Personally - and this comment is with no insight apart from having been a competitor and taken apart many iPods in my time - I suspect that Apple would love gapless, but adding it to their current platform would require a lot reorganisation of the software structure.

I have to say that I've only ever managed to crash an iPod by running some USB stress tests; the player software is solid as a rock. I can believe that they don't fancy pulling it to pieces and (most likely) seriously affecting stability to add such a feature. I can believe the player engine is largely unchanged from how it was in 2001, and for that vintage it's just fine.

However, as everyone has heard (especially portalplayer's shareholders), Apple looks like they're moving platform, at least for new flash players. Given that the PP platform was, errr, unique with its twin ARM7 cores, I can believe that they'll take the opportunity to build themselves a fancy new player with all the bells and whistles. Apart from anything else, their sales now justify a major software investment, whereas the original iPod (pre iTunes, especially) was a bit of a flyer for Apple and was pretty risk-averse in its software design. Take a look at what the Mac does graphically - the beatifully scaled & anti-aliased icons, the neat transparency effects, the rotating cube user switching - these people love seamless. They love flair. I can't believe they're happy with the gaps.

Just my 2p (when it's 2c, I won't be free to give it )

Hugo