With the new job with UTAC, I now find myself commuting a few days a week, spending a couple of hours each day in my truck, give or take. Depending on the traffic, it is 10 hours of driving. While I am not complaining ( Right now) about the time spent, I am, however, finding myself listening to a LOT more music, podcasts, and audiobooks than I have in the past decade while working from home.
For anyone that has ever been in my truck, it is more or less a base model missing a lot of bells and whistles, which was intentional on my part; I wanted 4x4 and Bluetooth to connect my phone outside of that, I didn’t want more features that would end up breaking and require costly repairs. Sadly, Bluetooth is ONLY for calls, and I can not play music over it, so I used the Twelve South AirFly Pro to stream music over my truck stereo. This has worked great in the year I have had it and since I started commuting.
Sadly, the aux cable plug on the stereo was not made well, and the connection inside seems to be on its last leg; I find myself adjusting the connection of the AirFly Pro numerous times during my travels and even the smallest bump in the road disrupts the playback.
A few weeks ago, before the connector had gotten to the point, it is now ( Almost unusable except on the smoothest of roads; mind you, I live in Michigan, and this does not exist), I started looking into a new head unit for my truck. This time around, I only needed one thing: CarPlay.
I settled on the Alpine iLX-W650 head unit. This unit comes in at a reasonable price, has wireless CarPlay, and must fit in my truck perfectly. This is set to arrive this Saturday, so I should have time to install it before my commute on Monday morning. I hope it will go smoothly, as it’s been 20+ years since I last installed an aftermarket stereo; it has to have gotten easier, right?