The End of an Era
My 18-year-old car has a CD player. Well, it had a CD player, anyway. About 6 months ago the CD player started acting pretty funny, and it's gotten flakier ever since until it finally failed a few weeks back.
Getting ahold of a replacement head unit (a factory one), was not really in the cards: they're expensive and kind of hard to get (after 18 years). So I bought a cheapy drop-in replacement head unit that's basically an android tablet that connects to my phone. I swapped it in on a Saturday morning.
I haven't really worked on a car beyond changing a tire or filling fluids in 15 years, so tearing the dash open to get the radio out was a blast from the past. I miss probing around and seeing the guts of a car, but I definitely do not miss dropping retaining bolts down into the dash and then having to fish them back out. Thankfully, this time I could reach the spot it landed with a little squeezing, and I didn't have to go tie a magnet to a string like in the old days. I haven't cussed that hard in a minute, and I hope my neighbors weren't too put out by my stupid ass yelling "Fuck a Duck" early on a Saturday morning.
The new head unit is pretty spiff. Being able to see navigation info large and at dash height is really cool, and the phone integration is nicer than most in-car infotainment systems I've interacted with because it just let's me interact directly with all the apps on my phone instead of funneling all the info through some narrow, goofy car-specific software. It can even plug into my phone directly for a more stable connection and it'll charge my phone while I'm driving, which will be clutch on long drives. Overall pretty cool, but I recognize that I'm just now, in 2026, moving into the world everyone else with a non-ancient car is already living in.
But, it's a little sad too. I have thousands of CDs, collected painstakingly over 30 years. When I bought this car, CDs were still the main way I listened to music. These days, while I do most of my listening on a computer, I still listened to CDs in the car until last weekend. And now, my carefully curated CD collection is no longer technology in use. It's decorative (or, at best, an emergency music backup). I still have an optical drive that I could use to listen if I really wanted to, but I've long since ripped them and listen to bit perfect copies of the discs digitally. My phone has my entire CD collection on it, so now I can listen to anything in the car instead of just the 10 or 20 discs I have with me.
The new situation is objectively better, but it's the end of an era and it hurts a little.