Don’t spend hundreds of dollars and hours installing a new head unit. We just found the cheapest and easiest way to install Apple CarPlay in your car.
It has now become a common fixture in new vehicles to have Apple CarPlay and Android Auto as standard. In fact, less than 10 new cars on the market in Australia don’t have it as standard.
RELATED: We bought an AliExpress CarPlay head unit, so you don’t have to
However, not everyone has the means to buy a new car, leading aftermarket head units to be a popular option. But, these are often expensive and hard to install if you don’t have the proper training, or perhaps you’re like me, wanting to preserve the standard interior of your older car and keep it as close to stock as possible.
What if I told you there’s a system you can install within five minutes that doesn’t require a single tool?
In my search for modern luxuries for my early 2000s car, I came across what’s called a “portable Apple CarPlay head unit”.
What’s the cheapest way to get Apple CarPlay?
The idea is very simple: it’s an external tablet that can be mounted either via a suction cup, bolted to the dash or stuck down with double-sided tape. There is no wiring, cutting or even a single tool needed to make it work.
There is a wide range of options available, with prices starting as low as $30 and reaching around the $500 mark. Not being one that likes to wait, I ordered mine from Amazon and opted for a mid-tier unit that retails for around $150.
You have several different shapes and sizes to choose from, ranging from a 6.0-inch display to a 12-inch 4K tablet. I went for the 9.3-inch skinny screen so it wouldn’t take up too much space on my dash.
It comes with quite literally everything you need – the tablet itself, mounting points, a reversing camera, all the cables and instructions, not that you really need it, considering it’s pretty self-explanatory.
I will admit that an issue did arise early on. I couldn’t find a suitable spot to mount it – I didn’t want to use the sticky mount in case I damaged my nearly 25-year-old dash, and mounting it to the windscreen means it’s somewhat in the way. Despite this, I slapped it in the same spot I’d put a sat-nav.
There isn’t any legal maximum size of the screen you can mount on your windshield, but fines can be handed out at the discretion of the officer pulling you over if they deem it to be in a “distracting position”. Regardless, it’s probably a good idea not to put it anywhere that blocks your view.
From taking it out of the box to having my phone connected, it was about five minutes. You can run an AUX cable to your standard head unit, but I opted to use the AM/FM transmitter – which emits a radio frequency from the Apple CarPlay unit to transmit audio signals to your standard AM/FM radio already installed in your car.
All you need to do is pick a frequency on the Apple CarPlay unit, then tune the built-in car radio to that frequency and, voilà, completely wireless sound without the need to use a cable or have existing Bluetooth connectivity.
The sound quality is quite impressive for an AM/FM radio, certainly not comparable to those small cigarette lighter transmitters that have become a common fixture in old cars around the globe.
The screen itself does have some lag, but it’s definitely not as bad as the wire-in AliExpress head unit I installed back in 2024.
Quite possibly the weirdest part of the unit as a whole: it doesn’t disconnect your phone over time like literal factory-fit options available in standard cars. It simply works seamlessly, and even without an external microphone connected, Siri works a charm.
If I cared more about tidying up the interior, I could easily hide the USB-C cable somewhere under the dash so it doesn’t travel across the instrument panel, but for now it sits fine.
There are a few other features: you can simply use the radio or connect via Bluetooth to your phone, as well as a feature that mirrors your phone’s screen onto the unit – which is prohibited due to the restriction on displaying moving images on any device mounted in your car.
I will admit that there are a few mild annoyances compared to a standard unit. These include the fact that the screen moves slightly when you tap it and the loss of audio quality due to not being hardwired directly into the speakers.
However, for the most part, it’s a fairly practical solution to an issue many people seem to encounter when transitioning to an older car. I genuinely highly recommend it.
There are hundreds of different options available online. The brand I bought was called Aphoua, but they’re all pretty similar, with the main pricing differences being the type of display and the amount of RAM the system has (the more you have, the less laggy the screen will be).
Spend some time looking through the online reviews for each, and you might just find yourself with the cheapest and easiest Apple CarPlay head unit on the market.
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