Editor’s Notebook: The New Power in Car Audio
» CarPlay’s home screen features the five main iPhone icons; future Car- Play-approved apps will show on this screen. Te Pioneer NEX icon takes the user back to the main NEX interface.
Pioneer is first to flex Apple muscle in the aftermarket. But what happens next? WORDS BY SOLOMON DANIELS
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ioneer Electronics launched its collaboration with Apple CarPlay at a high-profile event in San Francisco on May 15. Media from around the country flew in for informational demonstrations and hands-on, in-car
demos of the product. The big picture is this: Apple introduced CarPlay earlier this year and named several OEM partners that would be the first to showcase the platform in their multimedia units. Alpine and Pioneer were the first partners introduced on the aftermar- ket side. And Pioneer has emerged as the first to showcase the implementation in five of its high-end multimedia receivers introduced during the International CES in January. “We introduced our NEX line at CES, and we began shipping them in March,” said Ted Cardenas, vice president of marketing
24 Mobile Electronics June 2014
for Pioneer’s car electronics division. “This means that dealers already have inventory, and in fact, there are units on the street today in customers’ cars.” Why is this significant? Because Apple CarPlay is a software
upgrade, not a hardware implementation. Customers who own one of five NEX receivers—AVIC-4000NEX, AVIX-5000NEX, AVIC-6000NEX, AVIC-7000NEX and AVIC-8000NEX—can simply go to Pioneer’s website, download the CarPlay software package and install it themselves—for free. In addition, retailers with the head units in stock can immediately upgrade them to CarPlay once they are installed. On a side note, this presents a nice opportunity for retailers
to invite customers into their stores to perform the upgrade free of charge. (We all know that no matter how easy it might be for
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