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Comment by moribvndvs | Hacker News Reader

Side topic: I wish macOS would stick to just numbers in their os updates to make it drop dead easy to recall which update and how old one is. I don’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of Californian geography and even if I did, that doesn’t help me remember what Big Sur was vs. Catalina

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...except every OS update does have a number?

In tech circles I try to use the actual OS release number whenever I can for this reason.

Clearly I meant only use the number.

One of Apple's core strength is marketing. Just using numbers will never happen.

Works for iOS.

Even living in one of the cities doesn’t help me. They used to go west to east, but now the OS codenames have no pattern.

Same. From that headline I have no way of telling which is the oldest and which is the newest. Just put a damn number.

Even big cats I could keep track because I had a mental image of what they represented. Panther was an awesome release. And snow Leopard? Woooo!

Even worse, internally they use California wines as codenames for the OS.

Noooo… you mean there’s a Mac OS Bonnydoon floating around the Apple O-ring?

Not anymore.

It's been a while since I left, good to hear, it was getting old. :)

It helped that they did major releases only every 2-4 years. I think a new major release every year is too much, especially when the changes are things like "we rearranged the system preferences menu" or "new emoji"

I wish they went back to this. A two year release cycle, alternating iOS and macOS could result in much more polished software, and more meaningful updates. If they took their environmental stuff really seriously they could do a two year cycle with devices too, alternating iPhone's and iPad's. I guess everything is so tightly coupled on the software side that this probably isn't possible (at least the alternating part).

Yes and the number should match the iOS release of the same vintage.

Even better they could use the year, like Ubuntu

And Samsung. I can actually tell when the Galaxy S22 was made. What a revolutionary idea.

I can't even keep track of which iPhone or macOS we're on now.

Both MacOS and Ubuntu have a funny name and a number, the question is really just which people actually use. You could call Sonoma MacOS 13 or Sonoma, and you can call Ubuntu 22.04 Ubuntu 22.04 or Ubuntu Jammy Jellyfish.

At least the Ubuntu names increment alphabetically

This makes Ubuntu's naming scheme way better, IMO.

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