Why didn’t Apple get rid of numbering and call the X iPhone Pro?

[9594864]

Rule #1: Apple won't drop the numbering scheme.

The numbering scheme reminds consumers there is an annual cadence of iPhones. The annual release cycle represents two-thirds of Apple's revenue. An iPhone 8 is superseded by iPhone X. And the X will be superseded by 11.

An iPhone Pro may sound great for some people, but it's terrible from a marketing perspective. To sell new phones, Apple needs to age the old phones.

Do you have an iPhone Pro (2017) or iPhone Pro (2018)? It works in the iPad and Mac because the technology in those products doesn't refresh quickly enough to warrant an annual release cycle. In that case, Apple doesn't want to emphasize to consumers the age of the product.

Killing it on the logic

 

[bufffilm]

I still don’t get the 8 vs 10 (X) naming strategy. Especially when on the inside the 8 shares most of the same tech as the X. Had they dumped the numbers and gone with iPhone > iPhone Plus > iPhone Pro it would have neatly fit into good > better > best marketing and wouldn’t have made the 8 seem like an inferior device. And it wouldn’t have made people question why the 8 exists. Eventually the OLED screen would filter down to the iPhone and iPhone Plus and the Pro would get something else that was bleeding edge. To me this marketing is just plain confusing. What happens next year? Do we get an iPhone 9 that is faster than this years X? How confusing would that be? Does the X become XI? Or is it X forever now?

So you want the cynical answer or ???

 

[frou]

That's definitely a possibility.

This is a gazillion dollar hard-charging corp. No way is a round number what tipped the scale.

 

[Joe h]

They really missed a opportunity to cash in on the anniversary. I would have released a cheap, practical version that would have had a similar design as the original, with the smaller iPhone 8 internals. It would have only been available in 256gb, in the original’s color, and tried to keep the price close $600. Instead of pre orders, you would have purchased tickets to the in-store event. Which would have been a huge celebration. Ship to home, and phone store pre orders would have occurred around the same time as the “plus” models release, several months later. The plus model would have then been what the x model is currently suppose to be.

In the end you have had people buying the anniversary model as either a collectible, a status symbol, or to actually use. Then going back again, several months later, to buy the latest and greatest model.

Then next year, the two models would been called 11 and 11+, and look like a small x and normal x.