iPad is a baneful brand name to Bostonians

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I’m on the hardware beat of CoM’s iPad coverage, so while the App Store devs take the stage, I wanted to just a quick aside on why I think the iPad is a terrible name for the Tablet, as spontaneously ill-considered as my opinion might be.

In an earlier post, I swore that if Apple was creatively bereft enough to call their tablet the iPad, I’d eat an extremity… but not that one. Either way, I’m reneging on my promise, since I like my digits.

But I wanted to point out quickly why I think this is such a terrible product name. I’m from Boston originally. We have an interesting way of pronouncing our a’s.

Call up a friend with a Boston accent and ask them to say “iPad.” They might just pronounce it pretty similarly to “iPod.” We’re weird that way. Or as Jake von Slatt just said to me: “Here in Boston, we’d say ‘Do you haave the big iPohd or the little iPohd?'”

Even if the pronunciation is different for everyone, though, iPad still seems a bad choice. A one letter difference makes for a lot of possible confusion.

iSlate had its problems — I equate a slate with something monochrome, fragile, easy shatterable — but it was a lot better than iPad.

What do you guys think?

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