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.
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…?