Flotsam & Jetsam

Say it out loud: iPad

lonelysandwich:

But I’m afraid I’ll only ever love the device despite its embarrassing name. And that makes me love it a little less. Apple, you fucked up.

Adam Lisagor is right: iPad is a stupid name, stupid in such an obvious way that I saw three different people on Facebook make the “if Apple makes a larger iPad, they can name it MaxiPad” joke yesterday.

But the thing you have to remember is that Apple’s product names are stupid more often than they’re great. Sure, “PowerBook” was a great name, but the first one came out almost twenty years ago. “Mac Pro” is a solid name, as is “Mac Mini”, and “Time Capsule” is a great name. “Apple TV” is serviceable, if unimaginative. But just look at the list of the other major products Apple’s introduced in the last decade:

• “iPod” was silly-sounding when it was introduced, but the iPod brand benefited from a soft launch (Mac-only for the first year or so back when the Mac had a much, much smaller presence); people were used to the name by the time the product went mainstream. And the derivative names, like “iPod Shuffle”, “iPod Photo”, “iPod Mini”, “iPod Touch”, etc. have always been boring (with the lone exception of the iPod Nano).
• “iWork” and “iLife” are overly-cutesy, though it’s interesting that the individual applications that make up the iWork and iLife suites actually have pretty solid names: “Pages”, “Numbers”, “Keynote”, and “GarageBand” are all great names, and “iPhoto” and “iMovie” are decent. “iWeb” and “iDVD” are duds, but, honestly, who uses those applications anyway?
• “MacBook” sounded really stupid in 2006, and “MacBook Air” sounded doubly-stupid. It’s only because we’ve all heard the word “MacBook” approximately 8 million times since that it now seems reasonable.
• “iPhone” isn’t exactly stupid, but it was certainly disappointingly unimaginative back in 2007—after all, that’s what everybody was calling Apple’s phone before they even knew it existed. Now, of course, it seems like the most natural name in the world.
• “.Mac” and “MobileMe”. Enough said.

Looking through this list, it’s clear that Apple usually picks the most obvious product name it can think of, regardless of whether it sounds stupid or not: “Apple TV”, “iWork”, “MacBook”, “iPhone”. And so much the better if that name consists of an “i” prefix followed by a one-syllable word. With that in mind, “iPad” fits right in with the rest of Apple’s product line, and I predict that a year from now we’ll all have forgotten that it once sounded funny.