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The iPad as a Generic Name for Tablet? Here Comes the Cease-and-Desist Brigade

This article is more than 10 years old.

An AP wire report speculates that the word “iPad” is so popular that it is about to become interchangeable with the word “tablet“. Meaning, when someone is talking about his or her tablet computer, whether it is manufactured by Motorola or RIM, they’ll still call it an iPad.

That is not a bad thing, if this person goes to Best Buy looking to buy a tablet and tells the sales associate he wants an iPad.

It is a bad thing, however, if he buys, say, the RIM PlayBook, hates it, and then starts tweeting and Facebooking to all his friends how the iPad is a waste of money.

But that scenario is just not going to happen and not just because the iPad is so closely intertwined with Apple‘s identity. Without a doubt Apple will react to any signs of iPad replacing “tablet computer” by consumers and companies the way I would if I saw a rat scurrying about the kitchen: with revulsion, horror and an immediate call to the professionals with instructions to kill, kill, kill.  Which is basically how Apple responded several years ago when “Pod” began to morph into generic use.

And like its attempts to carve a bright line around Pod, any maneuvers Apple makes  to keep the iPad brand name pristine will  not matter in the long run, no matter how many cease-and-desist letters it fires off. Why? Because almost certainly the iPad will one day be replaced by another form factor, probably courtesy of Apple itself, making the whole conversation moot.

The Specter of McJobs

In 2006, the height of iPod mania, Apple warned off a number of companies incorporating Pod into their services or products, including myPodder--leading to speculation that it would eventually go after Podcast or Pod casting (it didn’t)--and, reportedly, a product called TightPod, manufactured by TightJacket.

TightJacket, which is still around, makes custom covers for mobile devices like the Mac or Kindle or an iPad. Supposedly, according to news articles at the time, the name TightPod was a combination of tight, as in tight fitting jacket, and pod, as snug as a pea pod.

(For the record, I completely sympathize with Apple’s defense of Pod. Besides being a market share and legal issue, iPod and iPad are the kind of words that almost beg to be made into new, not-so-flattering words--like McJobs .)

After Apple pushed out its iPhone, though, the spotlight fell on that device and while the company continued to defend its iPod trademark, people were no longer inclined to attach “Pod“ to any remotely appropriate word.

Where Trendy Words Go to Die

This is the fate of most trendy words actually.

Before we said hype we would say "Barnumize" . And before we said hog, we used to say, or rather our grandparents did, “to bogart.“ And Republicans from the 1980s were quite liberal in their use of the verb bork--a reference to erstwhile Supreme Court nominee, Robert Bork who saw his nomination derailed by a smear campaign--when they meant blindsided or ambushed.

"Barnumize" refers to circus master P. T. Barnum.  "Bogart," of course, refers to Humphrey Bogart and when people said “to bogart” they first meant having a cigarette dangle from your lips at all times. Bogart then morphed into hog (I decided to spare us the history of “morph” btw for this article, and “btw” as well) and the cigarette dangling reference broadened to mean overindulgence in anything from bed blankets to the remote.

Trendy words don’t always fade off into oblivion though.

Remember the fuss Google kicked up when Merriam-Webster Dictionary decided it was time to make "google" an official a transitive verb -- lower case "g". Even after the decision was made to enter Google with a lower-case g in the dictionary, the search engine was still sending media organizations letters correcting their use of Google. It didn't want to see its name commoditized.

Today, of course, Google probably doesn’t mind that its name is synonymous with search--not with Bing making some serious inroads in the space.