West Midlands police have issued a stark warning to iPod users: ditch the white headphones or pay the price.
Fashion-conscious music lovers are apparently being targeted by muggers. The
Times tells the sorry tale of 22-year-old language student Roland Baskerville, who lost his 20GB model on the mean streets of Birmingham: "I was walking down the road near to my home when a man who was walking the other way pointed at my headphones."
The thief then asked Baskerville if he was listening to an iPod and, receiving an affirmative answer, he "pulled a knife out and started waving it at me, saying: Well hand it over, then. I gave it to him and he ran off. He must have known I was wearing an iPod because of the white headphones."
The police are advising iPod junkies to use less distinctive headphones, something which is apparently akin to asking Victoria Beckham to shop at Oxfam. The
Sun quotes one iPod representative as saying: "There are guys whod rather be robbed than change the colour of the headphones."
Quite right. What's the point of buying a must-have fashion accessory unless everyone within a 300-yard radius can enjoy it too? As one poster to an
Ipodlounge.com forum puts it: "I always pick out the iPod people when I'm walking down the street. I know who all the cool people are."
Yes, it's certainly lovely to stand out from the crowd.
Well, of course the solution is iPod registration. That might be a cool option, to do it like how stolen cellphones are handled (at least in Germany). Every iPod gets a hardware-coded ID number, and on an iTunes synch the number is matched against a database of reported stolen iPods at Apple. If it matches, iTunes won't synch. Or even more severe the iPod is toast until Apple sends an unlock code through another iTunes synch. Nah, better, superimpose someone saying "You are listening to a stolen iPod" over all music played.
I'm sure this could eventually be hacked, but the common mugger will find an iPod useless after a while.