An OS is not like a phone, an iPhone 16 will always be an iPhone 16, but the OS will change. If they used 25 you would have ~9 months the following year where the OS is a number behind, which is worse than having it be ahead for 3 months.
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No iOS 19: Apple Going Straight to iOS 26
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That simplification worked when it was a company with a paltry $5 billion in revenue and had 4 products total.
Product line hasn't been that simple in 20 years. It grew up. The alternative was stagnation.
Yeah, we will finally be able to “69” Windows and macOS🤣🤣
Let’s face it. Samsung marketing department is way better than Apple’s.
This feels fresh and innovative and should be worth at least $1T in market cap for Apple.
It's similar to cars. the 2026 model cars/trucks come out towards the end of 2025. Not sure the reasoning behind it, but it's not unheard of.
Probably the only reason Apple is adopting this n+1 naming is to provide cover for pre-announced features. It lets them announce 2026 features in mid-2025 and not launch it until next year.
There is zero reason to follow the automotive industry naming. The reason for that goes back to the Great Depression.
I think this is a good change tbh, easy to tell if everything is up to date and know what the current versions are by memory.
For people who ask why 26 and not 25… the reason is that iOS 26 is only released this fall and will be replaced in fall 2026 so it will last almost 9 months in 2026 while only 3 in 2025
This is unexpected but not surprising. I've long thought they would eventually need to do this since it's gotten so fragmented with the different OSs. I hope they keep the cute macOS naming convention though!
This makes a lot of sense. A lot of open source projects do this. I wonder if the point updates will use a month number instead of an incrementing number? The initial release would be .0, a minor update a month later would be .1, an update two months later would be .3, and so on.
I don’t care what they call it. Just make sure you deliver on what you promise. The future updates will never be trusted again.
2026 cars/trucks will start coming out in 2025. Are you confused by what year car people have?
How many countless man-hours in meetings were spent to decide on this? Could they not funnel that energy into fixing the myriad of bugs and cruft collected across their offerings lo these many years? Apple can't walk and chew gum, that much is true, so I'd rather they keep things the way they are. This is just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic
at first I thought some joker made this up and it was going to end up in the "Wasteland" section of the forums. I couldn't believe it when I saw it was actually MacRumors
Well that’s a dumb idea.
But I guess it simplifies the marketing and customer support.
In many cultures 9 is superstitious or bad luck.
It’s why Microsoft likely also skipped Windows 9.