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Beware the iPods of March

JJ McCullough, OP Investigator

This week, Mathew Neenan asks “What does the ‘i’ in iPod stand for?”

Everywhere you go these days, you see them. Men and women of all.ages with white cords hanging out of their ears. They are the pod people, or to be more specific, the iPod people. Macintosh’s latest electronic gadget has saved the company and made Steve Jobs billions, but one question remains: What’s the deal with the “i”?

Though they may seem like a distant memory now, back in 1997 the Mac folks had a fairly successful line of personal computers known as “iMacs.” To put it bluntly, the iMacs were computers for people who were too tech- nologically inept to use real PCs. Brightly colored and cur- vaceous, the plastic machines were hyped for being incredi- bly self-contained. Supposedly, a user could just take the thing out of its box, plug it in, and be surfing the net in

seconds. This ease of web connection was a major selling point for the computers, and as such, the official explana- tion was that the “i” in iMac simply stood for “internet.”

In the years following the iMac’s debut, Apple released a slew of other accessories to accessorize the computer. Eager to keep the theme going, the Mac people gave each one of these gadgets an ‘i’ before their name as well. Apple loyalists could soon watch movies on their iDVD player and use their iBook laptop on the airplane. In 2001, the iPod was released, and the rest is history. Because the device is nominally part of the original iMac family, the “7” in iPod continues to officially stand for “internet.” It makes sense, really, when you consider how much illegally downloaded music the little guys usually contain.

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