Modern car decks are messy, clunky blasphemers of Apple’s simple design principles. That’s why Apple should change them forever with the Apple Deck--not just for incredible profits, but as vengeance for the travesties created by major stereo and deck manufacturers.
First and foremost the Apple Deck is your car’s music player. You can pair it with your iPhone to play all the tracks available on the mobile device--or even better, enter your Apple ID and access any of your iTunes Match songs from the road, utilizing the onboard 3G (hey, it would still cost less than OnStar). Searching through thousands of songs on a touchscreen while driving would be a recipe for disaster, but fortunately you don’t have to with Siri as your copilot.
Illustration by Adam Benton
With a single tap of a touchscreen button, Apple’s star assistant activates and awaits your command. (Perhaps she could also be activated by simply saying “Siri” to get her attention, but we fear it would be too easy to activate her accidentally with words like “seriously.”) Finding the next gas station is finally as easy as saying, “Take me to the nearest gas station.”
But Siri’s assistance isn’t limited to the services we’ve already come to expect of her. The Apple Deck touts a wealth of new voice controls that allow you to answer phone calls, have emails and texts read to you, and arrange screen space hands-free. By default, your current location is visible on a sleek new map that occupies a little less than half the screen. Even with every widget displayed--a waveform song view, incoming call badge, small map, volume knob, Reminder blip--the screen never looks particularly cluttered. Unlike OS X widgets, the ones for Apple Deck share a unified design aesthetic, and the large two-slot car deck allows for plenty of screen space.
The Apple Deck also has a few full-scope apps that adhere to a stringent, mostly distraction-free policy. (Games are pretty much out since you can’t play Angry Birds without swerving your car through lanes of traffic.) Most of these apps are for use when your car is in park, and serve a variety of different purposes. The included Reminders app, for instance, makes oil-change windshield stickers a thing of the past. Now, after maintenance, your mechanic simply inputs the date you should return, and the Apple Deck will remind you when the time comes.
Further upgrades to the Apple Deck could have it connect directly to your car’s onboard computer, allowing, for the first time, your car deck to tell you when something is wrong with your vehicle. But this plan may need to be scrapped if it’s decided that too many people would take their anger out on Siri when she delivers costly bad news.
In any case, the Apple Deck is destined to be the biggest thing that Apple never released.
