You have a wired car aux solution that...provides a microphone, which I've never seen before but lets go with it. There are dongles that have microphone inputs (Cubilux Lightning to 3.5mm TRS Microphone Adapter with Headphone Jack), but I'm assuming you can't use those because the microphone and headset are sharing the same jack somehow?
Your car doesn't support bluetooth, and you use multiple generations of iPhones so you can't just leave the dongle in the car. This is unrelated to airpods since you can't use those while driving anyways.
AirPods are expensive, I get that, and you aren't satisfied with cheaper non-Apple options on amazon. I'm happy not using airpods, since I hate earbuds anyways, but I guess not everyone is like that. Would the non-existence of AirPods make things better? I haven't had trouble pairing my conductive headphones, I guess I don't notice any distortion because it is going through my bones anyways, and I'm not using mic.
> You have a wired car aux solution that...provides a microphone
No, by mic I mean taking calls and meetings on my earbuds/phones, which is a common requirement. Most earbuds have inlined mics sharing the same jack.
Car aux issue is separate. One of my cars does have BT, but that's even worse because the phones fight over it or the pairing sometimes doesn't happen. Maybe "pass the aux" is not a thing anymore and I'm the only one who wants passengers to play their own music sometimes, but this wasn't a problem before.
That said, I hate BT more and have been using the same Bose QC20 wired earbuds and Belkin adapters for 4+ years. There are semi-decent options out there.
Now my choices are:
- AirPods, which I don't want to shell out more money for and deal with charging/caring for them, but otherwise they'd be the best option.
- Non-AirPod BT headphones. I have nice Bose ones from work. These lack Apple's extensions to improve pairing and headset (mic) mode. In headset mode, the earphone quality drops to like worse than early 2000s cellphone. Standard pairing is annoying. It's a bit annoying having to charge them. I also don't want to shell out more money for earbuds (the headphones aren't so portable).
- Dongles, which I tried. Turns out they don't work with inlined mics, don't work with older iPhones (so I can't leave them on a shared car aux), are fragile, and are really easy to lose. Can't charge while using one either, but that's nbd. My car seats ate two and the last one broke. It also just feels stupid having to use these.
- Old iPhone. I kept my 6 until it broke. I still have a spare 5, no longer usable with AT&T, which I use to play music in the car.
Yeah I want to listen to music on my phone, but they've made it sufficiently annoying that I don't anymore. It's a clear regression.