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Quick update here. I called BMW Assist to talk about the error preventing Car Play from deploying on my car last Tuesday, they said they'd get working on it and Saturday morning when I went out to the car the feature was now available. I spent the weekend traveling around and getting used to the interface and its definitely has some major advantages over the BMW iDrive system.
First major advantage is the ability to use Apple Maps on the full display with all of the bells and whistles it comes with. For one, I personally really like that this gives me advanced lane guidance whereas BMW maps did not, but also I find that the traffic and routing mechanism on Apple Maps is more reliable (not quite what you get with Waze or Google Maps, but better than BMW). For example - BMW told me a 300 mile trip was going to take 2 hours longer than Apple predicted in a trip I made two weeks ago, after completing the trip with both nav systems running side by side, Apple clearly provided the superior route as I arrived within minutes of the original prediction.
The other major advantage of using Car Play is if you use Apple Music, you can now navigate your music, playlists, radio stations all from the iDrive screen, where as before you could just toggle to the next song using iDrive to control your Apple Music library.
You will also get a better spotify, pandora, audible, and audibooks interface using Car Play.
One major disadvantage I noticed in my trip yesterday is that Music is really the only app that can run in the background while you try to multitask. For example, if you start navigation with Apple Maps, it displays on your iDrive screen immediately, now if you go to open your phone and swipe out of the maps app, the map comes down from the iDrive screen. So whether you are at a red light and want to check messages or you want to pull up Waze to check traffic that way, doing so will pull the map off of your iDrive screen.
Of course, you can always jump right back to the iDrive interface by hitting the menu button on your controls. Any music playing from your phone will still continue to play when you jump back, so no real issues there and status quo remains.
A few pics of what the interface looks like are below, if anyone has any questions I'm happy to help work through them.
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