Apple Veers Into Microsoft Branding Territory
Mark Gurman
You either die a hero, or live long enough to become Windows 95. That's the saying, right?1 I mean, I honestly can't believe this:
The next Apple operating systems will be identified by year, rather than with a version number, according to people with knowledge of the matter. That means the current iOS 18 will give way to “iOS 26,” said the people, who asked not to be identified because the plan is still private. Other updates will be known as iPadOS 26, macOS 26, watchOS 26, tvOS 26 and visionOS 26.
Look, Apple has done the whole naming scheme based on years before, notably with the old iLife suite of products. They also stopped doing it a dozen years ago. Because it's dumb. It has long been dumb for the sports videogame franchises that popularized the notion and it's worse for software, because there aren't actually fixed "seasons" for software.2 Apple has sort of forced their teams into shipping that way, but increasingly, that's not the case. Case in point: presumably a lot of 'iOS 26' features are going to ship in 2025, with some shipping in 2026. So I guess 'iOS 26' is like an NBA season, split between two calendar years. But Apple isn't calling it 'iOS 25/26', they're calling it 'iOS 26'.
Excuse me for a moment, I'm going to beat this horse good and dead.
It would be one thing if 'iOS 26' came out on say, January 1, 2026 and then was made obsolete on December 31, 2026, but its going to be released in the fall of 2025. After being announced and going into beta in the summer of 2025. And presumably it will start the process of being made obsolete in the summer of 2026 – barely half a year into its name – as that's when we'll undoubtedly see 'iOS 27' at WWDC26.
Granted, it's a better situation than the aforementioned Windows 95, which was Microsoft's operating system released nearly nine months into 1995. As such, Windows 95 was Microsoft's state of the art OS for 1996 and 1997 and half of 1998, until 'Windows 98' spelled Windows 95 in June of that year.
Windows 98 was Microsoft's marquee operating system in 1999 and 2000 (apologies to 'Windows 2000' – more an 'NT' thing) and early 2001 until Microsoft put that naming scheme out of its misery with the wonderfully generically Microsoftian 'Windows XP'. Which was naturally followed by 'Windows Vista', an operating system so bad that it drove Microsoft back to numbers: 'Windows 7'.
Was 'Windows 7' released in 7 AD? 7 BC? No, it was the seventh version of Windows. Sort of. Yes, they did the branding exercise Apple is now doing in reverse.
Likewise, we're now going to think 'iOS 18' was released in 2018 – well, technically 2017 given Apple's scheme here – even though it was released in 2024. And that points to my biggest problem with this name change: unless Apple is going to go full iLife and do 'iOS '26' – with the ' – it's such a bad branding look to simply jump from one number to another, seemingly arbitrarily. The mere existence of 'iOS 26' leads to the obvious question of: where's 'iOS 19' through 'iOS 25'?
I mean, it obviously doesn't matter. But it's clunky and weird. Yes, Apple pulled it off in jumping from the iPhone 8 to the iPhone X, but that required a cool 'X' to make it work. You know what's not cool? '26' is not cool. It's just a... random large number. Honestly, even 'iOS XXVI' would be better.
And all of this leads to the next obvious question. Actually, it's more of a statement: so you're telling me the iPhone 17 is going to be running iOS 26? WHAT THE FUCK. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.
I mean, the fact that the iPhone 17 was going to be running iOS 19 was already confusing as fuck.3 But now it's just a total mindfuck. So much so that it seems like Apple almost has to rename the iPhone lineup too! But would they really do that? More so than software, a move to 'iPhone 26' would literally date the hardware and make it far less attractive from a resale perspective.
Apple is making the change to bring consistency to its branding and move away from an approach that can be confusing to customers and developers. Today’s operating systems — including iOS 18, watchOS 12, macOS 15 and visionOS 2 — use different numbers because their initial versions didn’t debut at the same time.
Yes, this was a total mess. And the new scheme will be slightly easier to remember depending on what time of year it is. But again, it will make the name of the iPhone itself arguably more confusing and harder to remember.
Here’s an idea: just give them cute nicknames. Like macOS (and OS X before it) has long done. Big Cats. Or California shit. Planets. Whatever! Just stop with the goddamn endless and increasingly generic numbers Apple!
Or how about this: the 'iPhone 17' should be called the 'iPhone'. We can denote the model in small type like we do with the iPad or MacBook. I know it's not as cool from a marketing perspective.
But you know what's not cool? Having an iPhone 17 that runs iOS 26.
1 The one Jonathan Nolan apparently wrote for The Dark Knight.
2 Yes, yes, car manufacturers do this too, but it's far less explicit than what this is reportedly going to be from a branding perspective. The car branding is more like the iPad -- it's the 2025 edition.
3 And I certainly get that doing a full UI refresh across the board is as good a time as any for such a branding shift.