The first car I owned with Carplay was a 2016 Volkswagen Passat I bought in 2015 (the 2016 Passat has the distinction of being the very first car sold in America with Carplay/Android Auto capability). I bought the car specifically because of CarPlay, and if you haven't used Carplay or Android auto, I just kind of feel sorry for you. Long gone are the days of fiddling with aux cables, usb cords and phone mounts that simply do not work just to be able to use your phone's navigation and music apps. Let's be honest - until Carplay/Android auto came along, any GPS navigation solution, while certainly a vast improvement on ye olden tymes solutions like having to print out directions on Mapquest before you left the house, or having to carry around a bulky expensive road atlas (which was invariably outdated about 5 minutes after you bought it), the user experience for in car navigation has always been horrible. It started out with 3rd party devices like TomTom and Garmin GPS, and then moved to in-dash navigation. But even after GPS becoming a 1st party solution in cars, they were plagued by many of the same problems. Clunky interfaces, outdated maps, terrible voice control (if it even has the option). The brilliant simplicity of being able to just say "Hey Siri, navigate to the nearest Jamba Juice" and without even having to lift a finger (literally - and that's kind of the point here; to keep your eyes on the road and your hands on the wheel) your car just tells you the quickest route to get to your destination. The maps are always up to date and don't require dropping your car off at the dealership to have a technician update them with an proprietary SD card that the manufacturer could EASILY make publicly available for free, but instead they choose to charge you $200 for it...Since I owned my Passat, I've owned a few vehicles and I've either purchased them with, or subsequently added an after market head unit with Carplay. Simply put, I won't drive a vehicle that doesn't have it. Maybe I'm bougie, but I honestly believe that CarPlay is the single most important safety feature on a vehicle, save for maybe the seatbelts. Not hyperbole. CarPlay forces the driver to practice better habits behind the wheel by locking out the stuff you shouldn't be doing and making the things you can do as close to hands and eyes free as is possible. I actually wish that CarPlay was MORE aggressive about it, and literally locked you out of your phone as soon as it detects it's in a moving vehicle without giving you the option to override it.If you're lucky enough to own a vehicle that came stock with CarPlay (most new vehicles sold in the US since about 2018 do), you can probably enjoy all the bells and whistles where in car tech is treated as a 1st class citizen and not an afterthought. However if your car didn't come with carplay, your only choice is to add an aftermarket unit which has it, and in my experience there is a WIDE variance in quality of these devices. At the cheapest end - the lowest common denominator being "a double DIN stereo that works with carplay" most of these head units are no-name Chinese garbage that are PLAGUED with problems - slow, clunky interfaces, low-resolution washed out screens that are either too bright or too dark (or both), random crashes, terrible audio quality, horrible microphones, badly translated "Engrish" UI... In general, if you don't recognize the brand name, save your money and buy something a little better. Then there are the mid-range head units which cost a bit more, and in general you get what you pay for. These would be your BOSS Audio, Jensen, Dual, etc. These would be the typical brands you might find at a Walmart automotive section. Although these devices will usually be "good enough", they have to cut corners somewhere to keep costs down, in my experience the thing that tends to suffer the most on these devices is the display. You'll get displays that are either too bright or too dim (or both), overly saturated, visibly pixilated, often made out of plastic instead of glass, etc. I installed a BOSS audio head unit with carplay in my son's car, and while it gets the job done, the underwhelming quality of the display simply cannot stand up to the intensity of the sun in Phoenix, AZ. It's basically useless in the afternoon, and somehow too bright to use comfortably at night, so if you can afford it, I'd highly recommend going with a premium name brand stereo, eg; Pioneer (I've always been partial to Pioneer car audio gear), Alpine, Sony, etc.As for this head unit, the Pioneer MVH1400NEX, the user experience is as good, if not better than any OEM unit with CarPlay (save for a few bells and whistle some cars may have, like my Dodge Challenger with the HVAC controls in the head unit, a Wifi hotspot, etc.). The display is bright and crisp, although in my opinion it's slightly oversaturated, but that could just be a personal preference... It has a lot of extra features which are nice to have, but stay out of the way and never feel gimmicky, such as being able to set the RGB color of the capacitive controls on the side of the screen to match the rest of the in-dash illumination in my truck. Although the head unit itself support bluetooth and has "appradio" integration for several apps like Pandora and Spotify, I pretty much exclusively use CarPlay. No, not pretty much. I exclusively use CarPlay. I can't imagine a situation where I would ever opt to use the built in UI over CarPlay. Apple is a company that has built a rabid fan base solely on the strength of their UX. I don't care how good your hardware is, nobody is going to beat Apple at their own game, which is why I love CarPlay - it puts all that Apple design/UX goodness onto (virtually) any stereo. You get to pick your hardware, they provide the software. Win:win.The audio quality is good, but I feel like virtually all stereos with at least a 7 band graphic equalizer these days are going to have more or less the same or similar audio quality. Integrating with the car's factory Rockford Fosgate amp (it's only a 50W amp, but it drives the 8 speaker setup quite nicely) means that my tunes are plenty loud and sound good. I may add a real amp (and by "real" I mean, hundreds of watts, and needs a dedicated power supply from the battery) and a couple subs at some point, but I can't imagine needing to upgrade the Rockford Fosgate speakers.Your mileage may vary, but after purchasing the correct wiring harnesses (plural - my 2015 Nissan Titan needed SEVERAL to retain all of the factory features like steering wheel controls, rear backup camera and factory Rockford Fosgate amplifier, factory USB ports in the center console, etc.), the experience using this head unit has been nothing short of amazing. I added a CarLinKit 3 wireless CarPlay dongle which works fine with this unit after the initial setup, although the connection time does take a few seconds longer than just plugging in a lightning cable. Now all I need to do is hack a wireless charging pad into my dash and I'd call this setup about as close to perfect as it's going to get.