I know there have been plenty of posts about CarPlay not working with iPhone 17 Pros, but I want to document my headache with it so far because Apple is being obstinate about it.
My wife upgraded from an iPhone 14 to and iPhone 17 pro a few months ago. As soon as she did, CarPlay stopped working. We tried in her Ford, my Honda, and a friend's Honda. 99% of the time it fails to connect at all. 1% of the time we might get a CarPlay screen that immediately freezes before eventually dying. The phone charges, but CarPlay does not work. Period.
We tried Beats cables. Didn't work.
We tried renaming the phone. Didn't work.
Reset network settings. Didn't work.
Forget car/phone from either end. Didn't work.
Nothing fixes it.
I opened a support ticket a month ago, and it was escalated to a tier 2 person who confirmed on the phone that there has been an issue with iPhone 17 Pro and CarPlay since the phone came out a year ago! Meanwhile, he stepped through every troubleshooting step under the sun for probably over an hour. He had me take photos of the ports, the cable ends, the stereo screen, the case on the phone...we even collected and submitted logs for the whole session.
I heard nothing for weeks.
I called back, and I was assured this new person would take ownership of the issue. She did not because the next callback I got was from some new person who had no idea what I was talking about. Then she put yet another person on the phone who also had no idea about the case but said she would take ownership. She read to me a message from the engineer who had been assigned the issue, and the engineer said something to the effect of "I have no idea what is being asked. What is the actual problem?" and then proceeded to request all the same information i had already sent and the lady on the phone confirmed she could see on the ticket herself. So this engineer was clearly being lazy and trying to get out of the ticket.
I finally had enough and just demanded a replacement phone. She said they had to first try an exact replacement, so they sent me another iPhone 17 Pro. After hours getting my wife's info transferred over, this phone too does not work with CarPlay! Not in any of our vehicles.
Now they are saying they need to escalate to an engineer and have requested all the same pictures and logs that I already sent them a month ago!
This is absolutely maddening. I told them just to send me a 16.. i don't care if it's a downgrade. This 17 model is trash. TBD on how they will respond.