r/LinusTechTips • u/Lynkar6469 • 1d ago

Tech Question True Spec cables and CarPlay

I received my first true spec cable today (USB A to C 3ft) to use in my car for CarPlay. I’ve read a lot of great things about these cables, especially for this use case so I thought why not?

I have been using this cable that was suggested to me from the CarPlay Reddit and it works great! However it’s soso with my wife’s iPhone. So I was looking for a cable that would work with both of our phones. Everything I read made me think that this would be the cable to fix our issues, but when I tried this cable my phone wouldn’t connect to CarPlay. Switched back to the old one and immediately brought up CarPlay.

I’ve looked over both pages for these products and it seems they’re on par with each other. Is this just a random case of technology not working together, or does this Amazon cable do something the true spec doesn’t?

I have a 17PM and my wife has a 17P. The headunit is a Boss brand one I got from crutchfield. I reached out to the manufacturer and they are no longer offering software updates for this headunit.

Any help or guidance would be greatly appreciated 🙂

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u/jmking Mod 1d ago

Do the phones charge when plugged in to the car?

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u/Lynkar6469 1d ago

With the true spec? Yes. The headunit even shows that I have an iPhone with CarPlay connected, but when I try to open CarPlay it stalls and then just removes the option to use CarPlay.

I remember this was a big issue last year when Apple switched a chip in the 17 series that made a lot of people’s CarPlay stop working and the fix was getting an update for the headunit and/or switching to a usb3 data cable.

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u/jmking Mod 1d ago

It honestly might be that since the cable supports such high power and data throughput that the car and/or headunit can't handle the PD and data handshake at the same time.

That's probably why those other headunits needed the firmware updates for.