Nutritional Value of an iPod shuffle

As you may have heard, Apple has had its annual MacWorld, at which it announced a couple of new hardware products (and a slew of software products). One of them is the iPod shuffle, which is quite small and is pictured on their website next to a couple of packs of gum for comparison.

Looks normal enough, but note the (2) next to the caption. If you scroll to the bottom of the page, you find the footnotes, as shown below (with the two helpfully circled for the numerically challenged).

“Do not eat iPod shuffle.”

Browse to the iPod shuffle page at the US site and you’ll see that the warning is still there. Intrigued, I checked some of the other country-specific Apple sites that I would have a chance of being able to read and found the following:

• Italians are in no danger of eating their iPods
• Neither are Germans,
• the French,
• Either variety of Swiss (German or French),
• or the Japanese (OK, you got me; I can’t read Japanese, but I can see that point (2) is not mentioned under the gum comparison and that it actually refers to something about batteries).

You know who else is in danger of killing themselves by ingesting an MP3 player? The British, who are admonished not to “chew iPod shuffle” in a bizarre need to actually translate that phrase (from “eat”) for the British mind.

What do we learn from this?

First, we learn that most of the rest of the world has a penchant for Cinn-a-burst gum instead of Trident. Either that or Trident has a marketing deal with Apple in the US and the UK.

More importantly, we learn that Americans and their close allies are:

1. …the only ones stupid enough to consider eating an electronic device simply because it looks like a pack of gum and has been placed in proximity to a pack of gum in promotional materials. Are we so fat that we’d eat something that is the same approximate shape as something else that we have to unwrap (twice!) and has no nutritional value?
2. …the only ones to consider damaging themselves internally for a potential financial gain, which is nullified by simply slapping a warning label warning them not to do something fantastically stupid.

The fact that Apple had the English page translated for the British (from the incomprehensible American) indicates that, far from being included with Americans simply because of language (receiving a copy of the site, with warnings), the British are in similar danger. I would like to officially and heartily welcome them to the “too stupid to breathe” club and show them a slice of their future (if it’s not already here):