it's always nice when naming schemes are straightforward and the powers that be
just slap a number onto the end of every new version of something i mean it
worked fine for the lethal weapon movies right but one very popular product
lineup has been a little uh less than consistent i'm talking of
course about the iphone which hasn't had a very simple naming progression at all
so let's look at a bit of history and at why apple might have made the decisions
that it did the original iphone's name was a continuation
of what apple started when it released its imac computer nine years prior with
the eye insinuating internet internet connectivity wow so it was it
was a natural fit for a phone that apple touted as being able to access the
internet seamlessly this is just so cute
in retrospect of course the next iphone wasn't simply called the iphone 2 there
was no iphone 2. in 2008 3g connectivity
was relatively new so apple saw an opportunity to highlight the new model's
support for it by calling it the iphone 3g which offered much faster data speeds
than the original apple's next device was the third iphone but it would have
sounded kind of weird to follow the iphone 3g up with iphone 3 or iphone 3g
2 final fantasy style so instead we got
the iphone 3gs which although i've been holding this for a while this is
actually the 3gs with the s standing for speed
its network connectivity wasn't any faster but it had a more powerful CPU a
feature that was starting to become more important since consumers were doing
more with their phones the succeeding iphone 4 was named in a much more
straightforward manner after all it was the fourth version of the iphone uh but
after the success of the 3gs the paradigm was set to use the letter s to
indicate a souped-up revision of a base model phone
so in 2011 we got the iphone 4s but this
time the s officially stood for siri as this was the first model to feature
apple's virtual assistant apple stuck with this tick-tock cycle
for the iphone 5 and 5s but this is where things took a bit of
turn the iphone 5s launched alongside the iphone 5c which
was a lower end device sold at a lower price point an interesting move for
apple as by this point the iphone had positioned itself as a higher-end
smartphone the 5c replaced the base
model iphone 5 though apple had to differentiate it from the older version
without confusing it with the more souped-up s model so they stuck a c in
the name the speculation being that the c stood for color but the phone flopped
due consumers not particularly liking the less premium unapologetic
less premium unapologetically plastic feel leading people to joke that the sea
meant cheap so apple was done using the c suffix for the time being and the next
generation brought us to the iphone 6 and 6 plus apple was trying to make it
clear that plus meant something different than s as the plus model was
mostly the same as the base iphone 6 just with a larger
screen this left the door wide open for apple to give us an s revision of the
iphone 6 lineup and this is where the naming scheme started to get a little
unwieldy as iphone 6s plus was a bit of
a mouthful this is also around the time when we got the first iphone se which i
don't have with me today which was a much smaller and quite different
internally uh device than the other contemporaneous models so apple dubbed
it se special edition the next year
we got the iphone 7 and this is a 7 plus
but instead of then releasing e7s apple
bucked that trend and skipped right to the iphones 8 8 plus
and 10. here's a 10. this is where divining apple's intent
gets a little more difficult there's been speculation that they wanted to
compete with samsung's s8 and did not want to have a lower number associated
with their own device other speculation was that they wanted to highlight the
fact that the iphone 8 had wireless charging and
that was a bigger deal than would be implied through calling it the 7s
then of course you have the fact that apple released the 10 the same year as
the 8 skipping the iphone 9 altogether it's been suggested
that this was for iphone's 10th anniversary as well as to imply a
reinvented iphone with a ton of new features like face id
they may have also taken a page out of microsoft's book as microsoft 2 skips
straight from Windows 8 to Windows 10 and they haven't looked back apple then
went back to using the s suffix with the upgraded iphone 10s but also tried their
hand once again at a lower cost variant with the iphone 10r
putting a a letter that's pronounced as a number
next to a letter that's actually a letter cool however unlike the c from
the iphone 5c apple said themselves that the r took inspiration from the world of
high-end cars and doesn't actually stand for anything
but that may have paid off well for them as the 10 are actually sold pretty good
i guess apple learned not to make their phones out of plastic this is also
around the time where apple confusingly switched from using plus
to using max here's a 10s max to
indicate a larger sized variant which the company seems to have settled into
for the iphones 11 and 12.
oh and they dropped the s in favor pro like the iphone 12 pro max
and added a mini designation to indicate a smaller size model and threw in an
updated iphone sc that's just called iphone sc
and uh that's that's it i want to go home now someone else can do the sponsor
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