The High Cost of Car Ownership
From John in response to The Carless Generation:
That was an interesting article, Charles. I wonder, however, if the
numbers for this same group go up when they get married and start a
family.
Fiat 850 Spider
I suspect overall that the lower car ownership percentage is tied
more to cost than to any other cause. I think back to the first car I
bought in 1970 at the age of 21. It was a little Fiat 850 Spider, in a color
Fiat called "Positano Yellow". I paid $2,420 for it, as I recall. I was
still in college, so I paid for the car over three years, with a
monthly payment of about $61. In 1972, when I entered the US Army for a
two-year active duty tour, my salary added up with all the allowances
to about $8K a year. That $2,420 was about about 30% of my take-home
pay.
A new sports car today, however, is likely to cost at least $20,000
for a low-end Japanese model. A new college grad making say $30K can't
afford that car, as the cost is over twice, as a percentage, of what I
paid in the early '70s. I ran into the same thing as a husband and
father. The cost of a new car was just too high, and for that reason
I've bought used cars exclusively since 1972.
The same thing is true of home ownership. One of my daughters and
her husband were able to buy a nice house in an established
neighborhood, but their single friends, lacking two incomes, rue the
fact that they're stuck in apartments.
Back on cars, most kids today don't have the mechanical know-how
that is needed, especially when buying a used car. My 20-year-old
engineering son, who's a sophomore at the University of Tennessee,
where his two older sisters also matriculated, says he was shocked at
how ignorant of tools and mechanical workings his engineering
classmates are. He learned a lot of what he knows from his old dad, but
many kids today either don't have a dad in the home or have one who's
distracted and uninterested in these sort of things.
Young adults today are faced with lots of economic difficulties, and
for the most part those difficulties are tougher than the ones we
faced. Government, with its bloated bureaucracy and profligate
spending, has made things worse.
As always, this is just my 2¢ worth on the subject.
Merry Christmas! Jesus is coming and will make all things right, in
His good time!
John
Hi John,
I agree; it's a different world from when we were
young. I'm a longtime Fiat fan and am tickled that Fiat, under
Canadian-Italian CEO Sergio Marchionne, is now running Chrysler. I
admired the Fiat 850 Spider back in the day (beautifully styled and
turned out for an inexpensive car), but my sports cars were MGs.
According to a handy online inflation calculator,
inflation since 1970 has been 478.84%, so your $2,420 Fiat 850 would be
$14,007 today. Your $8K income then would be equivalent to $46,304
today - far more than all but a few twenty-somethings make, and I
suspect that most car buyers with that level of income are driving cars
costing more than $14K today, and cars in general are indeed more
expensive to buy and maintain even adjusted for inflation. However,
cars are also a lot more reliable and longer-lasting nowadays, so
direct value comparisons are tricky.
Yes, kids these day for the most part seem to be
pretty helpless when it comes to practical life skills. But there are
exceptions. My eldest daughter is a skilled and accomplished hotrodder
- can weld, rebuild engines and transmissions, and makes her living by
times as a mechanic, but she is also a computer phenom who has worked
in Windows tech support, although she's a consummate Mac fan, and can
fix most anything. My other daughter, who is working on a doctorate in
the History of Science and Technology at Harvard, is less
technologically and mechanically oriented than her sister, but can do
light carpentry, operate a chainsaw, swing a splitting maul
efficiently, grow vegetables, and keeps her MacBook up and running.
Merry Christmas,
Charles
The Car as an Appliance
From Lloyd:
Greetings, Charles:
I enjoyed your musings on "The Carless Generation". It made me think
about a few things. Here they are:
1967 AMC Ambassador
When I grew up in the late '60s and 70s, Dad did most of the
driving. (My mother had a license, but I doubt if she drove 100 miles
before I turned 18.) The cars Dad bought were not sports cars; they
were family sedans. Nonetheless, they were big and powerful: think
'67
Ambassador, '69 LeSabre, and
'71
Catalina. They may not have been flashy, but they were masculine.
Once, after picking me up after school, he told me that he'd just had
the Catalina's 455 cubic inch motor tuned up, and to show me how much
better it ran, he hit the gas. From a standing start, 0-50 in six
seconds. That's not good enough to drag race on Woodward Ave. with, but
pretty good. And Dad would have my older brother hand him tools when he
would work on them in their back yard. These experiences were typical
for kids growing up in and around the Detroit of my youth.
Compare that to what Generation Y grew up with. Their formative
automotive experiences were with Mom's minivan, being taxied around by
its underpowered 4-banger to after-school events. Unlike Dad's
Ambassador SST, the Caravan wasn't always kept clean and waxed - a mark
of pride of ownership. The minivans smell of French fries that found
the floor instead of Junior's mouth, have dirty carpet, and need a
wash. Mothers, especially single ones, may be too busy to primp a car,
but the other explanation I offer is that, for them, a minivan is an
appliance, nothing more.
So the contrast is a generation that grew up in a one-car household
where cars were associated with masculinity to one where unsexy minivan
appliances were associated with femininity. In the '70s, kids walked or
biked to most destinations; a car meant freedom. In the '90s, kids
expected to be chauffeured everywhere by helicopter parents.
The above may help to explain why today's youth don't look to cars
as must-have items. They don't need them for freedom and associate them
with feminine role models, something that won't motivate boys to dream
big and save their money in the hope and expectation of having their
own.
Thank you for sharing your "Miscellaneous Ramblings" with us once
again. Merry Christmas,
-Lloyd
Hi Lloyd,
Your dad and I share similar taste in cars. I love the
big old American sedans. My current Mercury Grand Marquis LS is one of
the most satisfying cars I've ever owned, and I've had well north of 60
vehicles over the past 45 years.
Partiality for big cars seems to have rubbed off on my
eldest daughter, who currently drives a 2003 Ford Crown Victoria Police
Interceptor (her second of those) and a 1968 Imperial LeBaron
convertible with a 440 cubic inch displacement V8. She's also owned a
1979 Chrysler Cordoba with a 360 CID V8 (handed down from me), a 1967
Imperial LeBaron four door hardtop, a 1964 Imperial LeBaron with a 413
CID V-8, a 1968 Chrysler New Yorker with a 383 CID V8, and an early 80s
vintage downsized New Yorker with a 318. I expect she might take issue
with you on the matter of feminine vehicle preferences!.
Of course, there were no minivans when I was growing
up. I've only owned two vans; a very funky 1962 Bedford (British
General Motors) with sliding doors that was the next best thing to a
convertible on my summer days if you left the doors open, and a 1977
Dodge Royal sportsman with a 360 CID V8.
My late father drove Studebakers, and after his
accidental death, my mother continued to drive a Stude for several
years. That was replaced by a quite sporty 1961 Corvair Monza coupe -
metallic red over white vinyl. A 1963 Mercury Comet Villager was a more
practical replacement for the Corvair, followed by two Austin 1100s, an
Austin 1800, a Sunbeam Alpine two door hardtop, a 1968 GMC pickup, a
1967 International Harvester Travelall, a 1964 Morris Oxford, a 1977
Chrysler Newport, a 1978 Dodge Diplomat coupe, a Dodge 400, a Chrysler
Dynasty, and a 1990 Toyota Camry - her last automobile, which we still
have. Her taste in cars was pretty eclectic, and more than half of
those vehicles had manual transmissions.
I agree that minivans are not terribly inspiring,
although they make a lot of sense for me practicality perspective. SUVs
have a more macho vibe, although I'm not a particular fan and prefer
either a large sedan, a station wagon, or a pickup truck.
Thanks for reading and Merry Christmas!
Charles
The Clueless Generation
From Stephen:
Charles,
"Or as forum poster 'boilerman10' commented on the
Daily Kos, the Gen. Ys have never heard the roar of a type 1 Hemi
DeSoto or Chrysler pre-1958, never heard or saw a flathead Ford
super-modified doing over 130 miles per hour on a half mile track and
then backing down for the curve and reaccelerating. 'That sound is
incredible....' Gen. Y 'never saw how Chevrolet revolutionized hot
rodding with the 283 and 327 engines. I am so glad I lived during that
time. Poor Gen. Y.'"
I can see a solution to this problem. Future cars will have digital
soundtracks. Imagine your Nissan Leaf or other generic electric
transportation pod with flathead Ford V-8 sounds synchronized to its
throttle. If the Ford does not heat your blood, then perhaps a Cadillac
V-16 or Ferrari V-12 will do.
"Frankly, I feel sorry for the kids. I like computers
and work on the Internet, but there's no way I would swap a youth spent
immersed in the real world of car culture for the virtual world of
texting, tweeting, and Facebook social networking."
I am scared for our future at the hands of these kids. In spite of
their networking, they cannot communicate. I belong to several car
forums (Saturn, Nissan Frontier, Corvette). The under-20 crowd cannot
write a short paragraph that describes, in sufficiently clear detail,
what they are asking. They have no clue as to punctuation, spelling,
and sentence structure. I'm convinced that English as a second language
is their communication skill.
If I am in an evil mood, I'll go to the fast food place and order a
meal that totals out to $4.02. I'll let the server punch in the order,
give the person a $5 bill, let the register display the change, and
then "find" the remaining 2¢. The deer in the headlights look is
priceless, but it's also scary. How are these kids going to understand
real money when it comes to finance and government economics?
They will have no clue how to troubleshoot or fix anything. I used
to joke that my college professors were confused as to which end of a
screwdriver to hold. Nowadays the response to a nonfunctional piece of
gear is to buy a new equipment (in their defense, most electronics
nowadays are not designed for repair).
Steve
Hi Steve,
You make some interesting and incisive observations,
and in general they square with what I hear from my teacher and college
professor friends. Also from my younger daughter, who spent last year
as a professor's aide at a Nova Scotia University. She ended up
spending a lot of time marking papers, and read a few of them aloud to
me. Seriously, I had better proficiency at essay-writing when I was six
years old than many of these (in this instance, it was second-year
engineering students, which is a scary thought in itself) university
students evidently did. It was hilarious in a sobering sort of way.
She is more than likely going to end up being a
university professor when she finishes her doctorate, but thanks to
being homeschooled until the 10th grade (she finished the final three
years of high school in public school in two calendar years, close to
the top of her class throughout), she is highly literate and also
possess many useful practical life skills - the kind of stuff that you
really don't get a grasp of from surfing the Internet, although she's
been computer literate pretty well all her life.
Incidentally, your suggestion about digital
soundtracks for electric vehicles is not fanciful. Apparently some sort
of audio sound broadcast outside electric vehicles is being
contemplated by regulatory powers as a safety measure for pedestrians.
If we're going to have a canned soundtrack with our e-cars, you might
as well make them sound like a hot-rodded flatty or Hemi, or a Ferrari
V12. That would be a tough choice for me. I love the musical rumble of
a V8, but the V12 stirs the blood. V-10s and V-6s not so much.
Finally, as you observe, most stuff these days (not
only electronics and household appliances, but also motor vehicle
components) are not designed or intended to be repaired. With the cost
of labor it makes no economic sense, although it still rubs
traditionalist tinkerer and fixer me the wrong way.
Merry Christmas!
Charles
Automobiles Abandoned for Computers
From pidj:
I think I made my first car/computer analogy when justifying paying
$6,000 for a new original
IBM Personal Computer. My first new car was a 1974 Dodge Dart
Swinger for about $5,000.
Took about ten years before I could "go places" with the computer -
CompuServe, BIX - $20-30/hour for 300 bps service!
And now the "information highway" is the drive-in restaurant with so
many things on the menu.
I think I've been reading your online columns for as long as you've
been writing them; about time to put something in the tip jar I guess.
Thanks Charles. Have a happy holiday season and another good year of
writing.
Hi pidj,
I never owned a Dodge Dart, but several friends did,
and I used to drive them a lot. The nicest example I think was a
metallic blue two-door hardtop of about 1968 vintage with a white vinyl
roof and with a 318 CID V-8. I do recall resting an early '70s Swinger
for a long road trip.
Thanks for your faithful readership and kind
words.
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you and
yours.
Charles
Car Ownership Is Costly
From Dean:
Hi,
I read your article on the carless generation with interest. There
are a few more things to consider. Years ago you could buy a fairly
decent used car for a few hundred dollars; today decent used cars cost
as much as new ones used to.
With new cars in the $25,000 to $45,000 range, they are beyond many
people today. Also, back in the day 20 gallons of gas cost $5 and you
could cruise all night. Add in the insane cost of insurance, and is it
any wonder that car ownership is beyond young people today?
When you factor in the general state of the economy and the
prevalence of minimum wage jobs today, it gets worse. Henry Ford had it
right when he said that to sell cars, they had to be affordable, and
when he paid his workers accordingly, they could buy them. Perhaps also
more young people are aware today just how finite our natural resources
are.
Did you think when you were a kid oil and gasoline might run out?
Neither did I.
You're also right though; NASCAR has no one to blame but itself.
Dean
Hi Dean,
Yes, owning and maintaining a car these days is a
pricey proposition, but pay is much higher (if you can find odd jobs).
When I was 16, I had a casual job sanding cars in a body shop for
65¢ an hour. My buddy had a job with a housepainting contractor
for $1.00 an hour, and we still managed to own and drive cars.
My wife's winter beater this year is a 1991 Toyota
Corolla she picked up for $300, although as a fixer-upper it took a
total of about $700 to get it ready for daily-driver duty. Still not
bad. In August I picked up a very nice 2000 Mercury Grand Marquis (too
nice to subject to winter salt) for $2,150.
The 17-year-old next door has a early '90s Pontiac
Sunfire coupe - his second car. The first was an '80 Chrysler Cordoba.
He's still in high school but earns money doing odd jobs. My eldest
daughter is 27 and has already owned more than a dozen cars.
As for the younger generation's more focused
consciousness about the finiteness of resources, not to mention
pollution and climate change, they're right about the problem. I'm
convinced anthropomorphic global warming is a rapidly escalating fact,
but I'm highly skeptical that there's much we can realistically do stop
it, given population demographics and as yet mostly-unrealized
lifestyle aspirations of 80-odd percent of the world's people.
Global population more than quadrupled in 110 years
from 1.5 billion in 1900 to about 6.7 billion in 2010, with 9 billion
projected by 2050, when India and China's cumulative 3 billion alone
will be greater than 1950's total global population - and their
citizens aspire to Western-style consumer lifestyles. It's projected
that by mid-century we'll need 50% more food production and 50% more
energy, with oil consumption rising to 126 million barrels per day by
2030 from roughly 84 million in 2009. There will be 50% more aircraft
flying and a commensurate increase in ships plying the seas. J.D. Power
forecasts automobile sales in India to nearly triple from 1.7 million
in 2008 to 3.2 million by 2015, with China's soaring from 9.8 million
autos sold in 2008, having become the world's biggest auto market last
year, and sales forecast to hit 16.3 million by 2014.
Three countries - the US (population estimated at 311
million), China (1.34 billion), and India (1.19 billion) - account for
more than 60% of all carbon release through human activity, with the
share represented by the two Asian economies growing exponentially.
China, which is building on average one new coal-fired power plant
every week, and plans to continue doing so for years, is estimated to
have passed the US as the biggest carbon polluter in 2006. Between 1990
and 1994, China's greenhouse gas emissions increased 47%, and India's
by 55%, with their rate of increase presumed to be substantially
greater over the past four years.
In light of those metrics, I frankly am not
optimistic. When you do the math, we're already in trouble at
population 6.7 billion. What prospect is there, really, of arresting -
let alone reducing - global carbon emissions or decreasing energy
consumption overall with roughly 25% more people coming on board over
the next 40 years.?
I'm just thankful I lived some of my lifetime in an
era where oppressive anticipation of energy shortages and ecological
entropy was not front and center. I'll continue enjoying my V8s.
Anyway, my big Mercury gets pretty good gas mileage (EPA ratings: City
18/hwy 25, which I've found realistic) with its 4.6 liter V-8.
:-)
Merry Christmas!
Charles
Hello again,
Interesting comments that have already crossed my mind. One more
sobering thought: We may manage to make the planet unsustainable for
the human species, but we really are not going to hurt it. Being about
4 billion years old, we can do nothing that vulcanism, tectonic plate
movement, meteor strikes, magnetic field reversals, and ice ages have
not already done. We may in the end make ourselves extinct through our
own stupidity, but the planet will still be here and in a few hundred
thousand years probably fix it self.
As for cars, a lot of young people today don't want to work,
unfortunately.
Thanks,
Dean
Too Many Unsafe Drivers
From Michael:
The world is a much safer place and this trend should be encouraged,
when you see how recklessly these younger people act when they do get
behind the wheel. Now if we could figure out a way to get the old and
infirm to tweet, use the Internet, and their smartphones instead of
driving, we drivers would be safe on the road.
Hi Michael,
I agree that the level of driving skill possessed by
most North American drivers is abysmally poor, but I think that cuts
across all generations. Ideally, everyone would be sent to skid school
before being granted a drivers license.
As a general observation, however, I have nothing
against safety, but a completely safe world would be a terribly boring
one.
I wonder how much the unreality of actual painful
consequences in the virtual world of video games has to do with
development of safety consciousness behind the wheel of an actual car.
I just happened to be reading a review today of Sony's Grand
Turismo 5 by a professed car fan who related that he doesn't have
an actual driver's license or any driving experience outside of game
consoles, but even he observed that virtual consequences of vehicle
contact in GT 5 and other automobile oriented video games was a
serious element of unreality in an otherwise quite remarkably realistic
virtual experience.
Some of the stuff we did with cars when I was a
teenager horrifies me in recollection - driving around with loads of
kids in the back of open pickup trucks; using water for brake fluid,
kids riding in the wayback of station wagons with the window down and
no seats, let alone seatbelts. I was 16 when seatbelts became mandatory
equipment on automobiles. I doubt that kids today are any more
intrinsically reckless than we were, but I doubt that there having as
much fun at it. Fun is important too, don't you think?
Merry Christmas!
Charles
It's a Whole Different World Today
From Timothy:
Charles,
It's always tempting to remember the "good old days" as one ages. In
our teenage years, perhaps we drove more cars as teens, but we didn't
have Facebook, Twitter, podcasting, YouTube, Skype, mobile phones, or
group-play video games. (I had email, but that was much more like Morse
Code ham radio at the time, with a very small universe of
participants.) Cars meant teens could be locally connected, but how can
that compete with global social connectedness?
Even so, physical mobility is increasing, not decreasing, on the
same global scale. My father is still bewildered by the fact that I hop
around the globe as easily (and with just as little forethought) as
when he hops in his car to drive 15 miles to work. I once had a
colleague ask me if I could fly to Goa, India, for a 45 minute
presentation, because I was 4 hours closer (in flying time). I brought
my suitcase to a piano recital a couple weeks ago, because I had to
catch a flight to Seoul immediately afterwards. This past year I
decided to fly from Singapore to Sao Paulo on Sunday, left on a Monday,
worked three days there, and returned on a Friday. And that wasn't
particularly unusual. Two days ago my manager "asked" me if I could
visit Beijing. Six hours later, I was on the plane, and 24 hours after
that headed back home. Gearhead? I could tell you how many seats across
an Emirates 777 has in economy class (10, the pity), near which gate my
favorite ANA lounge is at Tokyo Narita Airport (gate 46), which baggage
carousel Air China uses for early morning arrivals at Beijing Capital
Airport (usually either 35 or 36, for me anyway), and whether discount
carrier Jetstar takes American Express (yes, but only the Australian
half of Jetstar, not Jetstar Asia). In contrast, when my father was a
teenager, nobody in his family had ever flown anywhere.
Yet, despite all this flying (and riding taxis, buses, trains, and
the occasional rickshaw), US teenagers are also not getting pilot
licenses in the numbers they used to. That, too, was a rite of passage
in many parts of late 20th century America. The general aviation
community is concerned about that, of course.
In this context, I don't mourn the decline of teenage car culture.
Let's remember that way too many teens got (and get) maimed and killed
on the roads. My high school classmate's twin sister lost her life in a
drunk driving accident, and I still remember the stories my father told
about how a single car accident wiped out a substantial fraction of his
older relatives. Yes, Facebook is different, but it isn't fatal.
Really, though, I don't think there's much decline in automobiles.
Mostly there's just an increase in everything else that substitutes for
teen driving. The real problem is that those substitutes don't seem to
be walking and biking, two health-promoting alternatives which even
predate 20th century teen car culture.
Timothy
Hi Timothy,
I appreciate innovations like personal computers,
Internet, email, search engines, and so forth profoundly, and I
typically spend 10 hours a day or more interfacing with them. But I
wouldn't trade my teenage years as a motorhead for the virtual world of
bits and bytes.
You're right about travel. My kids have been
globetrotters with more air miles under their belts by their mid-20s
than most people in the 20th century would have experienced in a
lifetime. I actually had my first airline trip at the age of about
four, which would have been in 1955/56, although it was a relatively
short domestic hop.
Frankly, I can't see airline travel surviving very far
into the coming era of energy shortages, so those with a taste for it
should enjoy it while it lasts.
Actuarially, there has been a decline in driving by
young people. In the July 2010 issue of Car and Driver magazine,
editor Eddie Alterman cites a recent Washington Post report that
today's hard-texting, IT-obsessed youth are inclined to dismiss driving
as seriously lame, with only about 30% of 16-year-olds having even
bothered to acquire driving licenses according to 2008 research.
Alterman has launched a
Save The Manuals campaign to promote a revival of human driving
skills, focusing on the disappearing ability among US drivers to
operate vehicles with manually-shifted gearboxes and the diminishing
proportion of cars sold equipped with manual transmissions.
Alterman maintains that if drivers learned to operate
an entire car, not just the steering wheel and occasionally the brakes,
they'd probably like driving better through mastering the sense of
control imparted by that third pedal, learning the excitement that
accompanies a perfectly timed heel-and-toe downshift. He declares that
we need a "crusade" to "save the manuals" and advocates training youth
in the ancient ways of the stick shift, a subsidiary advantage of which
would be the fact that you can't text while driving a manual
transmission vehicle.
Merry Christmas!
Charles
Old Cars and Old Computers
From Adam:
Your recent post, and Jason Walsh's article (Classic Cars and Classic
Macs) that spawned it reminded me of my own musings on the subject
from about a year ago,
Old Stuff and the Future.
I just thought you might find it interesting.
-Adam
File Compression, CPU Usage, and Bandwidth
From Tom in response to Is It
Possible to Disable HFS+ File Compression in Snow Leopard?:
"For one, with today's inexpensive storage, there's no
point to having an operating system wasting any amount of CPU power, no
matter how efficient, on such compression/decompression."
Well, this isn't true in all cases. If you have a slow CPU and cheap
storage, compression will slow things down.
On modern multicore systems, CPUs are underutilized with lot of
unused CPU cycles. The big bottleneck is I/O speed. By putting those
cycles to use, you can compress the I/O data and actually increase the
data flowing through your I/O. Solaris puts this to use with its ZFS
filesystem. With compression, you can actually speed things up with
little impact on a dual-core or more CPU.
Linux Journal had an article, Compression Tools
Compared, showing when compression was worth it when transferring
files across the network. It was a 3D graph
showing the effects of CPU speed, bandwidth, and amount of data
(reduced to half original size above - ed). They showed several
different algorithms that could be used. It also depends on the kind of
data sent across the I/O. This applies to filesystems as well.
I'd imagine a USB 1.1 drive would benefit (in speed) more from
compression then would a SATA II connection.
Hi Tom,
I don't disagree. What you say makes a lot of sense.
Gregg is probably right in some cases, but generalizing a bit too
extravagantly.
Merry Christmas.
Charles
Absolutely.
Many of us are dealing with older hardware too.
When Sun had Solaris 8, TCP/IP was optimized for a Sparc 1 (Pentium
90 speed?) with 4 MB RAM and 100 MB hard drive and 10 Mb/s
ethernet. Linux at the time was 30% faster with 1 GB RAM and a 400
MHz Pentium II.
Tom
14" iBook G4 Screen in a Pismo?
From Dan Bashur:
Greetings Charles:
I was wondering if it's possible to drop an LCD from a 14" iBook G4 (1.2 GHz) into a
Pismo? They both have
the same screen size and resolution (14.1", 1024 x 768), although I'm
not sure if the video and AirPort connectors would work with the
Pismo.
I happen to have a 1.2 GHz screen assembly that I was using to swap
plastics out with a 1.42 GHz screen. After the swap, and after putting
that horrific mess back together, I'll just have the 1.2 GHz LCD panel
with connectors left. These connectors appear to look like those used
in Pismos and TiBooks.
I figured it was worth a shot asking you before I gave it a go,
since you had some experience with iBooks and know the Pismo like the
back of your hand.
Thanks,
Dan
Hi Dan,
As you note, the Pismo and 14" iBook displays are the
same size and resolution. However, while I can't say for sure, I would
be extremely surprised if the screen and AirPort antenna connectors are
similar enough to make this a simple swap.
I suppose it's possible, and if so it would be nice,
since there are a lot of iBooks, and they don't last like the Pismo
has. Since you will have the iBook panel in hand, you could size things
up to some extent by opening up a Pismo for a closer looksee at how the
cables are positioned and routed, and whether the cable connectors are
the same.
Merry Christmas!
Charles
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