Over the years, Apple has built a juggernaut of a brand that positions its products at the center of everyday consumers’ digital lives. It all began with an explosion of translucent candy plastic in 1998 with the release of the first iMac. iMovie showed up the next year, followed by iTunes and the iPod in 2001. The iTrain hasn’t stopped since, with most consumer-aimed offerings from Jobs’ cool-factory bearing the prefixed i.

Starting any word you please with a particular lowercase letter is not a registerable trademark. And so came the imitators, seeking to capitalize on the indefatigable momentum of the 21st century’s alphabetical dernier cri. They’re everywhere. An in-classroom digital response system from MacMillan called the iClicker. An interactive shop-window touchscreen foil technology called iWindow. Even our own wine show produced in partnership with the iYellow Wine Club.

But now Apple has announced a new suite of synchronization tools (extending the iSync/SyncServices platform?) that lets users synchronize mail, contacts, calenders and more between their Macs, PCs, and mobile iDevices. They’ve called it “mobile me“, and I have a hunch that there was more to the decision than the fact that they’d already used “iSync”.

Is this the first step in the abandonment of the iBrand? Has our generation’s favourite letter finally passed into history? Is the iMac just a little too 90s? Have iWords become so cliché that even Apple marketers cringe when one of them says, “Why don’t we call it iMobile?” Maybe the loss of brand specificity is becoming a problem.

But “me”? I know we’re trying to stick to the user-focused branding, but I’m not convinced enough time has passed since Microsoft’s WindowsME debacle to cleanse “Me” of its connotations of (1) Microsoft and (2) useless nonfunctional crap.

Whatever happens, eventually we’re going to run out of English first-person singular pronouns. And then advertisers are going to be in trouble.

-Nick