I cannot refute your recollection, but it sounds similar to the dust-up Apple had with the Beatles’ company. IIRC, Apple Computer promised Apple Corp that it would not get in the music business (and then it did).
More information than I (and probably you) wanted to know: Apple Corps v Apple Computer - Wikipedia. I thought I had heard that Paul McCartney was added to the Apple board as part of a settlement, but I find nothing to support that memory.
A good question. A magazine I used to work for got nailed for a one time use of a trademarked name in body copy of a paid advertorial, and it was a very expensive nailing. Maybe this is why Apple makes sure to keep Macintosh active but inconspicuous; trademarks can be maintained indefinitely but must be renewed every ten years, and between the fifth and sixth year of every period, it must be proven the trademark is still in active use:
From when OS X arrived and I still was hesitant, I started to format my HD in two partitions, Minus 9 and Minus X, depending on desired starting-up conditions. Minus 9 (unix-treated a bit to deal with permissions) I haven’t used as a startup disk since 2006 (I checked!) but it is still my actual home folder to this date. (And I might transfer the whole lot to the linux world, not sure yet).
Yes, that’s real too.
And when did Apple stop using apple (lowercase) varieties to characterise its products? Was Performa the latest?
Macintosh is Scottish spelling, McIntosh is Irish.
In the recent past, I have been using star names for my desktop computers, and bird names for my laptops and devices. My Time Machine external drive uses the same name, suffix TM, and my Carbon Copy Cloner backup has the suffix CCC. For reference, I tack on a post-suffix of the internal drive capacity, such as 1TB.
However, my beloved Cube is still named simply Picasso, and its internal drive partitions are Picasso9 (boots up in OS 9) and PicassoX (boots up in 10.4 Tiger).
Or for a serious nostalgia jag, I can plug in my Macintosh SE/30 — named Nameless — with System 7.5.5. However, after reading this thread, I wonder if I should name it “OK Boomer”.
Two notes: 1. The ‘About Finder’ on my Swedish system only uses ‘Mac’ (‘Skrivbordshantering på Mac’ though the Apple people in Sweden have been notorious for bad translations, but they are somewhat better these days).
2. As a long-time Mac user I know you can change the name of the “HD”, but I also know it has sometimes caused problems doing so and therefore it generally is best left with the default name (I am always careful to get that right). It was especially a problem with Adobe Acrobat as it depended upon the HD drive being named that way to find its files, but guess they eventually fixed that, but it is still a good idea not changing that name nor and then as some program you install may register search paths based on its name.
Since I’m a Windows user with a custom built PC that makes a lot of sense. We can plugin almost 6 2.5/3.5" HDDs/SSDs and have atleast 2 nvme SSDs. If they all have the same standard name can get a little confusing.
Edit: In my case of course, others with much expensive MOBOs possibly can do more than this.
Maybe that is a reason for the “Macintosh HD” as the default name for the internal drive.
Fun article!
Jerry touched on my topic briefly.
I give other names to external drives but I usually leave the internal drive “Macintosh HD” because I recall problems in the past.
I believe the problems involved Macs that were replacing older Macs and which therefore had the old Mac’s data cloned or migrated to them. And so then I think it may have been Backup software that broke because it had hard coded drive names configured so it would know what files to backup. By when I changed the drive name, it stopped backing up.
It’s an Homage to Steve, I am sure. The Finder name and on the back of the boxes.
A few people have said this, which I find interesting, since I’ve changed every drive name since my first Mac in something like 1987, and I have no recollection of that ever having been an issue that the community discussed. Not saying it didn’t happen, but I’d love to see references if anyone can find them.
First thing I do is change the computer name in the Sharing System Preferences. That’s a long unwieldy name. With an apostrophe if I’m not mistaken.
This thread is getting a bit long, but I’ll ad my 2¢ anyway: Since I replaced my old cheese grader Mac Pro with an iMac in 2014, I named my Fusion Drive iMac HD. I likewise have many external drives, so unique drive names are important. Most of them are system version related, as I have done a lot of Mac maintenance in the past and having relevant boot drives was important. Apropos of which, I name my drives according to their function, as it’s rather difficult to keep whimsical names in order, ie.: Data (for my main external data storage drive), Data Backup, Time Machine, Disk Archives, Support Files, Sierra Utility Disk, Sierra Install Disk, etc. Many or these, of course, are partitions on a drive; even so, I have two 8 port powered USB hubs, as there are way too few USB ports on an iMac. With a new Mac Pro (dream on), of course, one could install PCI cards to provide additional ports, though at least one hub might still be necessary. But even powered hubs won’t boot every drive I have, like my external SSD, so I’ve had to unplug at least one drive to boot from that one.
While we’re on the topic of nomenclature, why is a disk or SSD a “drive” anyway? Maybe to distinguish it from the RAM or CPU that actually drive the computer? Mysteries abound.
Here’s some detail on the etymology of “drive”:
Hey, thanks. That makes perfect sense—not always the case with technical terminology. 
I actually remember an example of the opposite being true. Wayback in the day (early 90s maybe?) there was a piece of malicious software that would try to change files on your system, but the files that it went after were located by the full location string. Only people who still had their system drive as the default “Macintosh HD” were in danger. If you changed your drive name the location of the files was somewhere else the software would not know to look.
Well I can’t say I remember a specific example, if an installer program was coded the same way as this malicious program was I could see an installer failing. That certainly wouldn’t affect any modern Mac systems though.
I suspect it will keep being used in a few places for trademark protection. IANAL but I think trademarks have to be used to be kept.
If you do it first thing with a new Mac it will almost always work.
But once you start using apps they tend to save full paths to files. Which can be a real pain if you have 100K+ files on shares and decide that “Candy Cane Lane” may no longer be the best name for the Accounting share. InDesign (and CAD
programs) can have dozens (or 100s) of files referenced into a document. And if the references are not a part of the folder structure with the main document you can get all kinds of broken links when you try and open/work on a file.
The slow pop of a “Recent” menu can be due to the app trying to link to files BEFORE you pick one and they are no longer “around”. Best practice here is the app should link to a file AFTER you pick it.