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Choosing a driving route in CarPlay

January 6, 2026 at 9:05 PM by Dr. Drang

If you pay any attention at all to the Apple-centric web, you saw an explosion of links yesterday to this article by Nikita Prokopov, which rightly eviscerates the proliferation of menu icons in macOS 26. I may write up my thoughts on menu icons in a future post (short version: they don’t belong), but today I have something else on my mind. Like Prokopov’s post, it addresses the question, “Why the fuck has Apple forgotten the UI principles it knew forty years ago?”

If you’re using CarPlay and ask for directions, you’ll see a screen that looks like this:

CarPlay with alternate routes in Maps

That the default route’s Go button is gray while the alternates are green is a stupidity addressed by Sage Olson and Joe Rosensteel1, so I won’t bother.

What I will address is that whichever route you choose, you have to tap its Go button. Even though the full description of each route looks like a button, the only part that’s tappable is the part that looks like a button inside another button.

Is this just as stupid as having a dull color as the default and a bright color as the alternate? Yes. And Apple has known that descriptions should be click/tap targets since the very beginning of the Mac. Here, courtesy of Infinite Mac, is MacWrite 1.0 running on a simulation of an original Macintosh.

MacWrite Find window in Infinite Mac

I’ve brought up the Find window. It’s currently set to do a Whole Word search, but I can switch to a Partial Word search by clicking on the Partial Word radio button or anywhere on that button’s label. Even with a label that doesn’t look like a button, Apple knew it would be helpful to select the radio button if I clicked on its label. After all, what else could I possibly mean if I clicked on the word Partial?

Apple understood this in 1984. But now, in 2026, if I’m driving and ask Siri for directions to Starved Rock State Park, CarPlay doesn’t understand what I mean if I tap in the middle of either of those large gray buttons-that-aren’t-buttons.

Why, you may ask, would I even consider tapping outside the Go button? Because Apple has trained me for forty years to expect that I can tap on its label.

  1. Even Joe couldn’t find the Mastodon post where he complains about it, but we both remember that he did. ↩

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