No, it's specifically to give marketers what they want, which is the ability to advertise support for the latest version of the spec without actually having to improve the product.

It's not USB-IF's marketers that want this, it's the vendors who pay USB-IF whose marketers want this.

Either a new version of a spec says that all existing implementations are out of spec, or it add new optional features and existing implementations are that don't support them are still in spec. There's really no other option.

This naming was an entirely unforced error, and should be called out as such at every opportunity to keep it from happening again.

Edit: if you want another example of a spec with good names, checkout WiFi 6. They realized that no normal person could reason about whether 11n or 11ac was better, so they changed the naming scheme to make it obvious what was going on.

Moving to WiFi 6 was a great idea!

Which they immediately made a mess of.

What version of WiFi has 6GHz support? 6e of course.

How about uplink MU-MIMO? Oh that's WiFi 6 Wave 2.

There are differences that warranted the incrementing of the numbering - mainly the vastly superior USB-C connector over the gawd awful USB-A, Micro, Mini and that other one that I can never remember the name of.

What are you talking about? The whole point we're discussing here is that thanks to marketers we have the opposite of that where the exact same product has had three different marketing versions associated with it over the last few years without any actual difference.

USB naming/numbering was perfectly reasonable up to 3.0. Higher speed revisions got a new number and lower speed revisions kept their old one.

Then with 3.1 this all changed. Suddenly the same port that was a USB 3.0 port yesterday is now a USB 3.1 Gen1 port and the new 10 gigabit speed is USB 3.1 Gen2.

Then 3.2 comes along and suddenly those ports are now 3.2 Gen1 and 3.2 Gen2, with the new additions of 3.2 Gen1x2 and 3.2 Gen2x2 modes.

What would have been wrong with continuing the same way they had already been doing things and just calling the SuperSpeed+ mode "USB 3.1" while leaving the old ports referred to as USB 3.0, then when dual lane came around that is "USB 3.2"? It's straightforward, easy to understand, and doesn't have any chance of confusing someone in to thinking "well this thing has USB 3.1 Gen1 while this other one only has USB 3.0, I guess the first one's better".

> There are differences that warranted the incrementing of the numbering - mainly the vastly superior USB-C connector over the gawd awful USB-A, Micro, Mini and that other one that I can never remember the name of.

The type C connector is independent of the versioned standards. The USB 3.1 spec was released in July 2013 while the Type C connector spec didn't come out until August 2014. USB 3.1's 10gbit SuperSpeed+ mode is allowed and supported on the same USB 3.x Type A and Micro-B connectors as USB 3.0 SuperSpeed uses. USB 3.2's dual link mode of course requires a Type C connector at both ends.

USB 4 actually requires a Type C connector, while it supports single lane operation for setup and fallback it requires all devices support dual lane. The 10 gigabit mode also uses different encoding than SuperSpeed+ so it's not just another rename.

This seems closer to the truth to me.

Being better at naming things is part of the reason that Apple became so successful.

"What do you want for your birthday, little Timmy? Do you want Apple AirPods, or Sony WF1000XM4s?"

Apple also sucks at naming and labeling things.

Which Macbook Air do you have? Today, sure, you can say "M1". But earlier models did not have official names requiring Apple themselves to describe them in documentation as something like "MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2017, Two Thunderbolt 3 ports)"* or worse, resort to the internal part number ("MPXQ2xx/A, MPXR2xx/A, MPXT2xx/A, MPXU2xx/A" in that case).

Not that "Sony WF1000XM4s" is anything to write home about either.

Related, I have two old Mac Minis here and I can't tell which one is the several years newer one without finding a tiny model number printed on the bottom of both, looking them up, and comparing the specs.

I for one have no idea what ipads are better than what other ipads. Is Air better or worse than regular? How does that relate to Mini, in Apple laptops Air was the smaller laptops, but now there's also Mini?

At least companies leaning heavily into number-based schemes tend to make models with larger numbers the fancier more expensive ones. Acme Frobnicator 6400 is generally a lot better than Acme Frobnicator 3000.