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Comment by Pewpewarrows | Hacker News Reader

At this point they should really consider dropping the "suffix" to the iPhone model name. They've kind of dug themselves into a hole, name wise, since this upcoming one will be the 6th version of the model. They could name it 5, which would probably only upset us geeks that actually know how many models there have been. They could name it 6, but then the general population would start wondering where 5 went. They could even just name it 4G and procrastinate solving the problem for another 12-18 months.

Or they could just go the way of a lot of their other products and just advertise it as the new iPhone (like the new MacBook Air, etc).

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The suffix was never meant to indicate that it was the Nth model, the only time that happened to line up was with the iPhone 4.

edit: I'm not talking about the iPad, of course.

What did the "4" mean in the iPhone 4, then?

It means "Our last major phone model had 3 in its name". Apple isn't going to go from iPhone 4S to iPhone 6, it'd just look like they can't count to most of the public.

> "which would probably only upset us geeks that actually know how many models there have been"

I thought the geeks were upset that the 4S wasn't a "real" upgrade anyway? It seems to me they can't have it both ways. It either counts, or it doesn't. (Not that logical consistency has ever been their strong suit.)

That said, I agree. The suffix was unnecessary and rather lame from the start. Moving on from that not only feels inevitable, but an overdue correction of a mistake.

It's based on the ~2 year upgrade cycle based on mobile phone companies. 3G to 4, 3gs to 4s, 4 to 5 etc.

Windows 7 is version 6.1. Welcome to the world of model versioning, where nothing means anything!

I remember hearing the reason behind that in one of the BUILD conference talks this year. Apparently (and sadly) there are tons of high-profile Windows apps that would completely break and stop working all-together if the only thing they did in the next version of Windows was bump the major version number up one and changed nothing else. Developers hard-coded many portions of their product to depend on specific version numbers existing (instead of looking for available APIs).

They learned their lesson after Vista, which is why 7 only bumped the minor version number up, and 8 will follow in its footsteps.

That's a very good point; however they still offer models n-1 and n-2 (and will probably continue that trend for the foreseeable future) so they need some distinction for that.

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