For your iPod only

Former iPod engineer David Shayer has revealed Apple worked on a “top secret” project to create a “special” version of the device for the US government in 2005.

Shayer claimed only he and three other people in the company knew about the assignment, which he suspects involved building an iPod that doubled as a covert Geiger counter. “That’s a lot of effort to go to to detect a brand of shoes,” you titter, but if you’d just shut up for a moment you might actually learn something.

Shayer explained: “You could walk around a city, casually listening to your tunes, while recording evidence of radioactivity – scanning for smuggled or stolen uranium, for instance, or evidence of a dirty bomb development programme – with no chance that the press or public would get wind of what was happening.”

This is really interesting and you’re not even listening, are you? Sorry it’s not more exciting. We can’t wheel out a TV/DVD combi showing the classified iPod Geiger advert, silhouettes of teenagers in hazmat suits and gas masks doing the robot to Radioactivity by Kraftwerk on backgrounds of pink, green, yellow and purple. There’s no unearthed footage of Steve Jobs quipping to a Witches-style meeting hall that Geiger counters “aren’t better at anything”. We’ll come back when we have more evidence.