I love the idea of using a cassette slot as a device dock. Much more elegant than those old “cassette tapes” with the aux wire hanging out of them.
Obviously the whippersnapper didn’t check to see if his iPhone was Dolby compatible first.
Typewriters, car window cranks, payphones, et al.
I’m sure that for a while you could by an MP3 player (yes kids it used to be a separate device rather than part of your phone) which was built into a tape adaptor, so you could just pop it into your cassette player. If I recall it also noticed if you tried to fast-forward the tape and would skip tracks.
Just looked, someone is still making new ones:
Not only that, the cassette deck clearly isn’t compatible with metal.
I feel like this is the car stereo repair shop urban legend equivalent of the classic helpdesk story about broken retractable cupholders in computers.
ok, now do an 8-track.
That is so cool, and I would have killed to have one of those things back in 2004.
Having manned the helpdesk and been responsible for teams that man the helpdesk for quite a few years I’m convinced the broken retractable cupholder was real. For quality assurance purposes I listened to a call where a helpdesk agent asked a customer “What lights are on on your DSL modem?” to which the person replied: Wash cycle, Rinse, Spin.
Yes, he asked for more detail, and the cables were indeed somehow hooked up to her digital washing machine which she was adamant, could be used as a modem.
My son wanted you know how many thousands of movies you could put on our VHS cassettes. He was not impressed when I told him the answer.
Come to think of it, if we’re talking 480i video, encoded with some very careful settings using H.264, and using Opus for the audio codec, I think you could probably cram 3 to 5 feature length films into a 120 minute VHS without losing any perceptible quality.
That this kid is dumb enough to take his Ford into a GMC dealership makes the story a little more credible.
That’s not just an urban legend. I’ve met people who broke their CD tray trying to rest a drink on it. I also know someone who tried to operate the mouse with their foot.
That’s what I was thinking as well. It would be cool, but it would be hard to see the screen.
Having done it for many years, I had coworkers claim that it happened to them, but I also had people tell me nearly every story in early Snopes happened, I chalk it up to a joke that mutated into the “it happened to me” and customers in the know who attempted to prank the phone jockey. I don’t think it ever happened to anyone sincerely.
Yes, that’s what everyone from Snopes says.
Snopes isn’t always right. They have to correct themselves from time to time. Maybe this topic is one of those times.
Urban legends propagate themselves because people take stories and apply it to themselves, sometimes the stories need to end.
Persons hear a funny story and then narrate as if it happened to themselves. It’s the nature of unreliable narrators and urban legends. Us humans are natural storytellers.
It’s a bit meta when you think something real is an urban legend though, innit? That’s getting into The Eagle Has Landed territory.
