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).
Apple's naming conventions are a mess
21–30 of 36 posts
Re: Apple's naming conventions are a mess
#22These 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.
Re: Apple's naming conventions are a mess
#23I 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 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.
Re: Apple's naming conventions are a mess
#24> “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.
Re: Apple's naming conventions are a mess
#25Just 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).
Re: Apple's naming conventions are a mess
#26These 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.
Re: Apple's naming conventions are a mess
#27So when you rant some random names on medium instead of reddit, you get to top of Hacker News?
Re: Apple's naming conventions are a mess
#28Sure 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.
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.
Re: Apple's naming conventions are a mess
#29So all I'm getting is TFA hates the "i" prefix. Everything else sounds like a minor/meaningless change.
Re: Apple's naming conventions are a mess
#30I 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).
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.