How Apple should name their phones

Week 96 was posted by Charanjit Chana on 2019-08-26.

Defining how things are named year after year is not a job I envy and yet every tech company struggles to get it right. macOS has largely followed a consistent trend from 10.0 onwards, but Apple ran out of big cats and switched to naming the operating system after different geographical features of California.

Mac hardware has largely forgone an incremental name and iPads have and haven’t had numerical suffixes.

The iPhone though, as a flagship product seems to have the worst. Starting with the iPhone, the 3G replaced it and after a speed bump, the name jumped to 4 introducing the concept of a numerical suffix. The 4 also saw a speed bump and became the 5, despite being phone number 6! After the 7 (no speed bumps here) we got the 8 and then the 10. For simplicity, this is how it should have gone:

Only important suffixes survive and only for the generations they were introduced. The iPhones that introduced 3G & 4G get two years as suffixes as the tech is introduced and the Pro suffix denotes the form factor that actually costs more. Is the Xs anymore ‘pro’ than the Xr? No, but its price point suggests that. This would inevitably have caused confusion when a previous years model was still available in the lineup as Apple have done from the 3GS onwards.

I get it, naming schemas are a pain and affixing a number only takes you so far if you position every other year as an integration rather than a revolution. One of the most consistent naming conventions has come from the gaming world for sports titles whose names carry the year in which the title is claimed in the real world. FIFA ‘19 or NFL ‘17 by EA sports for example. So this is how I think Apple could have tidied it all up:

This would make the models announced next month to be called:

• 2020 iPhone
• 2020 iPhone Pro
• 2020 iPhone Pro+

Now this re-introduces the issue around having the previous years models in the lineup as the gap grows when you keep multiple predecessors in the lineup. In the pre-iPhone X era, just the previous model was kept but when last years iPhone X gave way to the Xs models, the iPhone 7 stuck around as well as the 8. I expect Apple will keep the iPhone 8 in the lineup but will they keep the 7, the Xr or Xs models too? Maybe not but that still puts a two year gap between the latest and oldest models available.

• 2018 iPhone S
• 2018 iPhone S+
• 2020 iPhone
• 2020 iPhone Pro
• 2020 iPhone Pro+

This assumes that a Touch ID iPhone exists into 2020. Marketing wise, perhaps it's problematic that the difference in years is spelled out but as a consumer your takeaway will either be that the iPhone 8 came before the iPhone 11 or that the iPhone 8 is a lesser phone than the iPhone 11.

Perhaps the iPhone 8 needs a bit of a spec bump anyway, in which case it could gain a new moniker, the iPhone 9 perhaps?

Update

John Gruber's The Talk Show podcast just covered Apple's naming convention In the latest edition. They talked about the models having the number 11 in their name and continued to refer to the largest phone as the Max whereas I favour the + suffix which is still a mouthful when you have to say it but I just find it more visually appealing.

Tags: apple, iphone, apple, iphone