One of the britsites - TheRegister or TheInquirer, forget which - was mentioning a slew of Bluetooth dongles that just might do the same thing better.

That said, I have no clue how you push 16 bits * 44KHz over Bluetooth; I suspect further tradeoffs are invovled.

And then you still need the 'audio in' hack on the car deck, or the tapedongle equivalent, and an appropriate receiver attached/embedded into either. In Euroland, they're starting to think about putting Bluetooth into the head units themselves, which would solve that, add hands-free cellphone convenience, etc. I bet it'll take the US only a decade to wise up, at which point 802.11's successor will have supplanted everything anyway.

As someone who's had to remove a cubic foot of mouse droppings from the dash of a Subaru, stereo poking-around-behind is not something I'm a fan of. (Helpfully, my cousin's BMW blew a fuse that JUST HAPPENS TO BE LOCATED ON THE BACK OF THE RADIO and renders the CD changer inoperable. But he's in jail now, so I guess he won't miss it.)

But at least it shouldn't hiss.

(Also, ferchrissakes, I had a $40 Discman with the little short-range FM thing in it in 1999, and you could get the same thing in 9v-powered dongle form for at least a decade prior in any music store. Why does everything become magic when Apple's involved? I mean, really, I'm exceptionally pissed off about this lately, because I'm trying to convince other_cousin's parents that yes, blowing $70-$150 on Panther *is* the only hope to make his iBook stop wiping its hard drive for him* every Nth time it comes out of sleep, and technically, they've already saved $100 by not blowing it on Jaguar, and yes, I agree it sucks, and no, that XP you had me blow on your crippled K6-2 after you installed Gator and Kazaa and Bonzi on the original '98 install isn't particularly better or worse either...)

*No, it doesn't actually wipe the hard drive, it corrupts the Finder in a way that requires about as much effort to fix as dealing with a corrupted/deleted Windows Registry, okay? Except for some reason, even reinstalling 10.1 isn't enough in itself; in lieu of specific knowledge, it takes a full reformatting to clear out the affected files. Yes I whine about this; I whine because his college mandates Apple trendiness, when for fuck's sake even a Brother GeoBook would've proved more useful and reliable. (Meanwhile, the school's main use for these Apples? Word. IT'S LIKE ONE GIANT WANKFEST OF OHMGGDFLFGHLBLBLGHLBGHL PLEASE SIR MAY I HAVE ANOTHER)