In fact, Apple officially registered it for this purpose in order to avoid this kind of conflict. These conflicts with manually-assigned .local names were alrea

In fact, Apple officially registered it for this purpose in order to avoid this kind of conflict. These conflicts with manually-assigned .local names were already happening since the beginning of Apple's zeroconf work, and other people were frustrated with them (you can see on Wikipedia that Microsoft had previously advocated manual use of .local in its documentation). But the designation has been official since 2013. Edit: This was all described in another part of this thread already, sorry for the pure duplication.