> Instead of just notching up the version number, Apple will instead mark them by year.
IMO this makes sense when a product lasts for so long. Unity and JetBrains have also done it for their products. It’s easier to remember, especially when related products have different versions like in Apple’s case.
> However, the numbers will apparently align with the year after the one the update is actually released in, similar to cars. That means that the next big iOS update will be iOS 26 instead of iOS 19.
I don’t understand that (or why it’s done for cars either). Are they afraid the OS will be delayed into the next year and would rather its name be a year ahead than behind?
bennettnate5 · 12h ago
> I don’t understand that (or why it’s done for cars either). Are they afraid the OS will be delayed into the next year and would rather its name be a year ahead than behind?
My understanding is that it's a marketing gimmick--_you're buying the car/phone of the future!_.
More importantly, once a few sellers do it, game theory pushes the rest to follow the same convention (otherwise their flagship models could be mistaken as last year's by buyers on first glance).
If Android moves to the same year-numhering convention, I'd bet they'll do the same year-in-the-future strategy for this reason
Maskawanian · 15h ago
Can't wait until MacOS 95 (then Mac OS XP of course). I can only imagine the discourse if this happened 25 years ago.
thesuperbigfrog · 15h ago
Does the new naming scheme imply yearly releases for all of the Apple operating systems?
laborcontract · 11h ago
I don't think so. It could possibly hint at a reduction in cadence for releases. There has been an open line of reporting about Apple that yearly releases were important to Apple but that the yearly release schedule also made it hard for them to divert engineering resources into more experimental projects like LLM-related development.
Linking version numbers to years could be seen in effect to make each one seem less monumentally important.
soxfox42 · 14h ago
They've all been receiving yearly releases for a long time now – macOS has had them since Lion, iOS had them from the beginning, and the others are similar.
IMO this makes sense when a product lasts for so long. Unity and JetBrains have also done it for their products. It’s easier to remember, especially when related products have different versions like in Apple’s case.
> However, the numbers will apparently align with the year after the one the update is actually released in, similar to cars. That means that the next big iOS update will be iOS 26 instead of iOS 19.
I don’t understand that (or why it’s done for cars either). Are they afraid the OS will be delayed into the next year and would rather its name be a year ahead than behind?
My understanding is that it's a marketing gimmick--_you're buying the car/phone of the future!_.
More importantly, once a few sellers do it, game theory pushes the rest to follow the same convention (otherwise their flagship models could be mistaken as last year's by buyers on first glance).
If Android moves to the same year-numhering convention, I'd bet they'll do the same year-in-the-future strategy for this reason
Linking version numbers to years could be seen in effect to make each one seem less monumentally important.