I might as well join in with a 'me too' posting here, since it seems to be the thing to do. I got my MK2 just over a year ago, I just recently added in the tuner, and I've got a 48GB IBM drive that I'll be installing this weekend, bringing me up to 60GB of storage.

The Slashdot crowd doesn't get it, and it's sad. Even though my daily commute is all of fifteen minutes each way, I'm still hooked on the empeg. I have over 3000 songs at my fingertips. Most of the time, I have it all playing at random, but when the mood strikes I'll flip it over to playing a specific album or a specific subgenre. I've got things extensively classified into subdirectories with all kinds of cross-linking to make this easier (e.g., I can play the 5-CD Ken Burns Jazz collection from one subdirectory, or I can go into my Louis Armstrong directory which includes links to the Armstrong tracks in the Ken Burns collection). These features are particularly wonderful when doing longer drives, such as the roughly four hour drive from Houston to Dallas.

Most of the time, my empeg stays out in the car, but I'll bring it inside once every few weeks to copy over the latest MP3s that I just ripped. I'll also take it out if I'm parking my car in what I'd consider a 'high risk' parking lot (such as the underground parking lot downtown where my old car stereo got stolen...).

Clearly, the number one problem here has been a failure of marketing. You look at the Slashdot weenies, and they don't get it. It shouldn't be incumbent on users like us to evangelize to them. It should have been the responsibility of SonicBlue. Did they take out banner ads on Slashdot? Did they take out full page adverts in car audio magazines? The initial sales were driven by word of mouth, but to expand outward you need to advertise.

A secondary failure is the product price. I had to take a deep gulp before typing my credit card number into the web site to buy the thing, despite my deep desire to have it. Yes, I know, empeg gives you fantastic bang for the buck, but many people are entirely willing to get less bang if it will cost them less. One possible solution would have been to make the empeg fixed in the dash and have some kind of pull-out hard drive like the IBM Microdrive. Sure, it's not nearly as fun as the current situation (1GB of Microdrive vs. up to 96GB of dual laptop hard drives), but I'll bet it's cheaper to manufacture.

Still, nobody's writing SonicBlue's obituary. The new OEM strategy looks like it could be a big winner. Certainly, TiVo has done quite well with other folks manufacturing their boxes for them. Given that SonicBlue's ReplayTV is manufactured by Matsushita (Panasonic), I wouldn't be terribly surprised if the empeg finds its way there as well.

We'll just have to see...