Apple antagonist Proview unveils its own iPad Chinese shell-of-a-company Proview Shenzhen, embroiled in a trademark dispute with Apple over the name "iPad", held a press conference in Beijing to plead their case and to show the assembled journos an assortment of marketing materials for their own iPAD. The Proview iPAD has no resemblance whatsover to Apple's fondleslab, …
"The Proview iPAD has no resemblance whatsover to Apple's fondleslab, but there's more than a passing similitude between it and another groundbreaking Apple product, the original bulbous iMac."
Is this a jab at how Apple lies about everything being magical and revolutionary or is the author actually of the opinion that the iMac was a "groundbreaking" product? If the author is indeed of that opinion, then I am afraid I must announce that I do not wish to reside on this planet anymore. iMacs were garbage.
So how's your Chinese then? If your prime market is China, why would you care about writing good marketing material in English?
The point isn't that. The point is that they've actually been using this trademark in China since 1998. What on earth gives a US company the right to take it from them?
It's the VAX story all over again, but I bet you would have sided with VAX (a British company) against Digital. VAX, I remind you, are still in business, unlike Digital. Oh, and they are now Chinese-owned...
If your prime market is China, why write it in english at all? They did so they do care - but not enough do it properly.
No, the original question is good and still unanswered, why are chinese/japanese translations so crap. I'd like to know.
(above nationalities uncapitalised to annoy pedants)
It's not really a question of right to take away, it's a question of whether the contract Apple has that ostensibly gives it rights to the name is valid. Thrown into that seems to be some sort of confusion about exact ownership of different parts of Proview. So Apple's case is that it paid to purchase the mark and Proview failed to assign it, Proview's case is that whomever Apple dealt with, it was somebody else.
I don't think there's any dispute that Apple paid someone and thought it had bought the mark in good faith, despite its history of launching products and dealing with the legal issues later (ala the iPhone and Linksys). There's definitely nobody suggesting that Apple has the right just to swoop in and take ownership of the trade mark because its an American company or a much bigger company or anything like that.
Have you seen the English on some Japanese packaging? It makes no sense at all.
I asked a Japanese colleague about this. His reply, "You know how Chinese characters are sometimes used as decoration on Western products? It is the same with English characters in Japan: they are there just to look pretty."
My 'Chinese' is non-existent. But, If I were producing written material in Mandarin, I'd make sure it was checked (and re-written) by a native speaker, living in China with a technical background. To not take that simple and inexpensive extra step would be 'arrogant' of me. To expect the same from others seems reasonable to me.
7%? If only that...
Let's see "spent $30m on developing and manufacturing the iPAD, and that they had produced "between 10,000 and 20,000""
So that comes to a production cost of $1500 per unit. Did they really sell this piece of s**** for $1500? Somehow I doubt it. So I suspect their markup was actually -40%.
No wonder they are bankrupt - 30m pissed up the wall gives a massively unsustainable price per unit for the volume sold in the Chinese market - very few people there could spend anything like $1500 on a pc. Therefore it must have been priced *much* lower and didn't sell anywhere near the volume needed to break even.
The iMac was just a belated imitation of the groundbreaking Amstrad PCW all-in-one-box concept.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad_PCW
I suggest Lord Sugar should sue both Apple and Proview.
(For those who don't remenber it, the Amstrad PCW was also pretty crap, so it seems Apple and Proview half-inched that concept too)
Building the CPU board and floppies into the monitor cabinet was not an "original" idea by Amstrad.
NEC, circa 1982:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NEC_APC.jpg
IBM Datamaster, 17 Feb 1982:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/diana5/393075200/
Going back farther...
Tektronix 4051 (ran BASIC, had a built-in DC300a tape storage unit) circa 1976:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tektronix_4051_ad_April_1976.jpg
HP 9830a (ran BASIC, had a built in cassette storage unit and built-in thermal printer), circa 1972:
http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=950
I've used those beasts. The HP thermal printouts would fade to purple-black if you didn't keep them well away from heat sources.
That's basically a Compaq iPaq Internet Appliance (either the IA-1 or the IA-2, I don't recall which one is which). The iPaq CRT monitor's OSD behaves identically to a Mag InnoVision monitor. There is some relation between Proview and Mag InnoVision...
Proview's rendition has a different color scheme, but every other aspect of the design is identical to the Compaq product. These two Compaq products were members of the ill-fated Internet Appliance "craze" of the late 90s/early 2000s. They featured a National Semiconductor Geode CPU and booted into Windows CE from a DiskOnChip device.
I found one on the curb. It's still moldering in my basement, as I never had much luck getting it to boot into anything other than the copy of Windows CE on the flash memory disk.
IP vs Brand.
To be honest I think this is more a case of Apple saying "Well we own the i... Branding and we have used the iPad as part of our over all product which preexists prior to this trade marks inception ergo we have not intentionally infringed on a trade mark"
Having said that I still think apple should say "Opp's our bad" and pay them off to use it, but sadly that is not the apple way, but I feel that this little pseudo iMac would lend credence to Apple counter suing them over IP infringement as the original iMac for it's time was a damned unusual design that looked good.
Either way the whole IP war has just got silly, seriously how can a physical gesture be trade marked or patented, the TV my folks had till I was 12 used a sliding motion to raise and lower the volume and that was a Toshiba are they going to try and pwn apple over it?
Wow, a "thumbs down" for a statement of fact.
'Tis a hard life being a commentard in these forums, where anything which might cast Apple in a positive light, such as objective statements of fact, generate thumbs down.
The Register forums continue their inevitible decline to the level or moronicness (is that a word?) that chracterises so much of the internet.
But Apple paid Proview for the iPad name in 10 countries including China. Proview is a Taiwain company and their China division is saying the payment Apple made is not valid for the trademark that exists in China.
Proview is going bankrupt very quickly (within 60 days at best) and is trying to eek a couple of million to give to the officers.
Apple is within their rights to defend against this attempt to ignore what they paid for.
This post has been deleted by its author
Very detailed photos of the actual device, taken by an owner:
https://picasaweb.google.com/108815326764525357704/ProviewIPAD
There were two versions of Proview's iPad, one ran Windows CE with th MSN Companion interface. The other, funnily enough, ran BeIA, also known as BeOS for Internet Appliances.
As some may recall Apple was close to buying BeOS before deciding to bring back Steve Jobs and his company NeXT instead.
If it's a phone review, it's compared with the iPhone. If it's a tablet review, it's compared with the iPad. If it has the letter "i" in the name, it must be something to do with Apple. If it's something to do with Apple, then it's probably a legal dispute.
It's really quite tiring.
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