What Do The Letters In Ipod Stand For

I am a very curious person and I often wondered about the etymology of some words. I tried to find out the origin of my name and my mother's name and my city's name. It was not very easy, but not very difficult either, as there are a lot of dictionaries that can explain you the origin of the words. The only problem is that these etymological dictionaries can't explain the words invented by the companies to promote their products. And because I was curious I asked myself:"I wonder what do the letters in iPod stand for?". So I started doing some research and browsed the internet pages and googled it and also read some forums where many people tried to give a reasonable answer to my question that turned out to be a common question.

I read and heard a lot of variants and I will present them all to you and let you be the judge and decide what is the one that seems closer to the truth. Of course the people from Apple did not give a straight answer to that to clear the problem, but the executive from Apple, Steve Jobs , said in an interview in a very sarcastic manner that the "i" in front of iPod actually comes from the word "idiot". I really doubt that. Any way there were a lot of people who said that these letters and the whole phrase do not actually mean anything and they are just a marketing decision because they had to release the product on the market and did not have a name for it. Of course they couldn't sell it as being "a portable media player that is also capable of storing up to 1000 songs".



Others say that the "i" in front of the Pod is the symbol of the Apple company because here are now a lot of Apple products with this letter in their names: the iPod, iPhone, iPad, iMac and so on. I guess it is a distinctive mark, but I am not sure it comes from "internet" as other people suggested. It may come from "interface" or "intelligent", but I could not find a formal explanation to it. Actually many people who use Apple products seem to associate it with the personal pronoun "I" as in "myself", which gives a personal connotation to the devices.



The official variant of the name says that Apple people hired a guy called Vinnie Chieco to come up with a name for the product that was about to be released in 2001. He was inspired by the movie "2001: A Space Oddysey" by Arthur C. Clark, in which he saw some pods, that is some round isolated platforms that allowed spaceships to take off and return to them for safety. He thought these two looked pretty similar as appearance and called the media player "pod", adding the i in front for showing the belonging to the Apple family.

These explanations sound a bit too fantastic and I did not stop asking :"What do the letters in iPod stand for?" until I got this answer - the iPOD stands for interactive POD and the acronym POD stands for Portable Open Database. Now choose your favourite answer or go ask Steve Jobs about it.