Apple takes control of Axiotron’s TabletMac trademark

John Brownlee ()

Modbook_pen_B

Like an iPhone for Titans: a hypothetical lozenge in ebony, aluminum and glass!

We never quite see the end of Tablet Mac rumors on the Internet, and it’s easy to get swept up in the madness of crowds over the skintiest of them. Let’s not let too much foam collect in the saucer of our collected under lips over the latest headline to hit the feeds, though: “Apple takes control of TabletMac trademark” looks pretty exciting at first blush, but it’s probably just business as usual for a large company protecting its trademark.

The development comes by way of Axiotron, that neat company that will take your MacBook and $699, rip out its display, replace it with a pen-based screen, break its spine at the coccyx and flip it around one-hundred-and-eighty-degrees to give you a Tablet Mac. In fact, they went as far as to register a trademark for TabletMac with the Trademark Office.

Sometime in the last year, though, Axiotron transferred the TabletMac trademark to Apple. It’s easy to take that trademark transfer as significant (bolded), a sign that Apple is soon to send a hoary Jobs down from Mount Silicon with a divine, multitouch tablet of its own.

In reality, though, if Apple is working on a Tablet Mac, it’s unlikely to be called any such thing. I suspect the real source of this is just standard protection of Apple’s “Mac” trademark, and the whole thing was settled as easily as an email rattled off to Axiotron: “Hey, you guys are doing cool work. Transfer the TabletMac trademark to us before we have to rearrange your face.”

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[via Mac Rumors]

3 comments »

About the author

John BrownleeJohn Brownlee is news editor here at Cult of Mac, and has also written about a lot of things for a lot of different places, including Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker, AMC, Geek and the Consumerist. He lives in Cambridge with his charming inamorata and a tiny budgerigar punningly christened after Nabokov's most famous pervert. You can follow him here on Twitter.

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  • Art Lapp

    I think you are a little off mark with your comment. Axiotron, and Apple worked together “Friendly” on their tablet, Hell Steve Wozniack is their engineer/consultant/board member!

    Apple even sells them logic boards, and honors their warranty. I’m thinking Apple used the Axiotron tablet to “test the market, and learn” for such a device.

  • http://www.mr2.org.nz John

    And to find out who would pay the cost of a whole computer just to eliminate the keyoard and graft on a wacom tablet.

  • http://www.diarmy.net Diarmaid O Conchubhair

    I doubt that Apple would use such a name either as it doesn’t serve to become a word that can roll off the tongue like their current double-junctioned words like MacBook and iMac. I think it would more suitably be called the MacLet or the MacPad or something to that effect.

    Hopefully it’ll come soon because at the rate apps are being developed for the iPhone and iPod touch, the ‘MacLet’ would be a PSP killer and also be massively successful in the medical and educational arenas where the TabletPC was originally targeted, tested and dropped. But I hope there’s no stylus because I can’t count the amount of times I’ve had customers calling me (a rare few mind!) asking for replacement stylii that broke or got lost.