Tk Source Code

NSAppearanceName is a "Type Alias" for NSString, and the name property of
NSAppearance is of type NSAppearanceName.

i.e. the documentation says:

Type Alias
NSAppearanceName
typedef NSString * NSAppearanceName;

My understanding is that when Apple does this sort of thing they use
singleton NSString objects.  So all NSAppearance objects with name
NSAppearanceNameAqua actually do use equal pointers for their name
property.  It would make sense to do that, in order to make equality
testing faster, given that there are only a few possibilities for a 
"System Appearance Name".  However I can not find any explicit statement
guaranteeing that the System Appearance Names used for the name property
are actually singletons.

So I think the current code works, but that your suggestion would be
safer in some sense.