It only looks for a single leading “e” or “i”, not any number. I’m guessing those tweaks were added to capture specific proper nouns that weren’t captured by simpler “leading capital letter” regexes, like “iPad” or “eBay”.

"*" is "0 or more" and "+" is "1 or more", it looks for any number of "e" or "i" at the beginning and at least one capital letter. The diagram below the regex is wrong.

Instead of

  [ie]*-?[A-Z]+

it looks like they wanted

  [ie]?-?[A-Z]

There was a product called the eeePC or so. It was a "netbook."

The Asus product line, yes (all three Es apparently stand for "easy"). But Asus write it with a capital E on the front. Still, somebody else might not.

It's not perfect for sure, but perfectly suitable for a first pass and then a dictionary sweep or another set of regexes. I guess I like the compactness of it!