It’s almost impossible to realize you’re in the good times when you’re in the good times. Back in 2007, oh so many years ago, I reviewed the 2007 Dodge Caliber SRT4. It’s the only version of the pseudo-crossover econobox people have any respect for, and even that respect is heavily caveated. There are few car enthusiasts in existence who wouldn’t rather have the Neon SRT4 or ACR that preceded it.
I had a few crabby, negative things to say about the car. The vibes at Chrysler were not great, and the vehicles were all designed under the shadow of an impending bankruptcy. History has been kinder to many of these cars in a way I wasn’t at the time. There were some obvious issues I couldn’t overlook, which probably colored me against the car’s glorious iPod dock.
If you weren’t of driving age in and around 2007, then there’s a little bit of scene-setting I need to do in order to place you solidly in pre-Obama, post-9/11 America. It was quite a time. Hayden Panettiere was a person. Johnny Depp wasn’t sus. Dick Cheney almost waxed a guy with a shotgun. If you loved cars and had an iPod, you probably got much of your car news from places like The Car Lounge or NASIOC, or maybe even FerrariChat if you were (or desired to be considered) in a different tax bracket.
What was 2007 like? Look at this photo from the reveal of the Caliber. It was like that.
[Editor’s Note: What the hell am I looking at? Are those clowns in something that looks like a cross between protective rain gear and the Handmaid’s getup from Gilead? This is terrifying. I’m not okay with whatever this was. – JT]
Living in Chicago in 2007, I listened to music via what I remember was a 4th-generation iPod (the 3rd generation with the four little buttons was the best, don’t @ me). This music would have been a strange mix of relatively high-quality AAC files I cherry-picked from artists I liked for $0.99 a piece from Apple’s iTunes Music Store and hilariously low-quality MP3s ripped from, like, LimeWire or something.
If you didn’t have a fully developed cerebral cortex at the time, then you missed the strange situation where many of these questionably downloaded albums would sometimes lack key songs. Imagine owning “Exile On Main St.” by The Rolling Stones without “Ventilator Blues” or Liz Phair’s “Exile in Guyville” without “Never Said.”
People owned music in a way almost no one does anymore. When I download an album from Apple Music, I’m basically “renting” it from them, and if I kill my Apple account, I’ll no longer be able to access that music. In the early 2000s, you could still regularly “buy” music in the more traditional sense of owning a copy of a song or a record. As people amassed larger and larger libraries of music, it became necessary to build devices like the iPod, which was basically a portable hard drive. By 2007, I think my iPod had 40 GB of storage, which equates to roughly 10-12,000 songs depending on the encoding.
While CDs and terrestrial radio were still the primary way of listening to music in cars, automakers were starting to realize there was more support needed to get young people to buy their cars. The easiest and cheapest solution was an AUX-in port that would allow users to hook up any player they wanted, although power to the device would have to be supplied by the 12-volt cigarette lighter. More ambitious companies installed hard drives in the car, which was both expensive and impractical, given that to update your music you’d have to frequently connect to a bulky laptop or desktop.
The smartest solution? Some kind of magical cord that would both power a portable device and transmit the data necessary to play songs. Chrysler, which had become defined by the words cheapest and easiest, surprisingly came up with a solution that’s better than what you can get now.
I Would Honestly Use This Today
The 2007 Caliber was the successor to the Dodge Neon, a popular and attractive car that was premised on the belief that America could engineer a reliable competitor to Japanese alternatives like the Toyota Corolla. Rather than build on that success, Chrysler anticipated a “Merchants of Cool” future with a fearful, cowed population that wanted tough vehicles to protect them from… well, they never quite said.
The efficient and friendly Neon was replaced by the Caliber, which was under attack by bugs in the sales material. Efficiency no longer seemed as important as a beefy, more SUV-like facade. Given that gas prices were quickly climbing and America’s GDP was about to crash to the ground, this was exactly the wrong message.
When I reviewed the car for Jalopnik, I enjoyed the speed but was underwhelmed by the build quality, writing:
The SRT4 carries over a reasonable amount of storage from the base Caliber, including the Chill Zone storage above the glove compartment. This feature can keep water bottles cool—perfect for 14-degree Chicago weather. The interior contains the cheapest cut plastics I’ve seen in a long time, but at least it has a built-in iPod dock for when the kids want to play their spiffy tunes.
Did I really write “Spiffy tunes”? Yeesh.
I took for granted that the iPod dock would be, for me, about as good as a car interface would get for music.
Here’s how Chrysler described it at the time:
The Dodge Caliber features a standard auxiliary input jack for playing music from a portable MP3 music player, which allows the owner to play the music through the Caliber’s speakers. Optional radios feature CD players capable of playing all types of audio CDs, including MP3 and Windows Media Audio (WMA) formats. To make listening to music from an MP3 player easily accessible, Caliber’s armrest lid includes a unique flip pocket for storing a cell phone or an MP3 player.
That’s great. I drive all sorts of cars now, and the goal, understandably, is to get the music device (a phone, now) as far away from the driver as possible. In an Escalade, you push your phone into a charging cavern. Most vehicles have some sort of charging pad that barely works and causes the phone to slide around with the lightest of turns.
Look how useful this is. It perfectly fits an iPod, it has a little slot to put your docking cord (here a Monster cord) so it connects with the optional radio with MP3/WMA capability. I could see myself dialing up the first Handsome Boy Modeling School album and just cruising forever.
Even better, the Caliber came with the “MusicGate Power Liftgate” to blast, I don’t know, Black Eyed Peas out of the back of your Caliber.
For me, it doesn’t get a lot better than this.
Chrysler understood the “Bring Your Own Device” concept early and created a solution that would be at home in many new cars today. When I drive my early 2000s BMW I have a clunky magnetic clip that blocks one of my air vents, causing my phone to overheat in the winter. Because I have a manual transmission, I have to run a long USB-C cord around the shifter.
Wireless CarPlay is a delight in many ways, but I’m skeptical of most wireless charging pads, which means I most often just plug in my phone anyway. Could this work today? Maybe. The iPhone isn’t as ubiquitous as the iPod, meaning that the dock would have to be adjustable to phone size, but with the mass acceptance of USB-C, the cord situation should be fairly straightforward.
It’ll never happen, though, as automakers are investing heavily in screens of their own. There is one automaker working on this, however, which is Slate.
Maybe we’re living in the good times again…
I built a hard-wired, felt-lined, cassette-like slot into the blank trim panel under the HVAC controls in the center console of my GR86. It doesn’t slide anywhere even at 1g and takes no space from anything. I don’t know why there aren’t more commercial solutions along similar lines rather than just janky, tacked-on, ugly, appendages hanging from whatever parts of the interior they can cling to.
I own all my music, in physical form. Music for work purposes, I’ll source online from someone’s account, and capture the audio and convert it. But in my own collection, its all CDs and vinyl.
I do have a box full of cassettes that I have digitized. These are releases there were either bootegs, indie releases, old radio airchecks, albums out of print never available on any other format in my lifetime, or albums that are out of print AND were never released in the US at all, and thus, not easily or cheaply replaceable if my backup drive ever dies.
That being said, something like this iPod holder, but for phones, seems like a no brainer. I don’t want my phone down in the console, I want it up where I can see it.
No automaker currently makes an infotainment system as versatile – much less portable – as my damn phone.
Just give us a factory phone holder/wireless charging station with Bluetooth connectivity in the center stack of the dash. No screens. For ANYTHING. Buttons, knobs, switches, and sliders for ALL INTERIOR CONTROLS. Just include the amp, speakers, and perhaps a Bluetooth mic. Boom. Done.
The first automaker to offer this as an option can declare victory and go home, because they will have won the war of automotive infotainment.
Using your phone for everything while driving is inherently dangerous, that’s why things like carplay and AA exist.
In a dash mount, it is no more inherently dangerous than an FM radio.
My car radio(/CD player) has physical controls I can use without needing to look at it. My phone does not.
My steering wheel does.
You might think this, but the stats overwhelmingly say that it isn’t
“Hey Google/Siri, give me directions to the nearest Buc-ee’s, and play me some Alan Parsons project on the way there.”
I was just thinking yesterday that my 2019 AllTrack is more or less the sweet spot: every actual car control is a physical button/dial, there’s a modest-sized screen integrated into the center stack (no idiotic tablet-on-the-dash), Bluetooth for keeping my phone in my pocket when I’m in and out of the car, and a cable where the ashtray would have been, so I can charge my phone securely while CarPlay is doing its thing. It’s a bigger screen and better interface than just trying to use my phone on a stand, but it’s also totally optional.
You must be a Handsome Boy graduate.
Whelp, there’s an ear worm. Time to boot up A Day in the Life on the way home today.
You won’t be sorry for long!
Post-911/Pre-Obama was very much my era. In this house we refer to it as “Adult Swim First Year-7” although it is acceptable to abbreviate it to Years “1-7 P.S.” (“Post Shrek”).
Lately I increasingly give off “Old Man Yells at Cloud” vibes when I lament the lack of these quirks and gimmicks in modern cars.
Concept cars like the Ford 427 and Dodge Kahuna hinted at a fun, bright future that never came to be (damn Sports Almanac!)
It turned out the fun stuff was right in front of us the whole time, hiding in a refrigerated glove box or a built-in removable cooler.
As my memory rests
But never forgets what I lost
Wake me up when September ends…
Shuffle gears AND songs with iPod and AutoStick. Join Dodge and Apple in revolutionizing your commute!
Despite the fact that I was only in middle school in 2007, I’m still firmly in the camp of owning my own music. My collection of 150 or so iTunes songs has cost me, oh, $148.50 over the course of my entire life, whereas if I’d put that money towards a subscription, it would only cover music listening needs for a year or so.
Little known fact, you can still buy music from the iTunes store in the year of our Lord 2025. Sure the iTunes app is gone, but buried in the Apple Music app (on a PC) is the option to access the iTunes store and buy a single song for 99 Cents, just like its 2007 all over again. Except the difference between now and 2007 is that when I buy a $0.99 song today, it immediately shows up in my iPhone’s Apple Music app and I can immediately download it and keep it forever, no subscription required.
I appreciate the point Matt is making, but buying individual songs + Apple Carplay is peak infotainment for me. The good times are still rollin’.
If my music library were only 150 songs, I’d go crazy faster than a retail employee during Christmas season.
As someone who feels similarly about hearing the same Christmas songs over and over again, I get it.
I guess I just listen to music less often then most people. Sometimes silence is golden.
I still use an iPod! It’s a Touch; I still have my Classic, but it’s developed an issue where all audio output regardless of device has a little static. All of my upgraded vehicles have USB cables running from the stereo to a glove box or center console. The ’09 Grand Cherokee shipped with a weird, chunky proprietary connector for the iPod (30 pin). I was able to disconnect the cable, but I’m left with an empty socket in the glove box.
I remember that connector, my 4th Gen iPod Nano had one of those! It still feels crazy to me that we didn’t get the lightning port until 2012.
I still remember the massive amount of stuff that existed specifically to accomodate that connector. I have a Yamaha receiver that had an optional 30-pin dock (with its own special proprietary connector, of course). And as others have mentioned, it’s always a little funny to encounter a clock radio with one of those connectors in a hotel room.
Me too! I’ve got a 4th gen iPod (now retrospectively referred to as the “Classic”, the same as the one pictured above) that I assembled out of two broken ones, then bought a new hard drive for.
I don’t use it often, but I go through periods where I have it mounted in a dock that slots into the 12v socket with a long flexible neck, in my old ’91 Grand Wagoneer, then wired into an aux-in.
Sound quality is great, and I always liked that these older iPods could go to a much higher volume than the newer ones!
I remember a rental Volkswagen not too long ago (ok, like 10 years…) that had cable adapters that you connected in the glove box to be able to connect an iPod to the stereo. The groundbreaking iPod tech seems so archaic now. I couldn’t fathom having to have an adapter to a proprietary connection buried in a glove box just to listen to ripped copies of burned CDs my roommate share with me.
I don’t think I’ve heard Liz Phair mentioned since…. well let’s just say a long, long, time.
I’m keen on this Slate idea, if I can just staple a cheap Android tablet to the dash I’d rather have that. It solves the problem of Doug coming along 15 years from not pointing out the quirks and features of an outdated infotainment system.
watch the video of them showing off that dash storage, the flaps will be broken off so fast
That was a preproduction vehicle, fairly certain those will be using better staples by the time it’s released to the public.
Slates idea is good, but not new. 10+ years ago I remember a few low-cost cars in developing countries had an integrated phone mount. Ford of India (Figo? Ikon?) had one on the top of the dash. A pop up door with compartment like a lot of cars had, but this one somehow had a ratchet mechanism that would clamp down on the phone so you could prop it in landscape. Charge port and maybe an aux was nearby. I think VW up! had some kind of holder, maybe Dacias did too.
I refuse to put any sort of phone mount in my car
most of the time when I look to see whats on them, people are using them to watch videos or facetime while driving
You do you. But having maps and music is more than half the reason I have a smart phone.
thats what carplay is for
I can use maps and navigation without all the other things and my phone never has to leave my pocket
I use an old Android as a music storage device, all my favorite ripped CD’s are stored on it. I set it up on a suction cup windshield gooseneck next to the A-pillar. I ran remote USB power and a 3.5 mm jack up to it. Did the same with power and AUX on my older Acura SUV. Tap it to power up the screen to change albums or songs, then it goes dark again.
Dodge Caliber and the Space Shuttle
https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?PHPSESSID=3gg8c1e0a82o5qnlg4u7heij1g&action=dlattach;topic=57504.0;attach=2138107;image
I worked on iPod accessories in this time frame. You can see one in the shuttle pic above.
The problem with close fitting accessories, like this kind of dock, was always that the iPod dimensions, particularly thickness, varied between dimensions. If you wanted any iPod to fit you had to include different thicknesses of padded insert,
Today cellphone sizes vary wildly even within the same company / product / model. Then add first and third party cases and it’s a cluster. David’s recent BMW charger article shows a version of that. Modern phones don’t fit in the built in BMW charger because they are HUGE and BMW made no accommodation for that, probably never figured phones would get as large as they did.
It would be hard to build something like this ever again
I still have my iPod classic and use it every single day, the one I had way back in 05 was also used heavily and it absolutely influenced what car I bought.
when in mid 2005 Scion released their updated 06 tC that came with iPod connectivity, my decision was made then and there that was the car I wanted. It didn’t have a dock, but it was just in the armrest storage, which I really like how it keeps it hidden and out of the way.
and because of how staggered their car launches and Lego-ish their infotainment options were, I was able to replace that old radio with the newer updated ones from much later, that replaced the proprietary plug to a standard USB.
I hate that I’ll lose my iPod connectivity when I have to finally replace the car.
im sorry but wireless carplay with spotify is the greatest thing of all time.
Ive used ever other kind of car stero from the last 50 years, nothing beats getting in the car and having my shit ready to go without plugging anything in or adjusting volume on the player connected to the tape deck so you don’t get so much fuzz.
connecting the iPod is not even a huge deal or complicated, you do it once.
at that point it is ready to go just as quickly as having to wait for the phone to connect, I don’t have to worry about signal or bandwidth or draining my phone battery.
there is no volume you have to adjust or any fuzz, it’s not a tape deck, you plug it in and it sounds great and controlled through the radio the same way you would with airplay.
until you want to skip a song or someone asks to play something you don’t have saved on your iPod
wireless carplay is 1000% better than all of the old methods of playing music in a car, and most of the modern world agrees
you can go ahead and keep using outdated tech and pretend like its better
you are acting like it’s on a victrola or something though, lol.
I have thousands and thousands of songs on there up to recent, and I can skip or search through the head unit or steering wheel controls, exactly the same way you would through carplay, your situation of not having a request is not a realistic issue that would constantly be happening.
thousands of songs would be like just the beatles and eagles discography
there’s a lot of music out there, and I can pull up whatever I want as long as signal is good enough, otherwise I also have over 5K songs downloaded for offline play when driving through the boondocks
I know your username is “The Spirit of Jalopnik Past,” but this isn’t Jalopnik, and it’s perfectly ok here at the Autopian for people to have opinions that differ from yours.
There’s no need to get all butthurt and spam the comments section with “well, my elevated opinion is far superior to yours” type comments every time you disagree with someone.
But go ahead, prove my point and reply back to me with some sort of deeply offended holier-than-thou.
all I’m saying is that wireless CarPlay is objectively easier and safer than using an iPod for music in a car
I don’t know why you chimed in, maybe you should see a therapist instead of jumping into online arguments that don’t involve you whatsoever
easier and safer? you really are just trolling and being ridiculous.
the two things function *exactly* the same.
They connect and play music, you control them from the head unit.
I already am seeing a therapist.
Thank you for your concern. /s
they are either trolling or payed by apple and Spotify to argue with anyone using and happy with anything else.
some of their “points” aren’t even true to what they are so against.
Im just bored at work and youre a loser bragging about 20 year old tech in your scion
… said the weirdo who thinks that his Apple CarPlay + Spotify setup is a major flex that merits shitting all over anyone else’s setup.
I think its a major improvement over all the systems Ive used before it.
that’s all, you can keep being angry about this and try to win this pointless discussion.
Ive got what I wanted, which was to waste time at work
neat, the iPod literally the exact same but I never have to worry about signal because all up to 250gb worth is already there.
except mine is the same plus more
why are you this way, get help
you’re supposed “plus more” are entirely subjective, I’ve used it and it’s not beneficial or better from what I have.
you are the one that needs help, responding like I am trying to change your ways, when you are the one trying to change mine.
If youre happy living in 2005, I really couldn’t give a shit
… he says as he desperately tries to convince someone, anyone, that his way of listening to music is by far the best.
Im really not trying to convince anyone of anything, Im just stating my opinion
have a great day
Streaming pays the artist less, but using Spotify in particular, comes with some serious ethical concerns.
So regarding sound quality, Spotify (and all streamers), sound objectively worse/more compressed than a CD. If you can use a spectrum analyzer, you can see the difference. But wireless/bluetooth connectivity to any speaker (in or out of your car) is noticeably compressed even to untrained ears. Even with better codecs, signal degredation and interference are always present, even nominally.
But I think people should stop streaming because the streaming services are all a grift that pays artists even worse than the old label/studio system did…and having dealt with A&R reps back then, if you are worse than that, no one should deal with you except Satan himself…and even he might be aghast.
They pay comically low payouts to artists, use algorithmic manipulation, and restrict or block access to music you actually downloaded (and thus, own) by revocation of rights if you unsubscribe or if the service shuts down.
Regarding Spotify: they literally MADE UP artists to feed royalties back to themselves. In 2022 Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter revealed a composer named Johan Röhr was behind a network of 656 invented artists and 50 composer aliases, and his music streamed 15 billion times on the platform. He works directly for Spotify, who then get some of his publishing rights, and these songs in all genres are often the top recommended tracks. Even the ones that are covers.
Streaming has somehow made the old record industry look almost quaint and ethical, which is saying something. You can read more about this in the link below. But even in 2021 or 2022, people noticed that Spotify was doing weird stuff.
Personally I’d rather make sure the artists gets paid, actually own music, and have it sound better than streaming.
https://firstfloor.substack.com/p/liz-pelly-wrote-a-book-about-spotify
there is no ethical consumption, all of those CDs will sit in a landfill long after you’re done with them and the data on them has degraded beyond use.
My kids have already decided who gets which records and CDs when I die. They all have turntables. They were aware before I was that that artists are worse under streaming rates than getting royalties from physical media. They removed the apps from their phones on their own.
And while CD’s may degrade as all things do), using small computing drives and devices is an even less ethical form of consumption. My oldest CD was printed in 1984, and still plays just fine (Born in The USA from Springsteen).
RAM and flash storage drives degrade far faster than CDs, assuming both are used and stored properly. USB and other drives are considered volatile, as they can lose memory when the device is powered down, or even in storage. The chips that drive the phones have an even worse life expectancy, and their production process, the materials used, and disposal methods all contribute to pollution and resource depletion at a much faster rate than using recycled plastic to make records or CDs.
While all these forms of storage media for music are recyclable (even the drives), the carbon emissions from manufacturing and recycling HDDs and SSDs are significantly higher than they are for a record or a CD/DVD, in addition to their shorter shelf life.
I mean, your kids will die and all of that plastic will end up in a landfill.
That seems like a driving hazard. Have top touch the wheel just right, have to keep your eyes on it the whole time instead of watching the road.
Maybe this is a satiric article.
Just need a place to put the iPod so it doesn’t slide out or off the cord, while the audio system’s interface and remote control (or steering wheel for younger cars) allows one to search the iPod Touch.
My prior audio system had a “drawer” where the iPod sat, behind the audio face. Downside was that it baked the iPod if it was kept there in the heat. When I replaced the iPod Touch, the new one no longer fit. New audio system has a sloping (down and back) rack to keep both the iPod and my phone in place. Does not interface. Getting a new one soon.
You could control the playback from the radio itself, which was the only negative with these systems; if you had more than a few dozen albums/artists it made finding things impossible while driving. So it was a set before you drive off and pull over if you really need to change to something different.
That’s pretty much what I’m (supposed to be) doing.
The singular time I was distracted while driving and caused an accident was because I was eating while driving, I was 16 and ran off the road and knocked over a sign.
people caused accidents before cell phones existed.
Yes I’m well aware, my first accident was caused by looking at a mailbox too long and missing the brake lights in front of me. But trying to navigate 70 Gigabytes of music on a two line display with a jog wheel on the radio is far beyond even cell phone levels of distraction. Especially when it always defaults to starting at the top of the alphabet and you want to listen to Miles Davis or Skinny Puppy.
I mean, we all did it though the mid 2000s and only a handful of people dies who wouldn’t have found something else to distract them while driving
a screaming kid in the back seat is worse than someone scrolling through an iPod library while crusing the highway
You do you man, I wasn’t happy with the level of distraction it caused, and the modern version is far better.
People with ADHD will always find a way to be distracted, its in our blood
“Chrysler anticipated a “Merchants of Cool” future with a fearful, cowed population that wanted tough vehicles to protect them from… well, they never quite said.”
Sheesh – from creepy bloody-handed clowns, obv. <shudder>
A rare glimpse at Chrysler foretelling the future correctly.
Look at the number of SUVs and Pickups on the road now.
Yes, but… The Caliber in particular was the worst possible compromise of the Neon and a proto crossover.
Big outside small inside
High-er seating position low roof
Enormous heft (3200lb) with tiny engines and lousy transmissions
Bad fuel economy because blocky body and aforementioned weight
and I’m pretty sure AWD was reserved for the Jeep versions that followed
That would be standard Chrysler execution method.
It’s as though people think it’s a relatively new phenomenon under Stellantis.
Whatever’s going on in that image is probably still happening in Montreal today.
https://ibb.co/SXT8Mk3z
I will go to bat for the USB stick combined with modern infotainment screen as peak infotainment. If my kid wants to hear Monkeywrench, I can just tell the car to play Monkeywrench and it plays (hell, kid can almost tell the car himself if I push the button). It’s cheap, easy to update, always there, and being of a certain age, I have plenty of old CDs that’ve been ripped and saved in the car.
My Toyota does not play well with the USB stick, my Acura TSX did.
I’ve since ripped most CD’s to an old Android phone.
FLAC or .wav on a USB stick is The Way. Its music you always own at least a digital copy of, and the songs can be added or removed as needed by the user, not because of some rights issue between the streamer and the artist.
I had a Jeep Compass from this era and can confirm the plastics would cut you if you caught a panel the wrong way. I think it also had the iPod pocket in the console, I ended up putting a stereo with a detachable TomTom unit in it, state of the art at the time!
I hate how much I liked the Caliber when it came out. The coolbox! The rear swing down speakers! I wanted one bad!
Now, I almost appreciate when I see one in the wild that has survived!
Unfortunately, most Calibers suffered from a widespread, well-known problem in that they were owned by Caliber owners.
A similar problem confronts Altima owners.
At this point, it’s definitely best to re-caliberate your expectations.
Oh man, I haven’t thought about NastySock in ages. I was a ClubWRX guy, so the cool thing to do was rib other forums. The classifieds were better on NASIOC though. Got a lot of great Subaru bits off there.
I had a brief dalliance with a Saabaru and checked in there once in awhile.
I drove quite a few rental-spec Calibers back in the day. I don’t remember them having the iPod dock, or the facy speakers in the rear hatch. I suppose the rental-spec were just a lower caliber trim level.
I still have a Sony stereo head unit (at my parents house) which has built in iPod dock, as in the door in the face plate opens up an the iPod dock swings out, you plug in the iPod and push it back into the stereo and then control it from there.
https://www.sonyrumors.net/2010/06/03/sony-tune-tray-sticks-ipod-into-your-car/
I skipped the iPod trend completely (it was that “out of college, got no money, but I do have 300 CDs so why start with a whole new format?” situation) but I still get a nostalgic chuckle out of seeing the occasional iPod dock in a hotel or whatever.
I definitely had iPhones before Lightning (and now USB-C) and it quickly became a pain to find charging cables. If only I still had one of those iPhones, maybe I could crank my spiffy digital tunes at the nearest Drury Inn…
My spiffy digital tunes include one single U2 album.
I still have a series 1 Bose SoundDock with a later-gen (color screen, click wheel) iPod in it. They both work, though I haven’t seen the Bose remote in a very long time. They are on the light-duty workbench in the shop. 🙂
Handsome Boy Modeling School is, hands down, the best band named after a plot of a Get a Life episode. Fight me.
As soon as screens migrated away from being in-dash to “on dash” (you know, the glued-on look that just collects dust and makes the device look like it’s upgradeable or maybe folds down into the dash, even though 95% of the time that’s not the case) I realized the manufacturers were never going to stop foisting their own crappy interfaces on us.
General aviation, on the other hand, realized that they could never make a device as reliable and affordable as an ipad, so they actually certified to the iPad for in-flight use (mainly for charts, but still).
So just imagine an alternate timeline where carmakers focus on the car and just give us a mounting point for an ipad. In turn, Apple could offer “car-grade ipads” of a consistent size that might be a little bulkier, more temperature resistant, etc. That’s a win-win. It would be like DIN 2.0
Literally the only thing any of the Chrysler products of this era had going for them were the interesting trinkets.
This is true. Illuminated and heated/cooled cupholders. The dome light that you could pop out and use as a flashlight. The Journey with the bins in the floor that you could fill with ice. They obviously had some clever people there. Unfortunately, the interesting trinkets were surrounded by utter rubbish.
Spiffy tunes?!?
SPIFFY TUNES?!?!
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
I think I may be older than you, but I have NEVER said “spiffy tunes”.
You made my day, Matt. I’m smiling more at this than the fact that it’s my 30th wedding anniversary. Thank you so much!
Really showing the “elder” in my “Elder Millenial”
Unsure if we’re the same age or not but I personally like ‘Baby Gen Xer’ better than ‘Elder Millenial’ or even ‘Xennial’.
My 25th wedding anniversary is coming up and so is my time with this job (first job out of college for that matter.)
That feels weird.
I suspect we are about the same age, I’m 26 years now in my profession, and doubt I have ever used “spiffy” unironically.
To truly judge, we need to know how long it’s been since you used the word “snazzy”.
Be honest.
30 years? Congrats.
Thanks!! It’s been quite a ride.
(I hate myself for this, but one cannot let a setup like this go by…)
That’s what she said (for the last 30 years)!
Dirty minds think alike.