Amaya Toman From today's point of view, we see the iPad as something that has been an integral part of Apple's arsenal for a relatively long time. The path to the name, which seems so obvious to us now, was not too easy. Apple's iPad wasn't the world's first iPad, and getting the license to use the name certainly wasn't free for Jobs' company. Let's remember this time in today's article.
A famous song
The battle for the name "iPad" has flared up between Apple and the Japanese international concern Fujitsu. The dispute over the name of the Apple tablet came two months after Steve Jobs officially introduced it to the world, and about a week before the iPad was supposed to land on store shelves. If the iName dispute sounds familiar to you, you're not mistaken - it wasn't the first time in Apple's history that the company came up with a product that boasted an already existing name.
You most likely won't remember the iPAD from Fujitsu. It was a kind of "palm computer" that featured Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity, offered VoIP call support, and boasted a 3,5-inch color touchscreen. If the description of the device that Fujitsu introduced in 2000 doesn't tell you anything, that's totally fine. The iPAD from Fujitsu was not intended for ordinary customers, but served store personnel, who used it to monitor the status of stock, goods in the store and sales.
In the past, Apple fought for example with Cisco over the iPhone and iOS trademark, and in the 1980s it had to pay the audio company McIntosh Laboratory to use the Macintosh name for its computer.
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The battle for the iPad
Even Fujitsu didn't get the name for its device for nothing. A company called Mag-Tek used it for their hand-held device used to encrypt numbers. By 2009, both named devices seemed long gone, with the US Patent Office declaring the trademark abandoned. But Fujitsu was quick to hurry and re-submit the application, while Apple was busy with the worldwide registration of the iPad name. The dispute between the two companies did not take long.
"We understand that the name is ours," Masahiro Yamane, director of Fujitsu's PR division, told reporters at the time. As with many other trademark disputes, the issue was far from just the name the two companies wanted to use. The dispute also began to revolve around what each device should do. Both - even if only "on paper" - possessed similar abilities, which became another bone of contention.
In the end - as is often the case - money came into play. Apple paid four million dollars to rewrite the iPad trademark that originally belonged to Fujitsu. It wasn't exactly an insignificant amount, but given that the iPad gradually became an icon and the best-selling product in history, it was certainly money well invested.
Source: cultofmac
