Between 2011 and 2012 Apple was litigating for many months with the Chinese company Proview to be able to use the iPad brand in that country. The dispute, finally closed with an economic agreement of close to 60 million dollars in July 2012, could have meant millions in losses for Apple if the Asian authorities had prohibited the sale of the device in China for infringing a registered trademark.
Today we all associate the iPad brand with Apple’s tablet, but the Cupertino-based company wasn’t the first to think of the name.
Was Intel, many years before, the company that used it for the first time. And there are even tests. In one of the typical exercises of imagination of what could be the technology of the future, the company specialized in the manufacture of processors drew in 1995 a scenario in which portable devices could be connected with cables or wirelessly to a central home computer. . These remote devices would have different functions: electronic book readers, calendar, music and video player, personal computer, clock, alarm clock, maps, traffic information,… Sounds like something we already know, right?
Intel did not initially call this device the iPad, but instead i pad (information pad or information agenda). It was, yes, a generic name. In fact, as we will see later, he changed it later.
According to Avram Miller, vice president of Intel between 1984 and 1999, this computer would have a touch screen and flat to write on it. It would also accept voice commands and could respond in the same way. In addition, it would be wireless and, attention! cheap (we assume that by the standards of the time). The company pointed out that there were already proposals from other companies in this regard, such as Apple’s ill-fated Newton (precursor of the iPad as we know it today), Motorola’s Envoy or IBM’s Simon.
The funny thing is that Intel went so far as to develop an iPad (already with the name changed) and even take it to the CES fair in 2001, nine years before Steve Jobs presented the first generation of iPad. It was a device with which the company wanted to take advantage of the internet boom of those years. However, pressure from PC manufacturers (who saw it as a competitor) and the fact that the equipment was out of the company’s usual product line, led Intel to cancel the project (although the device was already ready for commercialization). ) and ended up selling it to his own employees at a substantial discount on the planned price
In any case, this was not the first time that Apple adopted an unoriginal name for one of its products. More serious was the case of the iPhone, a trademark registered by Cisco (actually, I-phone), which forced Apple to pay for the rights to the name. Something similar happened in Brazil, where the company Gradiente Electronica SA had also registered that name. However, since September 2013 a court ruling allows Apple to use the name iPhone in the South American country.
Via: Cult of Mac | CNET
