kad: What is in a name: Definitions for MAC, Mac, Apple, Macintosh.
Frequently people new to the Apple Inc.'s world may be confused as to the terms used by Apple Inc. and its users for various devices.
The confusion is obvious from the number of postings which refer to Macs as MACs, and the number of postings which refer to Apple Inc. the company as MAC or Macintosh. To help clarify what each of these terms means, I've listed what are the actual definitions of these terms and how they are used.
MAC - Acronym for Media Access Control. A type of hexadecimal address for network hardware.
Mac - Nickname for Macintosh
Macintosh - The name referring to Apple's computers since 1984 except for the Apple II and Lisa series computers which still were manufactured at the same time as the Macintosh was introduced, as well as the name for the operating system on those Macintosh computers.
Apple Inc. - the company name of the Macintosh computers manufacturer, and operating system, as well as the iPods, and various other hardware and software as listed on these pages:
http://www.apple.com/hardware/