There are a lot of things to also hate about apples naming schemes, just look at the pro, max, se nonsense they cooked up.
Also the naming scheme of Mac OS versions, i can never figure out which one came before or after the other, there is no rhyme or reason. Why dont they use alphabetical sorted names? Or years/numbers like Windows…?
> There are a lot of things to also hate about apples naming schemes
Which you’re free to do, and could have done without insulting the author. The submitted post’s very first sentence is “I love the way Apple names things”. The author likes them. They’re sharing a opinion, at no point do they imply they’re the voice of reason or that you should agree with them.
What I see from their post is someone who made an effort to build and share something interesting which makes them happy.
What I see from your comment is instant tribalism, where one can’t even say they like an inconsequential naming scheme without being labelled a “typical fanboi”.
Can we do better? Let people enjoy what they want, they’re not harming anyone.
That is to be proven. Encouraging and advocating practices that are counterproductive can be harmful.
Maybe you just don't see how one company is shaping the entire market because a group of people (we can call them fanboys for the sake of argument) insists that their way of doing things is "the" way. Which it of course isn't and we see how that is ruining products that try to compete. See win11 as an example.
> we can call them fanboys for the sake of argument
You don’t call someone a pejorative term “for the sake of argument”, you do it for the exact opposite. Insults are the antithesis of productive discussion.
> because a group of people (…) insists that their way of doing things is "the" way.
Which, again, is not what the author did. They didn’t claim Apple’s naming scheme was “the way”, they said they personally liked it. Period.
Discouraging and disparaging practices that are helpful is also harmful. Have you considered that?
Also, Apple adopted these practices long before they had significant market share in any market. Nobody has been “forced” to adopt them in order to compete.
Is it so hard to just let someone enjoy something? Apple has a lot of problems right now, but it's still OK to say something positive about them once in a while. We don't need to fight about it and discredit it.
> Is it so hard to just let someone enjoy something?
Is it so hard to just let someone complain about something? Everyone can have their own opinion, i don't know why some people want every single one to be positive.
For the purposes of enlightenment: Your comment is typical nerd stuff. You’re biased by your failure to understand how human communications and social interactions work.
> Is it so hard to just let someone complain about something?
Contrarian edgelords are obnoxious and tiring. There is no need to get involved in a conversation if the point is just to label someone an idiot fanboy. It is not even cynicism, which requires some degree of consciousness instead of a knee jerk reaction. So yeah, if your only argument is “I think the author is an idiot and I am so much better because I can see clearly what he ignores”, well, then kindly fuck off. Come back when you’re civilised enough to have a conversation instead of name calling.
At this point, whenever anything Apple-related comes to HN front page, I can bring up a bingo card with pre-canned responses and cover at least 80% of conversation.
Same for every other topic, really. It's not like the HN crowd is homogeneous (you can add 'HN is not homogeneous' to the bingo card for HN-meta threads).
> Is it so hard to just let someone enjoy something?
Really, what is there to be joyful about here?
I can write a similar essay about how I like the strong capital letters of AMD, the beauty of not falling for the temptation of putting a lower-case "i" in front of it, etc., etc.
It's not really up to you to decide what brings joy to the author.
You can write a similar essay, who said you couldn't? What point are you trying to make? If it's something you feel strong about, all power to you.
This kind of comment is deprived of any real content.
This is deviating too much from the original topic, but:
1) Your initial comment just took a bash at the author about being joyful regarding some topic - "what's there to be joyful", which is really a subjective matter;
2) I'll take your point, but I strongly disagree. I would never recommend anyone living by "do not share, you might annoy other people", you will never share anything then. Case in point, you shared your thoughts, I'm pretty sure you didn't care whether someone would be annoyed by your opinion ;)
3) Not sharing a small analysis regarding words and naming just because it may annoy someone it's a huge stretch. It's not even like he's sharing some hot political topic. Someone that gets annoyed at looking at such a simple project may want to take a deep breath and go for a walk. But anyway, that's my view.
I don’t think anyone has said that Apple never used bad names…? But I don’t think it is radical to say (atleast among us who works with branding) that ipod, mac, powerbook, macbook, itunes, airpods, etc. are strong names.
“iPad” is short and unique. Easy to remember, to say, and to search for.
Compare it with the discontinued “Galaxy Note.” Although it is not a tongue twister, it is two words, neither of which is unique to Samsung on its own. “Galaxy Tab” has the same issues.
Samsung’s product names are not bad. But “iPad” definitely has the advantage of pithiness and uniqueness.
All of them, of course, followed the iMac. The iPod was an extension of that, so the name makes perfect sense. The iPhone is an iPod on steroids (and it’s a web browser!), so again it makes sense. It is all very consistent.
I really dislike the pro/max/ultra qualifiers, but again it is all consistent.
iPod is bad how? It is short, looks good typographically, it is unique, easy to remember, easy to pronounce even for non native speakers. Do you mean that it is not descriptive? In that case, that does not matter.
> * Also the naming scheme of Mac OS versions, i can never figure out which one came before or after the other, there is no rhyme or reason. Why dont they use alphabetical sorted names? Or years/numbers like Windows…?*
They do. Ventura is macOS 13. In fact, when they dropped OS X, they did a bit in the key note explaining that instead of it being OS X 10.16 Catalina, it would now now be macOS 11 Catalina.
Idk, but it doesn’t matter. If you need to know which version came before or after just compare the version numbers instead. The human names are not meant for that.
That is not true: when some good logic is applied to naming, human names are too in order, with the alphabetic order, so that at any time you could know what you are talking about (at least easily if it is "before" or "after" each one)
> when some good logic is applied to naming, human names are too in order, with the alphabetic order, so that at any time you could know what you are talking about
That's just like, your opinion.
Even operating systems that try to follow that idea are not fully able to do it.
For example, Ubuntu has been using alphabetically ordered names ever since version 5.10, which was released in October 2005.
But sooner or later they have to wrap. And they already did that once.
So now, for someone on the outside who tries to apply this idea that names should encode release order, we still can't tell, which of the following was released first:
- Ubuntu Maverick Meerkat
or
- Ubuntu Lunar Lobster
Well, if all we know about Ubuntu is that the names are alphabetically sorted then we might think that Lunar Lobster came before Maverick Meerkat. But Ubuntu Lunar Lobster is the upcoming version 23.04. Ubuntu Maverick Meerkat was version 10.10, released all the way back in October 2010.
And so my point is, if you want to compare version release dates. Just look at the version numbers.
It is not sensible to claim that somehow the names have to be in alphabetical order.
Do you use alphabetical order for the hostnames of your computers?
Do you name your children in alphabetical order?
Maybe you do. But not everyone will, and that's perfectly fine.
> But sooner or later they have to wrap. And they already did that once.
Frankly, that's not a problem. They have 26 letters to go through, so that's 13 years.
13 years is a geological age in computing. By that point the previous product has been deprecated for so long it's basically a museum piece and nobody can spot it in the wild.
> 13 years is a geological age in computing. By that point the previous product has been deprecated for so long it's basically a museum piece and nobody can spot it in the wild.
Microsoft Windows XP was released to retail on October 25, 2001.
Extended support for Microsoft Windows XP ended on April 8, 2014.
Hostname can have many orders: if it's a technical/location name like "dc-room-row" then it's in order. If it's a character name, they could follow the logic of the characters: some are leading (frontend), some are smarter (backend), some are...
If you had more than 20 children, you would clearly want some logic in naming. People often apply that to twins for example.
Anyway, that applies better to "more than a few" groups; Ubuntu did well because they release many versions, and you really rarely need to check against versions from 13 years ago with that release speed. Microsoft didn't need it for Windows because they only had 4 or 5 versions in 20 years.
How do you know which Windows came first: XP, ME, Vista, 98, 10?
I mean even when Apple uses sequential, numerical names you can't always answer the question of which came first: the iPhone 8 and iPhone X (10) were announced ~simultaneously! And there wasn't even a 9!
My point is it really doesn't matter which big cat or California landmark came first. It's trivial to find out if you want to, but it's not terribly important to encode that in the name you're using to identify your product.
Every software vendor of any significant size knows to use version numbers of macOS, not just marketing names of macOS, when communicating that kind of information.
Here are some random examples taken from some of the software that I use on my systems.
10.12 came after 10.11. Nobody having to deal with this sort of thing is confused. Using a Mac, it is easier to get the version number than the code name. This argument is most of the time, if not always, used by people with no interest in trying to understand how it works.
Yes, of course they have real version numbers and these make sense!
But the thing is, almost everywhere we see the marketing names being used, so thats where i see the problem.
This page merely contains a graph of the product names taxonomy and four short sentences to explain why/how they created the graph, so we must have a very different definition of what typical fanboi stuff is.
Ok, Microsoft is not a shining example for naming either, I mean, they had a product called "Windows 8" which actually had version number 6.2 - do I need to say more? At least they fixed this with the first release of Windows 10 - and then got rid of the version numbers in the very next release (at least according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Microsoft_Windows_vers...).
If microsoft fired everyone who's ever come with a name for anything and renamed all their stuff after randomly selected Pokémon it would be an improvement.
The internal version number is just that: an internal number, maybe useful for developers making a check. To quote the great Raymond Chen [0]:
> Poseurs will call Windows versions by their programmatic version numbers. For example, they will call Windows Vista “NT6” and Windows 7 “NT6.1”. Trust me, nobody on the Windows team calls the products by their programmatic version numbers. Whenever anybody says “NT6” I have to go to Wikipedia and look up what they’re actually talking about. If I even care to bother, and usually I don’t.
Rumor has it that Steve Ballmer wanted people to refer to the new Xbox as "The One" because it was supposed to tie all these capabilities together and be the centerpiece of the living room. Additionally, Microsoft was going through a branding phase of "One" at the time.
As a personal pet peeve of mine, whenever a corporation chooses "One" for its marketing or branding it indicates an uncreative and unoffensive marketing team that can't think of anything more creative to convey a sense of product cohesion.
I still don't know which is the most powerful one. I remember people buying the previous generation of XBox consoles, because they were confused about the name :D.
Hey, don't dis MS for having different marketing version vs product versions. OS manufacturers are hostage to the same bad 3rd party coding practices that browsers browsers are with the UA string. You get stuck in a position where changing version number can become actually scary (I recall Safari 2.0.4 having a bunch of issues because the addition of the character "4" broke a wide array of sites, because if your user agent string contains "4" you are netscape 4, and supported document.layers and JavaScript Style Sheets)
And Windows 9 got skipped because some Y2K-like software would see "Win9" as Windows 95, or because 9 is unlucky in Japan, or because of marketing, or to distance itself from the flop of Windows 8, or because we all like the number 10.
But you can still understand that Windows 10 is newer than 8 or 8.1, and older than Windows 11. It is what most software companies use, v1, v2, v2.2, etc. Another good way is with year/month, like Ubuntu.
It reads as fanboyish because it start with "I love how ...", while a non-fanboy might instead have said: "How apple names things: they choose names that have a slight air of elitism to them (also reusing name parts they already established), to make it sound as if they're slightly better than everything else"
That's being overly pedantic. You can appreciate (even love) something without being a fanboy. I, for one, can say that I love some of the design of macos, but I also criticise apple on most other things. I don't even own a mac.
> the naming scheme of Mac OS versions, i can never figure out which one came before or after the other, there is no rhyme or reason. Why dont they use alphabetical sorted names? Or years/numbers like Windows…?
The human names of the macOS versions are not meant for that purpose.
Every version of macOS also has a version number. If you need to ever know which version came before another you compare the version number.
Why even have a version name then if it’s not intended to communicate anything?
I too find their naming conventions confusing. Apple TV is another example. It could refer to 3 different things depending on how it’s used. I have an Apple TV and an Apple TV subscription but I have no idea which is technically called what.
I also disagree with their casual use of the term “Pro” too. But at least that isn’t an Apple specific problem but rather endemic across the entire tech landscape.
The Microsoft example given by the GP isn’t great though. Microsoft are, in my personal opinion, even worse at naming things than Apple. But as someone who’s released a fair amount of open source, I do acknowledge that naming things is hard.
The names are used in marketing when new versions are launched.
Read the page I linked about macOS Ventura. The way that they use the name of that version here is the way that they use the OS version names in general. For marketing, when a new version is released.
But plenty of products manage to have a version name that is both used for marketing and also conveys contextual informal about the release. Which is the point all the other commenters have been making.
Your argument that the names are non-descriptive because they were intended to be non-descriptive doesn’t absolve the criticism that non-descriptive names are confusing to a lot of people.
Except Apple loves to drop the articles when describing their hardware. E.g. "With iPhone, you can do X, Y, and Z!". So "I like Apple TV" could easily be referring to the hardware box in Applespeak.
>There are a lot of things to also hate about apples naming schemes, just look at the pro, max, se nonsense they cooked up.
Nothing bad about those names in utility. They designate 3 different models/spec levels, and they're infinitely better than all crap names DELL or SONY etc ever came up with ("NZ4X5-324DD" and such). As for aesthetics, they're short, easy to remember, and pleasurably sounding.
What's not to like? That "pro" ain't for "real" professionals gatekeeping BS, as if video editors and graphic designers are the only real professionals, and a CEO isn't pro enough...
>Also the naming scheme of Mac OS versions, i can never figure out which one came before or after the other, there is no rhyme or reason.
Aside the fact that they coming with an associated dead simple numeric version, they're out there for a year before the next one comes. You have like a year to learn and remember that Ventura is the latest and had one year to become familiar with Monterey before it was replaced (so it's quite easy to remember Ventura was next). Now, if you some reason you want to determine if some OS from 10-15 years ago like Snow Leopard came before or after Tiger, yeah, that would be more difficult (also more pointless).
Yea but most people dont update their mac os every year, and get “familiar” with the name.
Heck, im still on catalina, imho the last “good” macos version (but thats another discussion).
Anyway, its just that everytime a macos version is mentioned i have to look up the sequence, because i just cant remember it.
One reason is probably also that macos has much more frequent updates (than windows for example) and thats why i cant remember them.
Also you say its hard to sequence the older macos releases, that is true! but i can perfectly sequence the old windows releases. Why? Maybe i used them more? Anyway its still interesting.
In the end it wouldnt be hard for them to use a more helpful, user friendly, naming scheme
heh no, they don't seem related at all. Sierra and High Sierra were. otherwise it's a pretty random stroll, they don't seem to be in any order by geography or type or anything.
You forgot 10, 10 Anniversary Update, 10 Creators Update, 10 Fall Creators Update, etc. nonsense. These were comparable to macOS 10.x since we were told Windows 10 was the last Windows version. But of course later macOS 11 happened, and Windows 11 magically sprang into life soon afterwards.
I reckon by naming things sequentially, you build in the expectation that a later variant is “better” than a previous one - Windows 11 is “better” than Windows 10.
Do you sincerely think the marketing team wants to names things so accurately as to admit the next version is worse than the previous? It seems like that would be a really bad strategy IMHO.
Wow, I disagree strongly with this one. It's so frustrating that I have to describe a feature to a search engine to find out what it's called, just so I can find it in the Settings (sorry, I mean System Preferences) panel. Continuity, Stage Manager, Exposé, Spotlight, Launchpad, Mission Control. These names don't mean anything, and aren't helpful. They're features, not products, yet they are named like products and you just have to be tapped into the marketing language Apple uses in order to know what's what.
AppleTV is a set-top box.
AppleTV is an app that you can install on your AppleTV.
AppleTV+ is a streaming service, which is also an app on AppleTV, but different from AppleTV.
AppleTV is an Operating System for old AppleTV hardware.
Oscalc. O: Office; S: Spreadsheet; Calc: Name of application.
There's no reason to stick to only one name, Oscalc in English could be XyCalc in another language.
And no reason why something with many functionalities could not be in more than one place, PvVLC could be ArVLC too plus deep linked to the recording function when called as such.
Then we could, name things how we liked, know what they do and where they are instantly, and get using them for what we want to do even faster.
What does the "Pv" in this even mean? "Playback video"? That does not line up with your other examples. Is the first letter a verb or a noun? What about the second letter? You see how this proposal falls apart once you look at it for more than a second?
The article is missing the best/worst named apple product. I'm in the camp of best. For sure its the ugly ducking, odd ball out, named unlike any other apple product.
Safari.
Like Explorer, Navigator before it, it invokes adventure and exploration. It doesn't mean anything per se in technical terms. It is however, a product.
And surely giving two different products which exist concurrently names which are homonyms or close to it is a terrible idea, right? "EarPods" and "AirPods" sound literally identical in my dialect of English, and they're extremely similar in most.
One of the nice things I liked about OS X when I moved from Windows/Ubuntu around 2010 was the clear but playful naming of apps and utilities. They seemed to have presence. The large and beautiful high resolution icons helped too.
In Windows Disk Management was hidden away and searching for it would return a nebulous list with long winded descriptions but never name Disk Management forcing me to carefully read each result. For search to actually return Disk Management (or any utility for that matter) you have to type the entire name.
In OS X (and now in MacOS but with far fewer utilities these days) apps like Disk Utility have a personality and are easily searched for. Typing ‘du’ in Spotlight is all you need. Windows 10 fixes a lot of this with Super X (or right clicking on Start) but it still lacks that personality.
MacOS is losing a lot of its personality these days unfortunately. In a hurry I often confuse the app icons for Finder, Safari and Mail because they’re all similar white and blue squares.
I also love how the name Finder throws shade at Explorer.
Disk Utility (the old version anyway) is an underrated tool. Sure you can use clonezilla or gparted or something, but having something built in and idiot-proof is a real joy. The only thing I wish it supported was moving partitions around.
In Windows 11, when you type "disk", you get disk cleanup, defragment/optimize, and then disk management. You can also type "partitions" and get what you want as the first result.
Google 3.0 would be a minimum. In industry 4.0 times, it should at least be google 4.2, but why bother with minor versions: Google Googol!
(with or without the faculty sign. As long as users say the want the new Samsung iPhone [sic], no one cares if that is barely even a meaningful number)
ive been making general notes on How To Name Things (from companies to variables) here since its one of the well known hard problems - offering it up for others
Thanks for sharing this, it will be my canonical resource on the topic. (also, it brings me joy that someone obsessed enough to make such an informative and lengthy compilation of pure ideas; a service to the community!).
Number one rule to be is that it should be universally unique and easy to search for, especially if it’s frequently searched for on Google. Being universally unique might mean if the primary name (company, app, etc) is combined with the thing name (product, variable, etc) it is unique.
It may surprise technical users but a _lot_ of people who have used Macs and iPhones for more than a decade don't know what an application is, much less what that application might be called. They just click an icon and things appear - when they don't, or the icon is not where they expect it, they are totally stuck.
On the one hand, Apple deserves credit for creating an experience where the tool seems to get out of the way.
On the other, it's depressing that so many users are steered away from understanding things that could increase their facility with these devices they rely on so much.
Hmm, the topic is a nice one, but I think it proves the adage, “a force-directed graph visualization is never the right way to articulate anything.” It’s very hard to discern much of interest.
In general I would agree, but since you mentioned "never" I have to interject ; )
In this visualization, I was immediately able to pick out clusters around "i", "Apple", "touch" and so on .. and the interactivity helps me to quickly filter and explore. So, I think that for an exploratory tasks, a force-directed graph helps.
I think Apple's decision to mostly name products based on dictionary words is a good one, and well-executed. Google tries this too but usually misses the mark a bit by being overly generic (Play, Chat, Calendar, etc.) and failing to build a brand around the products themselves.
My main gripe with Apple is their decision to not version product names well, e.g. "The New iPad". This is fine for tech-savvy users who will read the specs and know what they're getting, but from what I've seen almost universally confuses less tech-savvy customers and leaves them at the whim of salespeople. Apple doesn't need to use model codes or numbers, but should have something that clearly defines new vs. old. They have relented a bit and now have "10th generation" add-ons on official messaging after years of hiding it, which just seems to be like one-button stubbornness where they won't concede the obvious.
"Play" is my favorite example. Even after a lot of years of using it I still cannot remember what is the current name for their "App Store" when I need to tell someone to look for some app there.
I'll always remember how weird that decision became just 12 months later.
You went from something that was understood to something that even tech savvy people have to Google to figure out which version their parents have and why Facetime group calls silently fail for them.
Can anyone elaborate on the process how companies like Apple can get registered TMs on pretty much any seemingly generic term — Is it that they simply buy out any existing mark that would be remotely conflicting?
Some extremes: Soundtrack, Afterburner, Aperture, Cocoa, Exposé, etc.
It's not like all uses of the word "aperture" now refer to an Apple registered trademark. It's just that you can't name an image organizer program Aperture. It's not really a generic term in that context, although it's obviously evocative.
Trademarks are allowed to be 'generic' English words, they just can't be purely descriptive of the product/service/company. You can't trademark a name like 'Computer Store' for your computer store, for example. In the cases you list, I don't think any of these purely describe the app/feature's function (these are pretty opaque names actually, except maybe Soundtrack and Aperture), so should be eligible.
'App Store', 'Multi-Touch', 'FaceID', and others that Apple claims though are definitely questionable IMO. When you have to jump through linguistic hoops to describe your product because someone's trademarked the obvious descriptive language, there's a problem. I don't know either. I guess, considering how the legal system generally works in the US, that someone would have to legally challenge their validity, and nobody wants to go against Apple in court.
Edit: Did a bit of looking into the App Store trademark and it looks like both Amazon and Microsoft did challenge this, but both settled out of court with unknown terms, and the trademark stands as a result.
> Edit: Did a bit of looking into the App Store trademark and it looks like both Amazon and Microsoft did challenge this, but both settled out of court with unknown terms, and the trademark stands as a result.
This is a great example of how the USA legal system is broken.
The responsibility for preventing bad trademarks from being registered should not lie with other gigantic companies, which have as much incentive to collude as to compete.
Now the public suffers because the bad trademark stands, and the people who are likely to be harmed by trademark trolling (smaller companies that do not have the money to fight Apple's questionable trademark) remain at risk of harm, potentially indefinitely, because trademarks don't expire under US law.
If the case went through the full court system, then at least the outcome would be decided in the public eye and could be said to have been fairly evaluated and decided. A settlement is as if the case never happened at all!
Apple has been dropping the article from iPhone advertisements. "With iPhone 13, you can...", not "an/the iPhone". To me, this breaking of orthography feels too much like reverential capitalization for something that is not exactly divine.
It seems to me an ordinal rule of business is, in order to scale, sell systemic solutions to customer's problems, instead of selling mere widgets.
I interpret this change as communicating 'iPhone is a system whose benefits are predicated on the hardware being omnipresent.'
When you're on vacation and a stranger offers to take your photo and they can just airdrop it to you? When you can retrieve lost keys with an AirTag? When you put that fun sticker on an iMessage? That's not 'an iPhone', it's 'iPhone' and it's what a lot of people are really paying for these days, I think.
Apple’s way of naming things generic names makes it almost impossible to search for information related to them on the internet. Almost think it’s intentional so that people have to use them as the resource for all information related to Apple.
Because Apple is a tech company, but also considered a luxury brand. A watch is mostly a fashionable accessory. iWatch would've been a gadget-first name. Apple Watch sounds much better if you're trying to sell it to fashion aware people, besides people interested in the best tech.
Who is considering it a luxury brand? Maybe teenagers on the school playground, or in developing nations where a iWatch costs over a month's average wage (I'm from a developing nation).
But in the west (US, Sweden, etc) it's far from being a luxury brand of any kind. It's just a gadget/tech brand making stuff that almost anyone there can afford. Hardly comparable to something like LVMH.
>Apple Watch sounds much better if you're trying to sell it to fashion aware people
Fashion aware people are mostly wearing traditional watches or go for colorful oversized G-Shocks if they're some celebrity looking to make a bold statement or something.
The real elite are wearing F-91W's thanks very much. :)
But Apple is not necessarily selling to watch aficionados, they are selling (partly) to people who want to be seen as fashionable in a general sense. Calling it "Apple Watch" instead of iWatch, and putting it next to Hermès straps is about adding that gleam of luxury and glamour.
>people who want to be seen as fashionable in a general sense
That's funny. I'm not deep into the celebrity/fashion cult, but whenever I see interviews with various celebrities, actors, business people, fashion people, athletes, etc, they always wear some sort of Swiss/Japanese mechanical watch with their fashionable formal or casual attire, never an Apple watch.
I don't believe there's ever been an official explanation of when Apple stopped using the 'i' prefix for new products, but Apple Watch came out after that date.
My guess - the 'I' prefix was tied to the Digital Hub initiative, where software and devices would tie in via your home computer to share music, home movies, photos, etc.
When it became clear that the cloud would replace having all of that maintained on a home computer for most people, adding 'i' as a prefix ended - with iCloud.
Previously held trademark / copyright somewhere if I remember correctly - the company that owned it came out and more or less no to the name being used; when rumours were swirling about the "iWatch".
The Apple Watch is the only one of those products post Steve Jobs. Since then they have specifically removed that prefix from the OS too, e.g. iPhoto > Photos
iPhone naming will have to be restarted soon. Purely from marketing I feel going from iPhone 14 to iPhone 15 doesn’t sound as impressive as going from iPhone to iPhone 2.
After a while these large numbers feel like minors on a software patch and not big leaps that drive sales from average consumers.
Screaming into the void for years to stop using numbers for versioning (and codenames, my god, please send anyone who uses codenames directly into the core of the sun) and start using dates. iPhone 2017. Firefox 2022.05. Systemd 2022.04.23. Aaaaaaaaagh.
Occasionally that “similar sound” proclivity leads them down confusing paths: witness stage manager and center stage, which many people seem to struggle with separating!
I wish it would tag or mention the product names that a keyword originates from. I like it a lot though, mostly because I like Apple product names a lot too.
The Airpods and Apple Watch I think were both legitimately innovative when first released. They were massive leaps over what previous existed in their respective segments.
The first thing on your list, Apple Watch, is only the most successful watch of all time and a ten billion dollar a year business. If that doesn’t satisfy you as something new then I don’t know what would
AirPods are also a completely new multi-billion/year business, and competitors went from “we’re keeping a headphone socket” to releasing their own weirdly shaped headphones in charging boxes very quickly.
There are a lot of things to also hate about apples naming schemes, just look at the pro, max, se nonsense they cooked up.
Also the naming scheme of Mac OS versions, i can never figure out which one came before or after the other, there is no rhyme or reason. Why dont they use alphabetical sorted names? Or years/numbers like Windows…?