Other luxury consumer goods use pretty similar schemes, e.g. Audio gear (e.g. bang + olufsen: the higher the number the better, with some number of meaningless zeroes added depending on fashion).
One observation might be that these companies all have halo products that are used to anchor/promote the volume offerings that drive revenue (e.g. The Audi r8 and the a3, the 90k speakers and the 1k set)
You need to already know the brand to know this.
> (quality: 1-cheap, 8-luxury)
How high does it go? If they decide to turn it up to 11 tomorrow, is 8 still "luxury"?
I can't agree that this sort of versioning is any more transparent.
> (e.g. The Audi r8 and the a3, the 90k speakers and the 1k set)
This means nothing unless you already know the brand. There's going to be a minimum set of knowledge required to understand these versioning schemes.
Growing up in Europe seems to be enough wrt to Audi.
I'm not interested in cars but I have still picked this up somehow. Same with BMW.
Look at the luxury car sector. https://www.audiusa.com/models#sedans/ Can you tell the quality by its naming convention? I can't. I can sort of assume some quality hierarchy by the price though.
The fact that Apple has abandoned the "one phone, one tablet" model indicates to me that it hasn't been a valuable strategy for them.