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Comment by usui | Hacker News Reader

This is going to sound like a really weird and irrelevant nitpick, but I dislike how they changed the version numbers to be year+1. I like that they all unified and have a relationship to the current year, but we're not buying cars. We're getting operating systems and not being confused about chronology is pretty important for bug tracking or other minutiae. Plus, the Mac lineup use(d) the year of release. Why move away from it? Is it really necessary to market and sell an operating system like it's a car or the latest Microsoft Office suite?

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They’re telling you the year where the new OS will be stable enough that it’s a good idea to upgrade (joke’s on them, I still haven’t “upgraded” to Tahoe…)

Oh boy don’t! I’m also waiting for Golden Gate .1 release instead

TBH Tahoe feels like an especially buggy .0 still. I'm updating as soon as my laptop shows it as available in the hopes that it'll feel closer to a .1 than what Tahoe is.

Give me 10.6.9 with nothing changed except support for current machines.

From a psychological standpoint, maybe customers thinking 26 is old on their brand new device in 3 months isn't exactly good. People might start expecting 27 in 3 months when actually 27 is going to be around for most of the year.

Kind of like a vechical's model year.

It's not year+1, it's the year that most overlaps with that OS being the latest. 27 will be the latest OS for ~9 months of 2027 and only ~3 of 2026.

I also don't know why this would be considered more confusing for chronology. The year is in the name, whereas it was previously at best, years since version 1, or something more confusing in the case of macOS. I couldn't keep track of all the latest OS versions before, now we will be able to going forward.

They do yearly major releases in September for all their OSes. They are directly tied to the year.

Also Apple's fiscal year starts at the end of September. (Not exactly on Oct 1, because their fiscal calendar is weird.)

Do you hate *Ubuntu YY.MM style versions with their major LTS every even year in April and minor every October? Like April 2026 is 26.04

But Ubuntu sticks to the year and month the OS was released. I think OP was complaining about MacOS using year+1 as the version, even though the OS is being released in the current year.

I personally find Ubuntu's versioning to be the easiest to understand because you know when this Ubuntu version was released. It would be very annoying if they called Ubuntu 26.10 Ubuntu 27, though.

As someone who has been doing iOS programming for ~16 years I'm glad they did something. Nothing better than running Xcode 16, on macOS 15, to do iOS 18 work. Unless, of course, you also have watchOS 11 work too.

I think it’s because Apples fiscal year does start in October, so iOS 27 is basically released when Apple does start their fiscal year 2027.

You really think the marketing team based their version number on... the fiscal year?

That would be hilarious.

Yeah, I think it's far more likely that they don't want people buying devices with what looks like last year's operating system.

This feels like the kind of thing where the mismatching version numbers bugged some influential people internally. But I suppose a practical application could be recommending matching versions if customers run into issues since they are trying to integrate devices more.

Just breathe, relax, and stop worrying about useless things in life.

It will be the OS for 3 months of 2026 and 9 months of 2027.

they should release the new OS on the 1st of January

I think they had to rush out this version early to replace all the bullshit they did with liquid glass at lunch.

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