Yea cars have this notion of model years. Everyone knows nothing really changes between model years except the trim. It's the vehicle generation you care about. I think the focus should be on holding press conferences when you genuinely have something new to show off otherwise it's just fluff.

Car companies do have press events every year for their yearly product updates, it's just that everyone who doesn't care just doesn't pay attention.

Car companies' annual events where they unveil all their new models are huge. They've been happening every year since forever.

It's likely the tech industry copied them.

> iPhone 13 and Pixel 6

I think the fact that they are in those high numbers already shows that they "stopped pretending like it is going to be an exciting brand new product every single year". The numbering there is pretty straightforward compared to e.g. the Macbook namings, or the convoluted naming of other brands with stacked variation signifiers, like the "Xiaomi 11 lite 5G NE".

> The numbering there is pretty straightforward compared to e.g. the Macbook namings

I'm confused, while Apple has silly naming conventions for their operating system, the Macbook line doesn't have that at all. It's just the Macbook (and the Macbook Pro and the Macbook Air), Apple doesn't even give them different names or years.

Am I missing something that isn't incredibly straightforward about the Macbook naming?

Yes, you are missing the sillier "Late 2014", "Early 2019" naming of MacBook Pros and others :)

> It's just the Macbook (and the Macbook Pro and the Macbook Air)

Just that it isn't. The "(new) MacBook" (without any addition) most recently existed 2015-2019, and I personally found it very confusing, as it was thinner than a MacBook Air and with that breaking the previous expectations that were set up by the product line naming.

Placing all the blame on the naming of the MacBooks is probably overblown, but I feel like the individual lines of MacBooks have had a expectation/consistency problem for 10+ years now and throwing in the "new MacBook" into the mix for some time didn't help it.

Is there a whole lot of difference between “iPhone 15” and “iPhone (2023)”? Aside from the fact that relegating the version number to parentheses makes it more likely to be omitted and thus more likely to cause confusion for users trying to troubleshoot.

I like the version number being explicit and visible. You know what you’re getting. Pretending versions don’t exist just reminds me of OEMs swapping out components but keeping the same model number, making it impossible to know whether you are buying one built to the original design or to a cheaper design.

For what it's worth, swapping out material/ updating parts and not changing model numbers already happens a lot in consumer tech. Making changes after launch and initial mass production runs in order to average down cost or fix known issues is a fairly common practice at large hardware companies (Apple/Google/Samsung/Tesla). It's seldom changing the display or battery size or anything immediately customer facing, but there's hundreds of components that each act as a knob for performance and cost that get tweaked over time.

I work at Google and I don't always know which phone is which.

It's a phone. It does phone things.

I wish. Pixel 6 (Pro) often has trouble doing "phone things", like making calls or transmitting data.

It's really astonishing to me how deeply bad the radio in the P6Pro is. It's such a huge step back from the Pixel 5, likely owing to them moving off of the Qualcomm radio and on to... Tensor? Some Tensor/Samsung Exynos hybrid? Either way it's misery salad. Drops calls. Can't handle wifi transition. Can't manage low-signal 5G, so just... stops working instead of falling back to LTE properly. Can't handle the UWB transition. Hot as hell when it's actually backing up anything large. Awful all around on that front.

And, really, how many more phone things do you need it to do? Will doing more phone things make it noticeably better?

I believe Samsung has started to do this with their Galaxy S series of phones, starting with the S20 in 2020. This years phone is the S22 for 2022.

That numbering makes a lot more sense now.

>You would just say you have "an iPhone"

They tried this with the iPad 3 IIRC. Was just "The New iPad" but they then reverted back the next year.

They didn't really go back though, it's iPad (9th generation) instead of iPad 9. Not quite versionless naming like they use for Macs, but it's less versioned than the iPhone naming.

The problem with calling something "The New X" is that you basically can't come out with _another_ model after without making it confusing to differentiate between the "new" one and the "New" one. I think the main reason they felt they could try that is that they new they were not going to come out with any more "generic" iPads and instead have the Pro and Air models like they have for Macbooks.