Farewell to my faithful car audio adapter

As we act to send our 2005 Toyota Prius to its next life, I have to admit, I’m not particularly tied to the car. It was my wife’s car until we traded in my Corolla for our Prius wagon. What hits me harder is the loss of the car audio adapter and dock I put together and refined over the years.

Yeah, I still have the gear and pulled it out of the Prius, but it’s too dated now to use in another car. The old Prius has a CD changer and a cassette player, no auxiliary or USB input. That meant the only way to connect audio was through a cassette adapter, which even a 10-year old car wouldn’t have. Wanting to connect my iPhone 3G using a single plug, I used a 30-pin dock connector with separate audio output to support power and audio.

I later added an audio splitter and Bluetooth adapter, so I could skip plugging in my iPhone on short drives. I wound up not using this much because direct audio was so much better, especially back then. Still, I never eliminated it from the setup.

The big step forward was incorporating an Apple Universal Dock with remote control. The dock (and a lot of the stuff in the photo) fit in a translucent compartment in the dash. I kept the remote in a gap in the middle console between the seats. It was never any closer in reach than the iPhone screen, but it had the tactile feel of a button, and it was instant. We have button control in our other Prius, and I’ve tried Bluetooth controllers, but they suffer from a split second lag vs zero lag on the RF controller. Using that remote is simply a superior experience. This was during my iPhone 4/4S era.

The next update came after I upgraded to the iPhone 5 series, briefly with the 5 and 5c before 5s. It’s a whole thing I only half remember now, but it ended when I upgraded to a 6, which I quickly dumped when the SE came out. Anyway, this update was driven by Apple’s change from 30-pin dock to Lightning. I started with the short adapter before switching to the extended cable adapter shown in the photo. As you can see, that cable did not keep its outer skin, but it never stopped working.

The physical mount went through several iterations, most of which were just bad, until I combined a Nite Ize Steelie magnetic mount with a GorillaPod phone/camera clamp. This has been my go-to mount ever since. I have one in the other Prius, which I recently upgraded with the Steelie MagSafe mount after upgrading to my current iPhone 13 mini — six years after I landed on that generation 1 iPhone SE.

Through every iPhone I’ve owned, from 3G to 13 mini, I’ve had some form of that audio adapter in that Prius. Like the Ship of Theseus, most of the parts were replaced over the years, but I do know the cassette adapter is the original. It was the key component from the start. Though it was ejected many times by accident or mechanical error, it never had to be removed and thus never had to be changed.

The real star, though, is that Apple Universal Dock. It’s an iPod era relic with 30-pin dock that’s only usable thanks to a Lightning adapter, which is itself outdated. Granted, it can only supply 5W of power, but it still handles audio, and it still works with the remote. It is my longest lasting piece of fully functional Apple tech by a mile.

Well, all things must end, and even though there’s no place for this kitbashed solution in the age of CarPlay and advanced Bluetooth audio, none of that can match the feel of a clicky remote under my thumb.