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Comment by dietr1ch | Hacker News Reader

This is really cool.

Sort of related, what I find kind of silly, is that my car probably knows really well where I am, but can't help my phone figure out where my car is pointing to despite being connected to it.

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My understanding of CarPlay is that it does offload GPS to the car (when available, not all units/manufacturers might support it).

It does! Unfortunately for me, I rented this one Ford Explorer where the car's GPS was off by a mile, so that was the opposite of helpful, and I didn't find a way to turn that off in the short time I had it.

This is actually a problem for my Volkswagen Tiguan, the car GPS data is wildly inaccurate probably ~30% of the time. The only fix is force it to use wired CarPlay or turn of CarPlay and let my map grab my phone's data before reconnecting.

Thats still surprisingly unsolved problem. I was daydreaming about pulling my laptop out somewhere without known wifi and it automatically using my phone as a hotspot, without going trough manual process of enabling said hotspot. Somehow we connected the world but forgot to connect out devices..

This has almost been a feature for Macs+iPhones for like a decade. You need to manually "pick a wifi network" but it'll turn on your phone's hotspot if you pick it from the list.

Never tried on my Mac, but on iPad, it’s totally automatic : the iPad automatically tells the iPhone to enable the hotspot (over Bluetooth I presume) then connects to it.

Is the hotspot truly off? I am asking because it was really common to see Whoever's iPhone whenever you were picking a wifi network.

The hotspot uses a lot of power, so it really is off when it's not being used.

This is one thing that is nice about using the Tesla in-car navigation. It always knows which way the car is pointed.

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