> And here I am driving a 2003 Golf with a tape deck (and CD player).

That sounds wonderful.

There was a brief, magical moment in history when cars would come with AM/FM radio, a tape deck, a CD player, and an aux port so that you could plug in audio from every other device that humanity would invent for the rest of time.

It feels like the most fleeting of moments, and it was so long ago. Maybe it was just one summer afternoon in the early 2000s.

Anyway, I think we've largely been going downhill since then. For whatever reason, humanity achieved a lovely little peak of engineering, and then we immediately abandoned it for worse options.

Don't forget the adapters that plugged into the 1/8" jack on your Sony WalkMan with a cassette shaped adapter that went into the tape deck. There are also those weird devices that plugged into the 1/8" jack with a low power radio transmitter to tune your in dash receiver to hear. (A local station I listen is on the low end where these devices operate. The station is lower powered college station with the transmitter located where I'm pretty close to the edge of its range. From time to time at stop lights, a stronger signal will come in to interrupt and disappears after the green and cars separate. I'm guessing one of these is being used)

Perhaps coincidentally, it was also around the same brief beautiful moment in time where one could talk with all of one's friends using a single messaging client, possibly even over federated XMPP.

When I was buying my last car, I was searching for something with a CD player option. Turns out there are no new cars with CD players and the last manufacturer to offer one was Lexus in 2022.

I ripped my collection to my phone and I use CarPlay and it works well enough. But still if I could, I'd buy a car with a CD player.

My next car might be a Slate truck because they supposedly support single or double DIN radios and there has to be an aftermarket option that would work.

> > And here I am driving a 2003 Golf with a tape deck (and CD player).

> That sounds wonderful.

I don't know if people are really serious but there seems to be a good market interest in car's that's not just equipped with touchscreens and Apple CarPlay. It's interesting (and perhaps understandable) how no car manufacturing is interested in tapping into such a niche segment.

I had that PLUS a mini-disc player, all stock on a dirt-cheap car.

I remember being blown away seeing one of those tape-deck to aux cable players for the first time. Plugging my late 2000’s era iPod into my early 90’s car was magical.

> That sounds wonderful.

Except that rust is eating it and I'll have to replace it soon-ish.

I had a car with just a tape deck. This turns out to be all you want.

I went through two phases:

1. I ordered some type of Walkman-like car kit that came with a portable CD player, glue strips to adhere the CD player to your dashboard, and a cassette tape adapter that plugged into an aux port (on the CD player) and inserted into the tape deck. I'd burn CDs to play in the car that way.

2. I got a Zen Stone, a tiny mp3 player with no screen that was easy to operate by feel. I stored mp3s on it... and plugged the cassette adapter that I still had into it. That was as good as in-car music can get without being voice operated.

They still make the adapters: https://www.amazon.com/Arsvita-Audio-Cassette-Adapter-Auxill...

If you could go back in time and show your younger self Spotify streamed wirelessly from a phone via AA/AC, now that would be magical. Pretty much endless amount of music delivered instantly.

But I understand that it is a different kind of magic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-kqUkZnDcM (VW Cabrion Pink Moon ad)

I donno Bluetooth is pretty universal now