It's always nice when naming schemes are straightforward and the powers that be just
slap a number on to 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 i
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 two. There was no iPhone two in 2008.
3g connectivity was relatively new. So Apple saw an opportunity to highlight the new model
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 three or iPhone 3g to final fantasy style. So instead we got the iPhone
3g s, which although I've been holding this for a while, this is actually the 3g s with the s
standing for speed. It's 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 four was named in a much more straightforward manner.
After all, it was the fourth version of the iPhone. But after the success of the 3g s,
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 four s, 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 talk cycle for the iPhone five and five s,
but this is where things took a bit of turn. The iPhone five s launched alongside the iPhone
five c, 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 five c replaced
the base model iPhone five, 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 unapologetically plastic feel, leading people to joke that the c meant cheap.
So Apple was done using the c suffix for the time being and the next generation brought us to the
iPhone six and six 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 six, just with a larger screen.
This left the door wide open for Apple to give us an s revision of the iPhone six lineup,
and this is where the naming scheme started to get a little unwieldy as iPhone six s 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 device than the other
contemporaneous models. So Apple dubbed it SE special edition. The next year we got the iPhone
seven and this is a seven plus, but instead of then releasing a seven s, Apple bucked that trend
and skipped right to the iPhone's eight, eight plus and 10. Here's a 10. This is where defining
Apple's intent gets a little more difficult. There's been speculation that they wanted to
compete with Samsung's s eight 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 eight had
wireless charging and that was a bigger deal than would be implied through calling it the seven s.
Then of course, you have the fact that Apple released the 10 the same year as the eight skipping
the iPhone nine 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 to skip straight from Windows
eight to Windows 10 and they haven't looked back. Apple then went back to using the s suffix
with the upgraded iPhone 10 s, but also tried their hand once again at a lower cost variant
with the iPhone 10 R, putting 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 five C, 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 10 s 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 of pro like the iPhone 12 pro max
and added a mini designation to indicate a smaller sized model and
threw in an updated iPhone SE that's just called iPhone SE.
That's it. That's the end of the video. So thanks for watching guys. If you like this video,
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