Purchasing an Apple device in mainland China is no easy task. Provided that you can find a legitimate Apple shop which isn’t a physically photoshopped copy of the real deal, chances are good that the fancy tablet will be sold out.
Especially when Apple doesn’t even own the rights to call their device by its original name in the Asian nation.Legally, that name was trademarked years ago, by a company in China named Proview. They called their computer the “Internet Personal Access Device”, or Ipad for short, minus the grammatical castration.
And here’s where things get silly, as while the Taipei branch of proview was only too happy to sell the name rights to Apple, the ShenZhen branch wasn’t, resulting in a legal stand-off that prohibited Apple from using the “iPad” name in China, despite the fact that their manufacturing HQ was there.
Thing is, the Shenzen Proview has gone bankrupt, and has had no choice but to accept the $60 million offer from Apple, allowing the house of Jobs to secure the brand rights for iPad in China, a lucrative market. As the Shenzhen boss, Yang Long told Reuters:
My biggest wish is to resolve all these frustrating problems and put them behind me. If we can resolve all the problems we have now and I have a chance to make a comeback, I’d still want to overtake my old competitors.
Rest assured, $60 million should be just the right amount of cash needed to throw darts at a board and copyright a guess to the name of the next Apple product.
