alt Hacker NewsBMW's most recent infotainment is a big step backwards to me in both areas - aesthetics and UX. Its previous generation was one of the best in the market also in both. I literally don't consider buying the newest 4-series just because of it, especially of the ultrawide driver's "monitor" - it's just so ugly, and I regret it, since on the outside the car appeals me so much more. I'd rather spend the same on previous year model with better specs.
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pcurve • yesterday at 7:04 AM
agreed. IMHO, last good BMWs were E90 and F10s. That's when they still cared about craftsmanship even in areas not visible to customers.
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I worked on BMW infotainment for a time. My opinions are my own obviously, I don't even work at BMW anymore.
So, when I was working, I found the decisions regarding the infotainment mind boggling, to me they made zero sense, until I found some random documents deep in the BMW intranet, where I found the logic of it all: The focus was actually increasing the car range, so for example instead of having one infotainment dedicated hardware, one for the doors, one for the brakes, etc... now the cars have the least amount of computers as possible, located in the locations that result in the least wires as possible, with the goal of saving weight. Because of this, the software layer now had to deal with extra virtualizations, software that originally was to run on a specific microcontroller and do a specific task, and communicated with other parts by wire, now shares a generalized CPU with many other software, and communicate by virtual machines sending messages to each other.
Marvelous stuff from the point of mechanical engineering, indeed results in lighter car and less parts. But the end result for the user? It is mind bogglingly bad, several VMs running on top of each other, everything is slow, the Infotainment instead of being just Infotainment now do several other things.
I had written some of the surprising non-Infotainment stuff the Infotainment do, but that probably would cross into violating NDAs territory, so better not. Just let's say the Infotainment has to meet some non-entertainment related EU regulations.