Apple's naming conventions are a mess | Hacker News Reader

Apple's naming conventions are a mess

medium.com

17 pointscashy35 comments

Sometimes things like this only make the present naming conventions look like they actually kinda make sense. It's kinda like "what if brand recognition or backwards compatibility didn't exist". (and i'm sure even changing iphone to "phone" would somehow be a breaking change in some places.) I'll take "iPhone 16 Plus" over "Apple Phone 6.7" 2024".

As for the litany of suffixes, it's so much easier (and actually makes more sense) to not take them so seriously or literally, because it's all just vibes based. "What's more Pro-er than Pro? maybe it's Max, maybe it's Ultra, whatever "sounds right". The way people get some kind of impression from a product or brand or a name isn't gonna be so neatly lined up ever. Like, this is one of those cases where advertising and branding shows up as kind of an actual art aimed to convey and evoke some kind of emotion, as opposed to just 'lining it all up'. Apple's branding is so focused on emotional appeal, so something like this just removes it. It doesn't matter what "Air" means, it's just a vibe. (and people do just want that, which they did find out when they tried to leave macbook air behind)

In six generations of the iPad Pro, they’ve never used the numbering postfix or addition “max” to distinguish size.

They have the iPad Pro.

It comes in two sizes.

If they update it, it’s still just the iPad Pro (not iPad Pro Max). The only time it becomes “iPad Pro 13” (2022)” is when comparing with older versions. But in general, it’s just the iPad Pro.

So that’s the mindset my post takes.

Agree or disagree, it’s just my take

Sure I agree they’re a bit confusing, but the iPhone is arguably the single most recognized product name on this planet. Totally lost me with the shift from iPhone to Apple Phone.

Yes iPhone and iPad are far too well established to drop the "i". The rest of the list isn't too bad but I also don't think it's a lot more clear either.

I’ve seen the Apple Phone suggestion a few times. It’s kind of silly.

These kind of naming/marketing convention reviews are important to conduct when a change is needed. Nothing in this regards needs to be changed with the iPhone. The whole company doesn’t have to align around i this or that, or no i, until a change is needed. Why they didn’t call it iSilicon.

Exactly. Regardless how much Apple pushed on branding the watch as "Apple Watch", a few of my coworkers on the Android side always say I have an "iWatch Ultra", given these are folks have an above average attention to the tech sector, I won't believe "Apple Phone" is a better name.

I agree, and also there's something communicated by the brand iPhone that is important.

"Apple phone" communicates that this is merely Apple's version of a thing, the phone, that many manufacturers produce.

"iPhone" is a noun, its own distinct category of thing, that you can only buy from Apple.

I mostly disagree with this (let's not even talk about the suggestion to lose the 'i' branding), but the iPhone in particular has definitely had missteps.

"X" is a stupid idea any time anybody does it, and I still can't remember what "XR" and "XS" mean. Luckily they dropped this.

"Mini", "Plus", "Max", and <none> are too many suffixes to express size.

"SE" is meaningless, but I'm not sure what attractive word there is for "low spec".

Overall it's a lot less confusing than almost all other consumer electronics lines, but that bar is comically low. They could almost make it perfect if they could somehow express the size literally, as the author suggests, though he conveniently does not give an example, because you will immediately see that the "iPhone Pro 6.3 inch" and "iPhone Pro 6.9 inch" are horrible branding. iPad gets away with it because it gets to use easy-to-remember whole numbers. (Edit: I forgot, the big one is 12.9", not 13")

At minimum they should just use one word to mean big, instead of having slightly different "Plus" and "Max" sizes.

The author probably doesn't realize how many man-months have gone into deciding each one of those names. And now he wants to wipe out all that heroic marketing effort in one fell swoop?

bet you're fun at partys

Apple Pad sounds like something they would use in an orchard. What is wrong with iPad?

The conventions I suggested make more sense when you start looking at the Apple website.

The inconsistency in casing alone (iMac, MacBook, Mac mini, Mac Studio…) makes me twitch.

It was actually just a fun little task for myself, glad you all enjoyed it!

EDIT: on the topic of product recognition, how long did it take to forgot iTunes and simply start using its rebrand to ‘Apple music’?

https://www.apple.com/uk/itunes/

An old article, but it backs my case for Apple returning to simplicity

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/02/ken-segal...

These are worse than what Apple has today

> “I’ve reworked Apple’s whole naming system to be way more consistent and logical.”

Reads like a take-home interview assignment for a product manager candidate. And I’d give it a D - it suggests that current naming has zero value, which means this person does not understand brand equity.

Downgrades across the board. Why would you remove the recognizable IP portion of the names?

I don’t really see an issue with the product naming at all: just look at other companies… often you have NO clear indication that it’s recent or older.

iPhone 16 everyone knows this, and anticipates the next iPhone (presumably 17).

Aiming for consistency in branding achieves brand legibility (customer can figure out progressions and segments intuitively) but branding is about so much more than that.

It’s about name recognition, cachet, aspirational qualities, etc. which are all way more important than consistency. Inconsistency is sometimes a tool for achieving differentiation.

It's the stupid marketing depts of companies that come up with brain dead naming conventions. At Sun the original UltraSPARC systems had utterly stupid names until Larry said the same thing and told them to change the system names to T3-x, etc.

There are only 2 parts of this I agree with.

First the naming convention for all of the iPhone models needs a cleanup. "iPhone 16 Pro Max" is weird. But not fully sure of an alternative.

and "iOS". It no longer makes sense to be generic and should just be "phoneOS" to match everything else. But at this point "iOS" is also largely solidified but not sure how much sense it makes to change and how many people outside of tech actually fully realize that "iOS" and "iPadOS" are now different.

Apple's response: ok we'll get right on that!

These are not better names. If Air or SE are confusing or redundant then why is Pro or Ultra still acceptable?

Additionally, Pad is a terrible name and why is Pad 10” better than iPad Air? It doesn’t seem clear that it is an improvement.

Apple actually has one if the more straightforward naming conventions, the likes of Microsoft, Nvidia, Intel, and AMD do not, or at least don’t until you learn their specific nomenclature.

Not better, just consistently used.

You wouldn’t say “apple pad 10 inch (2023)” it’d just be “apple pad” and you’d have one of whichever size they offered. You might say “it’s the 2023 update, the 13-inch one” if required to specify for whatever reason in conversation - but when was the last time you worried about calling your iPad “iPad Air 4 13-inch” you just call it your “iPad”

These changes don’t make any significant improvements, and wouldn’t help with much.

Making these changes would cause chaos as everyone is already used to the current naming scheme, and AFAIK, it’s not really a problem.

Losing critically valuable names like “iOS” or “iPhone” would be detrimental for Apple.

So when you rant some random names on medium instead of reddit, you get to top of Hacker News?

So all I'm getting is TFA hates the "i" prefix. Everything else sounds like a minor/meaningless change.

I dislike the “i” prefix as it’s not used for more modern apple products and software. It feels like an awkward legacy thing that should be archived with skeuomorphism.

Lucky he's not a Swift programmer with Apple's 40+ character variable names.

I absolutely love the explicitness (for understanding) and lack of abbreviations (for searching).

Just use

iPhone SE iPhone iPhone Pro

All with different size. With Mini ( 5.7" )only available in SE and iPhone

This is what they do. The different sizes are Mini, regular (no suffix), Plus, and Max, with each model only being available in one or two of the sizes.

I don't think they should have two slightly different "big" sizes, but regardless, the only difference between your suggestion and the current state of affairs is that the iPhone hasn't been available in Mini lately, and the SE is implicitly mini (they don't give it the suffix).

Foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.

I mean you are not wrong, but some things just grow this way historically. It is not an easy decision to rebrand strong brands (like iPhone) to a more generic but better naming scheme.

Let's go back to 1997 when they sold the following desktop computers:

5200 LC

5300 LC

5260

5400

5500

6200

6300

6400

6500

4400

7220

7200

7215

8200

7300

7500

7600

8100

8500

9500

9600

Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh

I mean you could have just not bothered…

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