I'm a pretty normal human with pretty normal human hands. And that means I hate modern phones that are much too big for normal human hands. I believe physical phone design peaked in 2020 with the iPhone 12 Mini. The iPhones 12 and 13 Mini are about the same size as the iPhones 4 and 5, which fit my normal human hands perfectly. The iPhone 13 Mini is a marginal upgrade over the iPhone 12 Mini, and the exact same size and shape, so that's what I still use today in 2026. And luckily for me, Apple has committed to supporting the iPhone 13 until 2030, which means I have four more years to find a replacement phone. However, this comes with some obvious tradeoffs.
One of the most obvious problems is that the iPhone 13 still uses the silly Apple Lightning connectors instead of USB-C. And therefore I can only use Lightning accessories. This doesn't matter most of the time. The iPhone 13 has wireless charging and I use that every day. My headphones are also wireless. But there's one thing I still have to wire into, and that's my car stereo. The unfortunate reality is that although contemporary Bluetooth is a brilliant technology, the most modern Bluetooth standards still don't have anywhere near the bandwidth required for even an old CD-quality audio signal. And that means my excellent car stereo requires a wired connection to my phone. And that means I'm stuck with Lightning.
Lightning has been a pain for me since I first built my car stereo back in 2019. The only way I can get an HD audio signal out of my phone is through a USB-to-TOSLINK adapter. And to connect that USB adapter to my phone, I need to use the Apple Camera Adapter which converts a Lightning port into a USB-A 2.0 port. Unfortunately, none of these accessories were really designed to work in car environments. Cars are hot and noisy and full of vibration. I can buy third party Lightning Camera Adapters for $10, but whenever I drive over rough roads, the signal cuts out. I can buy Apple-brand Lightning Camera Adapters for $40, but they now have firmware problems. Whenever I plug them in to my phone, audio plays for about five seconds, and then a window pops up telling me I need to upgrade the firmware. The firmware in the adapter. So I click "upgrade", and then nothing happens. It never gets upgraded. Not immediately, and not after an hour. And then the next time I plug in my phone, the same thing happens again. Audio plays for five seconds, then gets interrupted with another upgrade popup. And the upgrade never happens. So Apple-brand adapters are out. That means I need to make those cheap third-party adapters reliable.
Assuming my problem is vibration and loose physical connections, the obvious thing to do is to simply eliminate physical connections. I cut open all of my adapters and wired and soldered everything together directly.
This was pretty straight forward. No magic; just trimming PCBs, removing ports, and soldering pads together using magnet wire. After testing that it all worked as expected, that I can get power in through USB-A and HD audio out through TOSLINK combined into the same Lightning connector, I printed a box to hold it all and potted everything in place. It works very well and took a few hours to build. This should hold up through at least 2030.
This is the old jumble of adapters vs the new all-in-one solution.