Have you ever seen a meme of Steve Buscemi, an adult, dressed in teen skate attire and saying, “How do you do, fellow kids?” According to a new claim, Apple narrowly missed making a comparable cringe-worthy attempt to be cool with kids. Rather of calling its best wireless earbuds AirPods Pro, at least some Apple executives preferred the name AirPods Extreme.
That was a terrible idea, and Apple employees – who I believe were much younger than the individual or persons who thought “extreme” was a good word – immediately opposed. According to MacRumors, there were so many concerns that Apple soon decided to modify the name of the finest AirPods.
So, what’s so wrong with branding your earbuds AirPods Extreme? Allow me, an elderly person who had to ask my kids what “rizz,” “drip,” and “Harry Styles” meant, to explain why it isn’t hip just because old people think it is.
Extreme is a phrase from the 1990s, and it should stay there
The word “extreme” was widely used throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, but it had no meaning. We had extreme Right Guard deodorant, extreme Pringles, extreme Nachos, extreme Mountain Dew, extreme Taco Bell, and even Hostess Extreme Cream Twinkies, which was spelled eXtreme to make it even more extreme.
And there was the band Extreme, whose music was notable for not being extreme: their biggest hit, the anodyne ballad More Than Words, was so extreme that if you played the video to your mother, she’d nod her head along with the music and tell you that they seemed like a nice bunch of boys.
Here’s a video of Extreme not being that extreme.
Apple was not exempt from this. When Apple released a new version of its AirPort wireless router and companion laptop card with slightly faster Wi-Fi, it dubbed it the AirPort Extreme – but when you consider that the modem inside was dial-up and 56K, downloading an Extreme album would take an extremely long time, you can see the problem.
Extreme is a horrible name for any technology product. When you’ve already stated that your product is at the extreme of performance, you can’t just turn around and claim that your new version is ‘extremer’. There’s nowhere else to go.
So I’m delighted Apple didn’t name the AirPods Pro the AirPods Extreme. But I’m not certain that The executives had completely digested the lesson that their younger staff were trying to teach them. After all, if they did, they definitely wouldn’t have titled their first over-ear headphones AirPods Max.
