I’ve gone through this rant with a few people IRL but I haven’t really taken it out on the Internet, until now that is.

I’ve got beef with people who refer to the iPod touch as the iTouch. Why? It doesn’t make any logical sense to call it that. The complete product name is the Apple iPod touch, “Apple” being the manufacturer, “iPod” being their mobile audio product family name, and “touch” being the model name. Apple’s got their catchy lowercase i in front of stuff to make it all high-tech and what not and people just abuse it. Personally, I don’t mind it but watching skits like MadTV’s iRack really shows how ridiculous it’s getting. Also, Bush humor.

First, let’s look at the line of iPods currently available. We have the iPod shuffle, nano, classic, and touch. Of these models, only the touch gets the iTreatment. Other than replacing a PDA, what makes the touch that much more significant that only it receives the iTreatment? The ONLY case where I will not bitch and moan about people referring to the touch as the iTouch is if they give the iTreatment to the rest of the iPod models: iShuffle, iNano, and iClassic. Doesn’t that sound like a mouthful? Does anyone ACTUALLY call them that? I’m curious!

Looking outside of Apple, another company with a similar fascination with camel-casing names is NVIDIA (UPDATE: Oh hey, whaddya know? NVIDIA now write all instances of their name as NVIDIA on the site, though the logo still has n in the lowercase but remains at a constant height with the rest of the uppercase letters. Odd, no?), best known for their graphical processing solutions for computers. Their gaming GPUs are under the product family name of GeForce. The 200 Series is the latest lineup of video cards available in stores. Would one call the GeForce GTX 260 a GeGTX260? I don’t think so. Personally, it sounds like a mouthful and is a waste of a syllable.

After running “iTouch” through Google, it appears that Wikipedia has made note of this error as well and also notes that the name iTouch actually represents one of three REAL entities: customizable input software used by an older model of Logitech keyboards (which Logitech cut the online support of as of August, 2008), the parent company of Ostrich Media, and the Pasen iTouch.

Referring to the iPod touch as an iTouch is incorrect, like calling a USB drive simply “USB”, a DVD player “DVD”, or abbreviating Blu-ray Disc to BRD while it should be BD (Blu-ray is one “word”). Personally, I refer to USB drives as keys since it’s generally accepted and not incorrect to call them as such. I also accept “thumb drive”. Saying DVD Disc is redundant since the last D in DVD is disc. Also, when did the habit of calling the player of media by the type of media it plays come about? You’d never hear someone say stick that movie into the tape (referring to VHS cassette tapes for those not old enough to know about that ancient media). I digress, but please, boycott the use of the word “iTouch” when referring to the iPod touch. Call it an iPod. Call it a touch. Mistake it for an iPhone. I don’t care as long as you don’t say “iTouch” because iDunno what I’m going to do with myself if I hear it again.