Coupled with Apple’s big announcement of Mountain Lion, exists a relatively hush piece of news. It appears that the ‘Mac’ in Mac OS X will not be with us anymore, instead it will be simply called OS X. Confirmation from Apple tells us that their preferred full name is OS X Mountain Lion. And it appears that this new name reflects quite evidently on the company’s new Mountain Lion pages.
This doesn’t mean that the term Mac has been written off, that will be pure sacrilege. It appears that Apple is now trying to differentiate their hardware from their software. The concept of using Mac exclusively for the hardware and OS X for the software seems to be their first step. As far as everything else of Mountain Lion goes, it matches the iOS naming scheme of calling the iPad and iPod by separate names rather than the OS. We’ll just have to see where Apple’s branching strategy will lead to in the future.
Another thing, Apple conspiracy theorists might find some cues from this move with Apple’s 2007 decision to officially rename the company “Apple, Inc.” from “Apple Computer”.
What does this mean? Could just be a post Steve Jobs rebranding overhaul, or could be something entirely different. Only Apple knows for sure.
