The I-Deck brings some old school to the iPod

Hmmmmm... Tubepunk. The next thing is born.

"The speaker mount has no wires in it (tip-off #1)"

THAT was your first tip off??? hell, look at that iPod...it looks like it's made of card stock. and why are you talking about scratching, and waveform displays? there is no mention AT ALL about using this in some sort of DJ setup, where one would scratch. it's a player, that's it.

and to address all those who routinely see a product design concept, and then feel the need to point out how the thing would never work: most often, when a design like this is created, it's not about creating an end product that can be produced right now, at this moment. the design has more to do with ideas of usage, and new and different ways to address user needs. this product seems to address the needs of the user: a large, easy to navigate user interface, and a way to incorporate physical interaction with digital media (seeing album art, flicking the screen to skip a song, etc).

looks fucking cool though

Looks like a graduate design project - a product concept mockup. Clever, but impractical. One, nobody makes round touchscreens (AFAIK) and the computing power needed to extract the album art, display and rotate it on a touchscreen would pretty much dictate at least an actual Mac Mini in there. And wouldn't a waveform display be better for actual scratching, a la Final Scratch? The speaker mount has no wires in it (tip-off #1) and acoustically, a mounting like that would sound terrible; the point of the 'horn' of an old victrola was to amplify a small sound generator at the base, not at the mouth. Plus, mono? Unless there's summing circuitry in there that can recombine left and right channels and not suffer from phase cancellation it's dubious at best.

An excellent example of neo-old school, if the speaker were of decent-to-high grade I would consider buying it simply because it starts to look classy.

wow, talk about vaporware. maybe it'll come out with the phantom. in fact, it looks like blown glass with a shitty speaker on top, i don't see wires running thru it. a good prototype. but i don't think the screen round thingy will work well.