myPod Story

Earlier in the fall of '08, this blogger faced heavy-duty dental work. A new dentist prescribed a crown on a tooth with deteriorating fillings. Lovely. Past experience with the installation of a dental crown featured the noise of the grinding as the original tooth was reduced to a stump upon which the crown was seated. Since this wasn't the blogger's first rodeo with a power tool in his mouth, a noise supressor was needed. This blogger immediately thought of a CD-player with ear phones; the sound of the blogger's favorite music would block out the sound of the dental grinding. A trip to the nearest big-box electronics store found this blogger strolling out with a Classic iPod. A combination of the CD player on the laptop plus iTunes software enabled the transfer of more than 100 CDs to the iPod. Amazing. Welcome to the 21^st century. This blogger blocked the sound of grinding with a medley of tunes through the iPod earphones. If this is (fair & balanced) technological progress, so be it.

[x Wikipedia]
iPod

iPod is a brand of portable media players designed and marketed by Apple Inc. and launched on October 23, 2001. The product line-up includes the hard drive-based iPod Classic, the touchscreen iPod Touch, the video-capable iPod Nano, the screenless iPod Shuffle and the iPhone. Former products include the compact iPod Mini and the spin-off iPod Photo (since reintegrated into the main iPod Classic line). iPod Classic models store media on an internal hard drive, while all other models use flash memory to enable their smaller size (the discontinued Mini used a Microdrive miniature hard drive). As with many other digital music players, iPods, excluding the iPod Touch, can also serve as external data storage devices. Storage capacity varies by model.

Apple's iTunes software can be used to transfer music to the devices from computers using certain versions of Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows operating systems. For users who choose not to use Apple's software or whose computers cannot run iTunes software, several open source alternatives to iTunes are also available. iTunes and its alternatives may also transfer photos, videos, games, contact information, e-mail settings, Web bookmarks, and calendars to iPod models supporting those features. Apple focused its development on the iPod line's unique user interface and its ease of use, rather than on technical capability. As of September 2007, more than 150 million iPods had been sold worldwide, making it the best-selling digital audio player series in history.

The name iPod was proposed by Vinnie Chieco, a freelance copywriter, who (with others) was called by Apple to figure out how to introduce the new player to the public. After Chieco saw a prototype, he thought of the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey" and the phrase "Open the pod bay door, Hal!", which refers to the white EVA Pods of the Discovery One spaceship. Apple researched the trademark and found that it was already in use. Joseph N. Grasso of New Jersey had originally listed an "iPod" trademark with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in July 2000 for Internet kiosks. The first iPod kiosks had been demonstrated to the public in New Jersey in March 1998, and commercial use began in January 2000, but had apparently been discontinued by 2001. The trademark was registered by the USPTO in November 2003, and Grasso assigned it to Apple Computer, Inc. in 2005.

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