I took it for a drive that night. No rattles. No error codes. Just the flat-six howling through a tunnel while Waze warned me of debris ahead. The car felt complete—not modernized to the point of sacrilege, but elevated. Like a 911 that had learned a new trick without forgetting any old ones.

Day one was just trim removal. The 997.2 dash came apart like a puzzle I wasn’t sure I could reassemble. The PCM unit slid out—heavy, hot to the touch, its internal HDD clearly cooked. In its place, the 991 unit looked almost identical, except the button layout was subtly different, and the screen had a deeper black.

And there it was. CarPlay. Wireless. My iPhone’s maps glowing on the screen, Spotify ready, Siri listening. I backed out of the garage, and the rear camera view popped up instantly—guidelines and all. The steering wheel volume buttons worked. The factory mic handled calls perfectly. The oil temperature and tire pressure displays? Still there, buried in the CAR menu, untouched.

Option two was the aftermarket “Porsche Classic” lookalikes from Continental or Alpine. Clean, period-correct, but something about losing the OEM integration—the vehicle settings, the oil temperature readout, the way the original buttons felt—felt like betrayal.

It started with a flicker. Not the check engine light—that was solid, reliable in its own ominous way. No, this was the screen of the PCM 3.0 unit in my 2010 Porsche 997.2 Carrera S. One moment, the navigation was guiding me through the Black Forest backroads; the next, the display washed out like a watercolor left in the rain. Then it died. Just gray. The hard drive whirred, sighed, and gave up.

Option one was Porsche themselves. A new PCM 3.0 unit? Discontinued. A refurbished one from a dealer? $4,200 plus programming, and they’d still give me a map from 2014. No CarPlay. No backup camera. No thanks.