need into SD card slots (I had been working a bit with SD cards at the time, so that seemed convenient). I used the hub with my 2017 MacBook Pro without issues, but never tested the HDMI output as I rarely took my machine anywhere.

Last month we were getting ready to go on a trip and I decided to check the hub to see if I could connect my iPad Pro to our TV in case we wanted to watch a show. The Plugable hub was advertised as iPad Pro compatible, so I had no reason to think it wouldn't work. When I plugged it in, all the colors were messed up. I plugged in my MacBook Air and it didn't have any problems.

I contacted Plugable's support and they assured me it was compatible and started going through troubleshooting steps. For our trip, I brought the Plugable adapter as well as my older adapter that didn't have the same problem. When we wanted to watch a show, I decided to try the Plugable hub and much to my surprise, it worked fine. I sent my findings along with the model number of the TV in our room and thought maybe it was a 4K vs 1080p issue.

When we got home, I tried a few more troubleshooting steps that were recommended to me and didn't see any change. After much Internet searching, I discovered that when you plug an HDMI display into the iPad Pro, an extra option appears in Displays & Brightness for the display. Under connected displays, there is my TV, the 55R617.

Tapping on the option brought up 3 choices for Preferred Display Setting with the checked one being Dolby Vision. I selected the second option (High Dynamic Range) and boom, the picture problem cleared up!

I relayed this information to Plugable support and the person I was working with commended me on my sleuthing and said that was exactly the issue as the chipset used in the hub didn't support Dolby Vision (extra licensing for it) and offered me a refund if I wanted it. I told him it wasn't necessary (support was great and would definitely recommend their products) as I just wanted to make sure I knew how to work around the issue when I traveled.

Now I can just bring 1 hub for both my iPad Pro and my MacBook Air when I travel and hook up either device to a TV if needed. As long as I remember to bring an HDMI cable (it's on my packing list), we should be good to watch our own content when we travel.

My Take on the M1 MacBook Air

Years ago Mac laptops were getting so much better every year that I was on a 2-3 year cycle for upgrading my machine. The performance increases helped with my productivity as it reduced compile times for my work. This increase slowed dramatically in the last decade and I stopped buying new machines so often.

When the Retina MacBook Pro was released (2012), I got a fairly loaded one (quad core i7, 16 GB RAM, 512 GB SSD). This machine was a workhorse for me for 5 years. In 2017, I bought a new 15" MacBook Pro that was kind of a mid range machine that was still a quad core i7, but had a higher clock speed. It definitely was faster, but for being 5 years newer, I really had expected more. In any case, I gave my 2012 machine to my wife (she says she doesn't mind getting older hardware as long as it works; does she really mean it? I hope so!).

For a few years, the 2012 machine has had an indicator saying that the battery needs service, but it can still be used. We've ignored that for awhile as it mostly stays connected to power. Two weeks ago, the machine restarted a few times while my wife was using it to teach. My theory was that the battery was on its last legs and when the MagSafe adapter got knocked out, it lost power and restarted. That might not quite be the issue, but started me thinking about what to do with it. We had basically 2 options; option 1 was to replace the battery myself using a battery from iFixit or buy a new computer.

I've opened up machines before and replacing a battery should be doable. However, this machine has the battery glued in and was rated as a hard to replace. If anything went wrong, the machine was basically toast. A friend of mine saw a technician replace the battery and advised me against it. Apple put the machine on its obsolete list last year so Apple wouldn't touch it and authorized repair centers couldn't get Apple parts for it; so if I wasn't going to replace the battery, who would? If the battery wasn't the problem, getting it serviced would be near impossible. It would also be throwing money at a very old computer (9 years is a pretty long life for a laptop).

The second option of buying a new computer was the easier option, but far more expensive. My wife didn't care if I got a new machine and she got my 2017 machine or if we got her a new machine. I asked a few friends what they would do and the answers ranged from don't buy an M1 machine now because it is a first generation to loving his M1 MacBook Air. I had shied away from the MacBook Air for me in the past because they had been underpowered and I thought the screens were too small. These days I use an 11" iPad Pro often and don't use my laptop all that often without it being connected to an external display, so I would be OK with the 13" display and the differences between the Air and the 13" MacBook Pro were relatively minor that I'd save a few dollars by going with the Air.

I decided to get a new M1 based MacBook Air and my wife would get the 2017 machine. While she didn't care, I justified me getting the new machine thinking that if there were any problems with the M1, it would be better that I had them than she did as the computer is just a tool for her and she doesn't like futzing with technology.

The machine I picked up was a 16 GB/1TB/8 GPU M1 MacBook Air. Of course I bought AppleCare+ with it as I now buy AppleCare+ on just about every Apple product that is portable. This was the least I've spent on a laptop (in raw, non-adjusted dollars) in a long time; did I make the right decision? Would the machine be able to handle my daily work?

After setting up the machine, I worked on getting my projects to build. While they built fine for an iOS device, they wouldn't build for the iOS simulator due to a different simulator architecture. Unfortunately there are a few 3rd party libraries I use that I don't have source for and needed a workaround until the libraries are updated. I did a bunch of searching and found the answer:

EXCLUDED_ARCHS[sdk=iphonesimulator*] = arm64

That magic line in my project (as well as sub projects) got me going again. A full build of one project on the M1 machine was 42 seconds; on my 2017 machine it was 1 minute 24 seconds. Wow! That's some pretty impressive performance.

The next part of getting setup was getting a Ruby on Rails project setup. Luckily Homebrew has many packages compiled for the M1, so I installed that, Ruby and some other pieces. Unfortunately it took me about a week to figure out that I had to change the version of a library to the latest as someone committed changes to build on the M1.

I took the machine on a trip last week and I absolutely love the size and weight! Even though it is a lot smaller than my 15" machine, the screen is easy to read. The keyboard is excellent and the machine performs well in everything I've thrown at it. While it only has 2 Thunderbolt/USB-C ports, that's not a problem. I have 1 connected to a Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt adapter for my Thunderbolt Display and the second is connected to a USB-C hub that has a few USB-A ports, SD Card reader and power delivery.

Up until yesterday I hadn't restarted the machine since I got it, but have had 3 kernel panics since then which is concerning to me. I'm not sure if it is related to the external hard drive I connected to perform a backup or running Cura in Rosetta 2.

As long as the kernel panics stop and performance remains as good or better than my old machine, then I'll be a happy camper and this will have been a good purchase. When Apple releases new machines with either the M1 or a newer processor, I think they'll be a hit. However, I'm so taken with the size and weight of the MacBook Air, I might not want to move to a larger machine even if it has better performance.