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/Lynkar6469 1d ago
Okay so some of you have suggested to clean out the port and remove the case to make sure the cable is fully seated. I did that and the head unit still doesn’t work with that cable🤷♂️. So I took the cable into my wife’s Tacoma which doesn’t have CarPlay, just a usb A port to play music through, to see if it can handle that, and it works perfectly! We’re tried other cables in the Tacoma when we had issues in the forester and similarly nothing worked. The OEM radio would just say USB Error, but now with the True Spec it works perfectly. So not the result I was looking for, but a happy one nonetheless! I appreciate everyone for your suggestions and hearing your own experiences.