Your doctor probably still uses CDs, and 6 other reasons they won't go away

Your doctor probably still uses CDs, and 6 other reasons they won't go away Credit: Jordan Gloor / How-To Geek By  Monica J. White Published May 24, 2026, 5:00 PM EDT Monica J. White is a journalist with over a decade of experience in covering technology. She built her first PC nearly 20 years ago, and she has since built and tested dozens of PCs. PC hardware is her main beat, and graphics cards and the GPU market at large are her main area of interest, but she has written thousands of articles covering everything related to PCs, laptops, handhelds, and peripherals. From GPUs and CPUs to headsets and software, Monica's always willing to geek out over all things related to computing. Outside of her work with How-To Geek , Monica contributes to TechRadar , PC Gamer , Tom's Guide , Laptop Mag , SlashGear , Whop , and Digital Trends , among others. Her ultimate goal is to make PC gaming and computing approachable and fun to any audience. Monica spends a lot of time elbow-deep in her PC case, as she's always making upgrades, testing something, or plotting out her next build. She's the go-to tech support person in her immediate circle, so she's never out of things to do. Whenever she has spare time, you'll find her gaming until the early hours and hanging out with her dog. Sign in to your How-To Geek account Add Us On follow Follow followed Followed Like Like Thread Log in Here is a fact-based summary of the story contents: Try something different: Show me the facts Explain it like I’m 5 Give me a lighthearted recap Good old CDs, how I miss them so. I miss when an optical drive bay was a standard thing in every single PC, and when instead of Spotify and YouTube, we all had to buy the albums and deal with the songs we didn't love quite as much. But I'm not here to rant about the state of the world, nor am I here to go on and on about my never-ending nostalgia for old storage media . This time, I'm here to remind you (and me) that CDs never really went away. Not only are they having some sort of weird resurgence in 2026 (which I'm so here for), but they were here the whole time, just keeping it on the down low. Here are all the surprising ways CDs are still very much in use in 2026. Playing music in older cars The road is newer than the dashboard Your car might have a touchscreen, Bluetooth, some USB ports, and your phone might have Apple Music or Spotify. But that doesn't mean the humble CD player has vanished from the road. Cars aren't like smartphones; those things live for years and years. Plenty of people are still driving models from the era when a CD slot was just part of the deal. Maybe it lives above climate controls, or maybe it's in the center console. Either way, if it's still there, then you might as well use it and enjoy not needing to pay a subscription fee for it. Borrowing audiobooks from libraries No, I'm not kidding Credit: Hannah Stryker / How-To Geek Some libraries have fully embraced the current status quo and off