[judge2020]

With the amount of horrible infotainment systems in the wild i honestly doubt they’re using overpowered chips. I’m sure any consumer grade APU (ie. CPU with an iGPU) from the past 5 years would do better than the chips currently in cars.

[simias]

I've worked in that industry. The problem with infotainment systems (be it in planes or in cars) is that they're usually designed years before the planes/cars enter production, they have very strong constraints in terms of price and component choice (you need automotive-certified parts, not smartphone parts, and they need to last a long time even if they have to go through Arizona summers) so they're already outdated by the time the car comes out.

These systems are also usually integrated with other systems to provide additional functionality using largely custom code that somewhat prevents quick iteration and code reuse, especially since the people writing the code are largely not in-house but various contractors (that's where a company like Tesla has the upper hand since I suppose that they control the software stack a lot more than the average).

Beyond that these systems suffer heavily from design-by-committee and worse yet, committees whose core competence really isn't computer UI.

[delecti]

Don't underestimate the ability of lazy, incompetent, or (most likely) rushed developers to fill the headspace given to them by overpowered hardware.

[danielmeskin]

How much of that is the APU? I’d imagine the bottleneck would lie with manufacturers using the cheapest panels and digitizers they can.

[kube-system]

I think the panels and digitizer used in automotive applications are pretty specialized and relatively expensive. They have environmental requirements that far surpass that of typical consumer products.