Apple to Rebrand Its Device Operating Systems to Mark Major Overhaul

bloomberg.com

18 points·mfiguiere··6 comments

>The next Apple operating systems will be identified by year, rather than with a version number, according to people with knowledge of the matter. That means the current iOS 18 will give way to “iOS 26,”

Not a bad choice.

> Other updates will be known as iPadOS 26, macOS 26, watchOS 26, tvOS 26 and visionOS 26.

Especially the consistency it brings.

That’s fine and all, but if this is the direction they’re taking, why not just call it AppleOS 26 across all platforms? Even if each platform gets a “specialized” version.

Part of me wonders if this is related to the EU CRA. It mandates software support lifecycles. It’s a lot easier to say xxxOS 26 is supported until 2032, 27 until 2033, etc as opposed to iOS 19 is supported until 2032, macOS 15 is supported until 2033, etc etc

If you app supports AppleOS 26, does it run on a watch? How would you use AppleOS in a sentence where it's better without the platform?

This makes so much sense. The use of place-names for marketing (Sequoia, etc.) was fun, but as a dev, it gets confusing having to look up when the OS came out and which version number it is. I'm sure regular users have the same problem. This makes marketing much simpler too since there's no confusion which the latest OS version is and if you've got it or not.

Windows 95 has entered the chat.

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