Apple's OS X trademark application triggers unnecessary speculation

Stephen Withers
Friday, 16 January 2009 02:07

Opinion and Analysis

As for "personal digital assistants; electronic organizers; electronic notepads", I'd suggest that's a reference to various minor capabilities of the iPhone and iPod range.

Paging software? No ideas there, but paging's nowhere near as important as it was before mobile phones became so affordable, so I wouldn't waste too much time pondering that one.

So what's the motivation for trademarking OS X?

Commentators are coming up with all sorts of speculations, including the old chestnut of OS licensing - if the operating system is sold with a Mac, it'll be Mac OS X, but if it's on another company's hardware then it's just OS X. I don't think so.

My interpretation is simple. The reason you register a trademark is to stop other people using it, or a mark that's confusingly similar.

Apple's Mac OS trademark was registered in 1996. Once the company began using OS X to describe the variant of its operating system for the iPhone (and later the iPod touch), it made sense to seek protection for that mark as well.

Filing the OS X trademark makes sense in terms of what's already happened - there's no need to hypothesise about current or future plans to justify it. Remember Occam's Razor.