There’s an accompanying blog post too, but the video (around 18 minutes) is (unsurprisingly, from Top Gear) better. It’s just a great tour of everything from how you set it up to what it offers, and what the various “themes” look like — and how you switch between them.

The DBX doesn’t have a ton of screen space, so we’re still left to wonder what the experience will be like in a car that has door-to-door screens spanning the dashboard, but Rix does a great job showing the driver’s perspective of the main instrument cluster. One thing Aston did right is that they still have a lot of physical controls — clicking buttons and twisting dials — for the most essential features like climate control. As you’d hope, the CarPlay Ultra interface updates live as you manipulate those physical controls in the car.

I don’t know if CarPlay Ultra came out of Apple’s abandoned “Titan” project to build its own line of vehicles, but it sure feels like for the first time in its modern era (see link below), Apple is licensing an OS to third-party hardware makers. A straightforward “you do the hardware, we’ll do the software, and we’ll work together to make sure the result looks like a partnership between our brands” sort of deal. That never made sense for Apple with other device classes, like PCs (where, in the mid-’90s, they briefly tried and it proved nearly ruinous for the company), phones, or watches, but I think it might make a lot more sense for cars than if Apple had forged ahead with Titan.

They might really have something here, and brands — like Mercedes, which supports regular CarPlay but whose CEO is opposed to CarPlay Ultra taking over all its screens, or, more famously, the electric startups like Tesla and Rivian that are holding out against any CarPlay support at all — that don’t support CarPlay Ultra might see a Hemingway-style slowly-then-quickly decline in customer demand that is more notable than the remarkably high demand for regular CarPlay.