Apple's Sales Have Grown So Much That It's Running Out of 10-Digit Invoice Numbers

[ArtOfWarfare]

They may not use all 26 letters in those positions. They might choose to avoid Q, O, and I, which all strongly resemble 0, 0, and 1 and could easily be misread.

That'll reduce how many combinations are possible.

 

[SoundJudgment]

Apple will use up all those 67.6 billion Order-codes, before the world switches over to IPv6 addressing.

 

[4jasontv]

I don't think you understand what the phrase "first world problem" actually means...

I hope it doesn’t try and dismiss someone’s problem by suggesting their pain is less valid than another’s.

 

[groovyd]

If they ever did hit the limit why wouldn't they just reuse from 0. Seriously time to archive the first 10 years of Apple invoices, tape backup maybe?

 

[Yaharonson]

Wait, what?!

"Wow, that's a lot of orders! If I am remembering my college combinatorics course properly, a 10 digit numeric only code would cover 10 Billion orders. Each position in the number has 10 possible values (0-9) and there are 10 values total. Multiplying it out, 1010 = 10 Billion."

That's NOT combinatorics!

10 digits - simply means there are 9,999,999,999 numbers + the number 0,000,000,000.
That is 10,000,000,000 numbers.

 

[Junior117]

Why couldn’t they just add a “year” after the invoices and begin again each year.. for eg. 1234567890-2018 1234567890-2019

I think “we built it from the ground up” applied here too...

My guess is that they wanted to put less stress on their partners who may have a system/software that (for some weird reason) is limited to 10 characters. It may be a stupid reason, but it's the only reason that I can think of that may be somewhat reasonable.

 

[justperry]

Just make it Hex. Problem solved for a long time. Maybe even think of adding a digit - insane thought I know.

Erm...no, the alphabet has 26 characters/possibilities while Hex has 16(Numbers/letters), guess which one is better for orders.

 

[I7guy]

I hope it doesn’t try and dismiss someone’s problem by suggesting their pain is less valid than another’s.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_World_problem

 

[DEMinSoCAL]

I don't think you understand what "/s" means. (Hint: it is sarcasm)

Putting a "/s" at the end of something that isn't sarcastic doesn't make it sarcastic. Had he left it at just the 1st sentence, and put the "/s" after it then, yes...that would have been sarcasm.

But he goes on and on giving examples, etc. It sort of loses the sarcasm (if there was even any there to begin with). At least that's how I read it.

 

[toke lahti]

They may not use all 26 letters in those positions. They might choose to avoid Q, O, and I, which all strongly resemble 0, 0, and 1 and could easily be misread.

That'll reduce how many combinations are possible.

Also, did they start with lots of zeros in the beginning?
If they started with 1000000000, that would remove one billion of numbers...

 

[benface]

Wait, what?!

"Wow, that's a lot of orders! If I am remembering my college combinatorics course properly, a 10 digit numeric only code would cover 10 Billion orders. Each position in the number has 10 possible values (0-9) and there are 10 values total. Multiplying it out, 1010 = 10 Billion."

That's NOT combinatorics!

10 digits - simply means there are 9,999,999,999 numbers + the number 0,000,000,000.
That is 10,000,000,000 numbers.

Hahaha I thought the same thing. Such a simple problem.

 

[Solomani]

One thing I hate about alphanumerics: I always can't tell if it's an O (letter Oh) or a 0 (numeric zero).

This is especially the case when I have to type back or read back the serial numbers to someone (e.g. tech support).

 

[4jasontv]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_World_problem

Putting a "/s" at the end of something that isn't sarcastic doesn't make it sarcastic. Had he left it at just the 1st sentence, and put the "/s" after it then, yes...that would have been sarcasm.

But he goes on and on giving examples, etc. It sort of loses the sarcasm (if there was even any there to begin with). At least that's how I read it.

Sarcasm can only be one sentence. Everyone knows that. Even Shakespeare knew that. It’s like citing in a paper for a terrible teacher. You have to add /s after every sentence that is sarcastic or people will be confused over which idea it applies too.

 

[960design]

They'd probably skip a few letters, or would be wise to — I and O are two that can be mistaken for numbers.

That is an excellent point and often overlooked.
Part of the alphanumeric code function I use skips a bunch of characters that could be confusing such as:
zeros, the small letter L, capital letter I, capital letter S ( gets confused with number 5 ) and many more.

 

[fairuz]

Is the issue that they give random numbers and want enough entropy for there to be no collisions or easy guessing?

 

[Glideslope]

Just make it Hex. Problem solved for a long time. Maybe even think of adding a digit - insane thought I know.

Well played.

 

[Rojaaemon]

Use emojis. You'll never run out of emojis.

 

[JeffyTheQuik]

The number won't be 67.6 Billion.

There are usually combinations that won't be there, like 'FU#########' or the letters I and O.

Hexadecimal has its issues too. The number combination of DEAD probably won't be in there, either.

I'm down to 57.5 Billion. They can solve the letter combo problem and give themselves back 100 Million more numbers by putting numbers between them.

I do like the dash year solution. If they get 10 Billion orders a year, they can probably buy another few more digits.

And for the math/First World Problem thing... it's also a database storage problem. It's almost like they have to buy another hard drive to store all of these orders.

 

[4jasontv]

but changing to alphanumeric means the order number needs to be handled as a string

Good point, but are we able to rule out the idea that it wasn't always a string and Apple simply never used alphanumeric value?

 

[Anonymous Freak]

12/31/1999!

Add a few more letters.

My favorite Y2K issue was the letter I got from my bank mid-January 2000 "We didn't have any Y2K issues, everything went smoothly, all's good." (Paraphrasing.)

The letter was dated January 3, 19100.

 

[SoyCapitanSoyCapitan]

This means that instead of a basic 10-digit number, Apple's system will now include two alphabet characters followed by eight numbers, for example: "AB12345678."

Makes sense and use the customer initials for the letters.

 

[Tozovac]

Why not put genius designer and Supreme User Interface expert Jony Ive onto it? He could move towards assigning invoice numbers with white font on white backgrounds, and then no two invoice numbers will “appear” alike. After all, by now everyone knows what an invoice number is and users no longer need silly and insulting differentiation cues like different digits. Voila, problem solved!

Example below:
AB12345678
AB12345678

 

[ignatius345]

Why couldn’t they just add a “year” after the invoices and begin again each year.. for eg. 1234567890-2018 1234567890-2019

Please no. This is the kind of logic that leads to tracking numbers having enough digits to make up quadrillions of combinations -- which just becomes onerous for end-users. Letters are a great way to increase the information density of a string without making it any longer. Look at this monstrosity from USPS:

9261283697080193841078

There are enough digits here for 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 packages. I'm sure every cluster of digits "means something" in the USPS system, but it's just user-hostile (and inviting of error) to make people deal with numbers this long.