Review: Ford’s SYNC 4 Brings Wireless CarPlay to the 2021 F-150

2 years ago 73

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The massively popular F-150 pickup truck was one of the first Ford vehicles to gain the manufacturer’s new SYNC 4 infotainment system for the 2021 model year, and I recently had a chance to test out the vehicle to get a sense of how the overall system functions, including a key new feature for iPhone owners: wireless CarPlay.

If you’ve shopped pickup trucks before, you know that they come in a huge array of configurations with different trims, cab and bed sizes, engines, and more across a range of prices. While I didn’t get to test out the upcoming all-electric F-150 that’s been making headlines recently, my 2021 test vehicle was a Lariat trim 4×4 with SuperCrew cab and a 3.5L PowerBoost Full Hybrid engine.

With some additional options, my tester came to a sticker price of a little over $68,000, which is toward the higher end of the F-150’s expansive pricing range that starts at under $30,000 and can push past $80,000 fully loaded.

SYNC 4 Infotainment

The Lariat trim of the F-150 comes with a generous 12-inch infotainment screen for managing the SYNC 4 system and Ford says the hardware is twice as fast as that used in the SYNC 3 system. That makes for a responsive system that responds well when switching between functions and doing more intensive tasks like panning and zooming with built-in navigation.

SYNC 4 with built-in navigation

SYNC 4 is also designed from the ground up to be scalable across display sizes and aspect ratios, from the relatively traditional 8-inch and 12-inch display options in the F-150 to the large portrait-style screens in the Edge and Mustang Mach-E that get a slightly modified SYNC 4A system.

The overall look of SYNC 4 is quite similar to SYNC 3, with a simple look that generally lacks significant contrast and forgoes the increasingly common dashboard/widget home screen view for a split-screen view that al

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