NYU warning students not to use iPod headphones
posted March 7th 2005 7:03AM
Haven't been able to verify this, but AppleInsider is reporting that NYU has been putting up posters in its dorms
warning students not to use the standard-issue white earbud headphones that Apple includes with the
iPod lest they find themselves at the
hands of a mugger after their precious cargo (just a few weeks ago it was
New York high school students who were being warned not to
wear the signature white headphones). Apparently NYU is also asking that Apple introduce a less recognizable
alternative (which should work fine until would-be muggers just learn to start looking for those headphones instead) in
addition to recommending that students switch to less conspicuous headphones, but at the end of the day, it's a big
city and people who aren't even wearing headphones have been known to be robbed.
Anyway, any NYU students out there want to snap a pic of one of those posters for us? Assuming that they actually
exist, that is.
[Via TUAW]
I go to NYU, live in NYU housing and in one of the most dangerous areas for NYU students to be living. Never have I seen any propaganda concerning the white earbuds, nor have I heard anything about the administration asking that Apple make a less recognizable alternative. I haven't heard a thing about this through NYU news, only through technology news sources. Also, while I know a few younger kids who have been robbed for their iPods, I don't know anyone at NYU (nor have I heard any stories about anyone) who has been robbed for their iPod.
My two cents
Sounds like yet another urban legend...
I still say the people that come up with this stuff must not have ever even been to New York. You can't throw a rock in this city without hitting someone wearing white headphones.
I don't go to NYU now, but when I did 10 or so years ago they did not even allow flyers throughout the dorms. Each dorm had a bulletin board near the front desk but there were no flyers allowed throughout the building. So maybe some scared kid stuck up a flyer on a bulletin board in one of the dorms and now it's getting all blown out of proportion; people stick up all sorts of things on those bulletin boards.
Things may have changed since then but you've already got what sounds like a pretty definitive statement from a current student, and as a New York resident and former NYU student myself, it's another story that just sounds too ridiculous to believe.
If true, it sounds like a job for the retropod. http://www.retropod.com/
Well, if it's true, surely the Uni are forgetting the more important issue - that the earphones are bloody terrible!
"(which should work fine until would-be muggers just learn to start looking for those headphones instead)"
this seems a silly statement to me...
zack, obviously you are too dense to see that that was a joke.
I live in Brooklyn, and it has absolutely happened that people have been mugged for their iPods. Just last week my local police blotter included the story of a guy in my neighborhood who was followed two blocks from the subway to be mugged for his iPod. Hmm. I wonder how they knew he had one... Believe it, kids.
If this turns out to be true, wouldn't it be easier to just ask students to run out and buy a different set of headphones for their iPod instead of asking Apple to R&D NYU a new set? The arrogance of NYU's demand is staggering, only in academia.
I don't go to NYU, but I do live in NYC. It's so obvious when people are using iPods. Muggers could just clean up in this town by the headphones alone. It really would be an easy thing for iPod owners to just get another set of earphones to cut down on their risk. But I think people like the Apple ones because it shows you're cool enough to own an iPod. I have an iRiver MP3 player and some black Sony earphones (and I don't care about the cool factor), so I don't worry too much about getting singled out by muggers just for my music hardware. I just try to be cautious when I'm alone, or in an unfamiliar neighborhood, or at any other time & place when I feel less than 100% comfortable. And I don't get so involved in my music that I'm not aware of what's going on around me.
That's the real problem -- people are tuning in the music and tuning out the rest of the world. It would be better for NYU to provide more general advice on how to avoid being mugged than to tell students to swap out their white Apple earphones for nondescript ones.
How about swapping them out with an attached boombox instead that blasts out tunes from your ipod?
Getting rid of the iPod headphones is good advice anyway - they hardly sound good.
"It would be better for NYU to provide more general advice on how to avoid being mugged than to tell students to swap out their white Apple earphones for nondescript ones."
NYU does provide such advice. They give you a handout when you first arrive at school (as part of an orientation package) explaining basic common sense things about city life, including how not to get mugged. They do also provide more specific info, and honestly some of it *is* kind of ridiculous - I remember they had a map in my dorm about "areas to avoid", with the bad areas shaded in red. Well, the red areas were so totally arbitrary and haphazard as to be basically meaningless - for example, they'd shade in 100 feet of one street on the map, then not shade the next 70 feet, then they'd shade in the 80 feet after that, etc. And the shaded streets would often just be normal streets that regular people live on anyway (some of them even housed NYU buildings!). I mean, it *almost* makes me believe this iPod thing could be true... but not quite.
Honestly, I could see if, as part of their standard handout of general tips, one of the bullet points was "swap out your white headphones for black ones". That doesn't seem unreasonable. But to plaster big warning flyers specifically about iPods all over the dorms? No way.
The story is absolutely false. I live in an NYU dorm and have not seen any flyers warning about wearing iPod earbuds. Despite what TV's many Law & Order series may have you believe New York City in real-life is the safest large city in the United States.
This is clearly another urban myth. This has appeared two or three times in the last year, and never with coroboration.
As for #13, that's kind of a sucker's bet, isn't it? I mean, NYC is the single larges city in America, nearly triple that of, say, Los Angeles. Sure, it's much safer per capita than folks think...but with upwards of 8.5 million residents, you get a lot of total incidents. I suppose it's all on how you define a 'large city'. It's not a misrepresentation that NYC has a lot of crime...just a misinterpetation that the average citizen seems as much as TV might make you think.
hell, I work in Philadelphia (across the river from America's most dangerous city, Camden) and the average person polled figured the crime rate was 32% of the citizens had experienced some form of violent crime...when the actual rate was 3.2%. :)
The answer as mentioned above is to replace the headphones. Better can be had cheap. Trouble is, although many of the good replacement headphones are black or grey, some of them are WHITE. I'm looking at you, etymotic http://etymotic.com/ephp/er6i.asp
Can't something be made for iPod and not be white? Sheesh, apple is facinated with white, they even made the inside of the ibooks all white when they used to have the aluminum palm rests. I'm glad my G5 is aluminum. I'd have to sandblast the stupid thing if it was white.
I bought the original ipod and the headphones are the only part that still works. I'm gonna wear them with my cheapo cd-player that my ipod was supposed to replace before the battery died, that way when I get mugged, they'll just get some cheap crap... that should teach 'em a lesson...