I'd seriously doubt that Apple would come out with a car audio product in the same vein as the empeg. Cutting your new (and exceedingly non-DIN shaped) car dash to pieces to install a DIN stereo is really not very apple in my opinion!

There are products that give a sort-of decent UI to an iPod, including the very high end touchscreen gear from Alpine?/Clarion? (can't remember which it was) - music browsing, info display, etc. That and as it's just a remote to the iPod, users can play their protected AAC tracks too. From what I've seen in the car mags, it's going three ways:

- Cars with built-in HDD ripper systems (20GB in some high end Lexi, it seems - only 7 years late!). Never used one, but it could be done well.
- Cars with high-functionality iPod interfaces (track details, music browsing via embedded car systems). Issues with browsing being a bit slow, but this can be fixed with clever software (see below).
- Aftermarket stuff, which is mostly iPod-based. Functionality rather like the other two but with more garish colours.

Maybe someone needs to do some code for the empeg which controls an iPod (it's just serial & audio) whilst presenting it with the empeg-style UI. The issue of the serial iPod channel being a bit slow could be addressed by caching the database and updating the empeg's view of the iPod contents in the background during music play.

Once that works then you could move the code over to a new platform (say, more car stereo like with a built in amp & tuner) and sell it. You could even emulate playback features that aren't iPodesque by doing some behind the scenes work to implement "next track from same artist" (etc) by basically only telling the iPod to play one track at a time and managing the playlist yourself.

Pro: it'd be cheap (and hence might sell), and tick the boxes for most mainstream users
Con: not an empeg as people know it

Another option, which I've suggested to Patrick more than once before now, is to do an Xscale-based empeg replacement main board, plus enough kernel hackery to run the same player code. Much faster ATA (maybe even SATA bridges on board), 100mbit ethernet, etc. If it's the same case, then the user has the moral right (IMO, but I'm not a lawyer) to run the original code. Maybe even make the main board accept a Gumstix module, which means you might be able to get away without needing BGA on it - cheaper to make (it's hard to buy the bits for a gumstix for the price they sell them for!).

Pro: you get an empeg with the things that people most wanted fixed, fixed (bigger cap drives, faster connectivity, more memory
Con: a bit hacky

Hugo