As the Apple community awaits the WWDC20 keynote later this morning, Patently Apple has discovered the filing for "Apple Rosetta" at the Japan Patent Office this morning after the news of this development began to surface. The Japanese trademark filing that we discovered is presented below. Apple filed for it on April 30, 2020 and it was made public on May 26, 2020. Apple's recent filing would strongly suggest that they intend to reuse this software with upcoming ARM based Macs to allow x86 coded apps to be translated.

Apple filed their trademark under International Class 09 with the following verbiage:

"Downloadable computer software for developing/translating/executing computer programs on computer/computer networks and global communication networks, computer software for computing on a cross platform, computer software, electronic application machines instruments and parts."

In the U.S. Apple was assigned the trademark "Rosetta" from Rosetta, Inc. Corporation in Texas. The trademark was registered on December 10, 1985. The USPTO record lists apple Inc. Corporation as the "Last Listed Owner" via assignment. The last renewal date is listed as June 19, 2015 which is good for 10 years (June 2025).

Currently Rosetta is a discontinued dynamic binary translator for Mac OS X that allowed many PowerPC applications to run on certain Intel-based Macintosh computers without modification. Apple released Rosetta in 2006 when it changed the instruction set architecture of the Macintosh platform from the PowerPC to the Intel processor. The name "Rosetta" is a reference to the Rosetta Stone, the discovery that made it possible to comprehend and translate Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Rosetta is based on QuickTransit technology. It has no graphical user interface, which led Apple to describe Rosetta as "the most amazing software you'll never see."

Rosetta was initially included with Mac OS X v10.4.4 "Tiger", the version that was released with the first Intel-based Macintosh models. Below is a photo of the late Steve Jobs introducing Rosetta at a keynote event.