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

My favorite from Apple is "the new iPad" that they used to refer to the 3rd gen iPad.

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

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.

Microsoft did that because it thought you were too stupid to understand that the Xbox 2 was the same generation of the ps3.

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.)

The real answer is that you either rename the product right around version 10 (because 17 is too big for iPhone versions) or you use the year like sports video games.

> 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>”

Not so easy: even for old PlaysStations, there existed different versions:

1. PlayStation, PSOne, PlayStation Classic

2. PlayStation 2, PlayStation 2 Slim

3. PlayStation 3, PlayStation 3 Slim, PlayStation 3 Super-Slim

4. PlayStation 4, PlayStation 4 Slim, PlayStation 4 Pro

5. PlayStation 5, PlayStation 5 Digital Edition, PlayStation 5 Slim, PlayStation 5 Digital Edition Slim, PlayStation 5 Pro

And then Sony used the PlayStation branding for other consoles, too:

- PlayStation Portable

- PlayStation Vita

- PlayStation Portal

- PlayStation TV (which is also called PlayStation Vita TV)

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).

I like the joke where windows 9,..10,..11 would eventually give us windows 1995 again.

HP is like they assigned good people to the right task, had everyone make a draft, pulled it from their hands and declared it finished. The combined drafts do not resemble a product so they also have someone make a draft solution for that problem.

If I dare to ask, why do you care so much about naming ?

It's something that has always bothered me in reviews as well. To me a product is primarily supposed to be used, and I also don't want to buy a new one every 6 months.

For instance I like my headphones very much, been using them for 4 years now. I did a ton of research and read a bunch of reviews before buying them, and to keep the exact and unique product name somewhere for research, but from the point they were delivered to me whatever they're named has been completely irrelevant. Same for my computer or phone, I could check the marketing name, and there is skew number somewhere on the product, but in my everyday life it's completely useless.

I'd argue having a impossible to remember but perfectly unique and SEO friendly names wins over using common names like Apple does, for my purposes at least.