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Comment by pkamb | Hacker News Reader

> Read this, plus more, in The Magazine’s app for iPad®, iPhone®, and iPod touch®. Start your free, 1-week trial.

http://i.imgur.com/bINgC.png

What's with the "®"s? Seems like something Marco would complain about on B&A. (Also, that entire button should be clickable.)

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It looks like boilerplate or c/p'd text. Note that "touch" is not capitalized either. This is too sloppy for Marco - or a serious indictment of the editorial standard we can expect.

Apple doesn't capitalize the T in iPod touch.

http://www.apple.com/ipod-touch/

That doesn't necessarily mean tech writers shouldn't though.

Of course it does. What justification would they have for using a different name capitalisation for the product?

It's fairly common. For instance, the NY Times style is to use "iPod Touch", "iPod Nano", and "Mac Mini" despite Apple's desires. The justification is that a proper noun in all lowercase can lead to unclear or ambiguous sentences.

Then they do so incorrectly, as Apple's list of registered trademarks clearly specifies the lowercase second word for these devices. [0]

So when the NY Times writes iPod Touch® [1] as they do on their mobile apps page they're not using the registered trademark as intended. It would be as incorrect as writing 'Blackberry' or 'MicroSoft'.

Apple is pretty touchy about this, with Section 4 of their 'Rules for Proper Use of Apple Trademarks' saying:

4. Always spell and capitalize Apple’s trademarks exactly as they are shown in the Apple Trademark List. Do not shorten or abbreviate Apple product names. Do not make up names that contain Apple trademarks. [2]

Obviously the enforcement of all that legalese is questionable and Apple has yet to burn down the doors of the NY Times, but I think it's fair to say that for the rest of us it would be correct to accept that not all company and product names follow grammatical rules and that when writing about them we should spell and capitalise them as the company intended rather than as we'd prefer.

[0] http://www.apple.com/legal/trademark/appletmlist.html

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/services/mobile/apps/

[2] http://www.apple.com/legal/trademark/guidelinesfor3rdparties...

Funny thing is that it doesn't seem like the actual registered trademark includes capitalization choice. They are all shown as all-caps in the PTOs database, for instance: Word Mark ITUNES MATCH

I believe the trademark is registered regardless of capitalisation, otherwise we'd have ridiculous situations like GoOgLe being non-infringing. So 'iTunes Match' is protected whether it's spelled 'ITUNES MATCH', 'iTUNES match' or whatever other combination you want.

That is however a separate issue to a company's preferred usage of its mark, where it has the prerogative to specify a preferred capitalisation. Again, the examples of 'Blackberry' and 'MicroSoft' being incorrect are relevant here.

As an aside, I love that we got into a debate on this. In what other community would such needless minutiae take up anyone's time? :)

I commonly see the misspelling "MicroSoft". Does anyone know if it was ever spelled that way? Originally it was "Micro-Soft", but did they ever use the intercaps form?

People commonly misspell "Xcode" and "Xbox", but I really hate it when they write "MAC" to refer Apple's Macintosh. It's not an acronym!

Apple also tries to promote the use of dropping the "the" and just referring to iPod, iPad, iPhone, etc. Should we also do this too, in deference to Apple?

"iPod touch" is the correct capitalization. http://www.apple.com/ipod-touch/

Interesting. The first search result on my search was capitalized, but now it isn't. Maybe I searched on DDG instead of Google and got a weird result.

I wonder whether they'll follow a style manual, though. I find it weird that "The Magazine" isn't italicized, but maybe they're following one that prefers magazine titles non-italicized.

EDIT: I think it was indeed DDG, which uses Wikipedia's weird autocapitalized titles. Or autotitle()'d, if you're a Python guy. I was too focused on the capitalization of the "t" that I didn't notice the erroneously capitalized "IPod".

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