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It's always nice when naming schemes are straightforward and the powers that be just

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slap a number on to the end of every new version of something. I mean,

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it worked fine for the lethal weapon movies, right? But one very popular product lineup has been a

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little, uh, less than consistent. I'm talking of course about the iPhone, which hasn't had a

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very simple naming progression at all. So let's look at a bit of history and at why Apple might

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have made the decisions that it did. The original iPhone's name was a continuation

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of what Apple started when it released its iMac computer nine years prior with the i

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insinuating internet, internet connectivity. Wow. So it was, it was a natural fit for a phone that

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Apple touted as being able to access the internet seamlessly. This is just so cute in retrospect.

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Of course, the next iPhone wasn't simply called the iPhone two. There was no iPhone two in 2008.

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3g connectivity was relatively new. So Apple saw an opportunity to highlight the new model

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support for it by calling it the iPhone 3g, which offered much faster data speeds than the original.

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Apple's next device was the third iPhone, but it would have sounded kind of weird to follow the

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iPhone 3g up with iPhone three or iPhone 3g to final fantasy style. So instead we got the iPhone

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3g s, which although I've been holding this for a while, this is actually the 3g s with the s

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standing for speed. It's network connectivity wasn't any faster, but it had a more powerful CPU,

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a feature that was starting to become more important since consumers were doing more

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with their phones. The succeeding iPhone four was named in a much more straightforward manner.

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After all, it was the fourth version of the iPhone. But after the success of the 3g s,

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the paradigm was set to use the letter s to indicate a souped up revision of a base model phone.

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So in 2011, we got the iPhone four s, but this time the s officially stood for Siri,

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as this was the first model to feature Apple's virtual assistant.

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Apple stuck with this tick talk cycle for the iPhone five and five s,

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but this is where things took a bit of turn. The iPhone five s launched alongside the iPhone

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five c, which was a lower end device sold at a lower price point. An interesting move for Apple,

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as by this point the iPhone had positioned itself as a higher end smartphone. The five c replaced

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the base model iPhone five, though Apple had to differentiate it from the older version without

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confusing it with the more souped up s model so they stuck a c in the name. The speculation

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being that the c stood for color, but the phone flopped due consumers not particularly liking

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the less premium unapologetically plastic feel, leading people to joke that the c meant cheap.

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So Apple was done using the c suffix for the time being and the next generation brought us to the

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iPhone six and six plus. Apple was trying to make it clear that plus meant something different than s,

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as the plus model was mostly the same as the base iPhone six, just with a larger screen.

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This left the door wide open for Apple to give us an s revision of the iPhone six lineup,

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and this is where the naming scheme started to get a little unwieldy as iPhone six s plus was

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a bit of a mouthful. This is also around the time when we got the first iPhone SE, which I don't have

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with me today, which was a much smaller and quite different internally device than the other

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contemporaneous models. So Apple dubbed it SE special edition. The next year we got the iPhone

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seven and this is a seven plus, but instead of then releasing a seven s, Apple bucked that trend

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and skipped right to the iPhone's eight, eight plus and 10. Here's a 10. This is where defining

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Apple's intent gets a little more difficult. There's been speculation that they wanted to

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compete with Samsung's s eight and did not want to have a lower number associated with their own

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device. Other speculation was that they wanted to highlight the fact that the iPhone eight had

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wireless charging and that was a bigger deal than would be implied through calling it the seven s.

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Then of course, you have the fact that Apple released the 10 the same year as the eight skipping

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the iPhone nine altogether. It's been suggested that this was for iPhone's 10th anniversary,

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as well as to imply a reinvented iPhone with a ton of new features like face ID.

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They may have also taken a page out of Microsoft's book as Microsoft to skip straight from Windows

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eight to Windows 10 and they haven't looked back. Apple then went back to using the s suffix

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with the upgraded iPhone 10 s, but also tried their hand once again at a lower cost variant

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with the iPhone 10 R, putting a letter that's pronounced as a number next to a letter that's

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actually a letter. Cool. However, unlike the C from the iPhone five C, Apple said themselves

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that the R took inspiration from the world of high end cars and doesn't actually stand for anything.

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But that may have paid off well for them as the 10 are actually sold pretty good.

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I guess Apple learned not to make their phones out of plastic. This is also around the time

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where Apple confusingly switched from using plus to using max. Here's a 10 s max to indicate a

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larger sized variant, which the company seems to have settled into for the iPhones 11 and 12.

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Oh, and they dropped the s in favor of pro like the iPhone 12 pro max

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and added a mini designation to indicate a smaller sized model and

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threw in an updated iPhone SE that's just called iPhone SE.

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That's it. That's the end of the video. So thanks for watching guys. If you like this video,

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give it a like, give us a subscribe and hit us up in the comment section with your suggestions

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