> Consumer electronics naming is very simple. Make a good product with a simple name. “iPhone”, “comma”, “Z Fold”. Then every year or two, add one to the number of that product. If it’s a small refresh, you can add a letter after the number. “2 3 3X 4” “4 4s 5 5s 6 …” “2 3 4 5 6 7” Why is this so hard for companies like HP?

Oh man I feel this every time there’s a games console launch. I still have no idea what the latest Xbox is called but Sony gets it right with “Playstation <N>”

Apple loses some points here since every macbook from like 2007 until 2020 was just called “Macbook pro” with no year officially in the name so you have to be really careful when eg looking at used listings for macbooks. But since the M1 it’s been good with M<1-5>

This reminds me of the parody from 20 years ago of what would happen if Microsoft would re-design the iPod packaging - including the name of the product. It seems that nothing has changed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUXnJraKM3k

What to expect, when Microsoft decides to do stupid things like renaming .NET Core into .NET 5, thus everyone that doesn't pay attention to Microsoft world keeps thinking .NET is Windows only, as the .NET Framework was always known as plain .NET in most circles.

You know as a company that you have gone out of the ability to create something if you come up first with name changes of existing products. Looking at you, Office (or whatever your name is today).

On the flipside, there were the days of the Power Macintosh 6100, 7500, 8500, 9600, and other models. It’s very easy to look up different models using these names, and there was also logic to the naming scheme, but it was confusing for people new to Macs to figure out, and this was back in the 1990s when there were still large amounts of people in the developed world who never owned a personal computer.

Once Steve Jobs returned, he replaced the product numbering scheme with a quadrant: consumer desktop (iMac), consumer laptop (iBook), high-end desktop (Power Mac), and high-end laptop (PowerBook). The high-end models had a suffix (G3, G4, G5), but it got confusing with all the variants (e.g., Wallsteeet vs Lombard vs Pismo PowerBook G3, various revisions of Titanium and Aluminum PowerBook G4, etc.)

We could have had Xbox 720, 1080... but no. xbox 1 x one one x triple X amsterdam edition.