One of the issues with portable music players is that sometimes, viruses can stowaway on them. This happens often enough, however in the rarer cases, they can even leave the factory carrying such a surprise passenger. Such was the case with the video capable iPods shipped after the 12th of September.

We recently discovered that a small number - less than 1% - of the Video iPods available for purchase after September 12, 2006 left our contract manufacturer carrying the Windows RavMonE.exe virus. This known virus affects only Windows computers, and up to date anti-virus software which is included with most Windows computers should detect and remove it. So far we have seen less than 25 reports concerning this problem. The iPod nano, iPod shuffle and Mac OS X are not affected, and all Video iPods now shipping are virus free. As you might imagine, we are upset at Windows for not being more hardy against such viruses, and even more upset with ourselves for not catching it.

Apple has good reason to be upset with themselves over this, this sort of thing should not happen, under any circumstances, luckily for them, only a small number of devices were affected. Quite surprising, however, is the jab at Windows, which has no place in this context… there is such a thing as viral marketing, but this is taking it a bit far.