Clearly some departments of Sony have engineers naming things. No marketing team would put out a product names the "Sony WH-1000XM4" not to be confused with the "Sony WF-1000XM4".

Overall Nvidia generally has a very good naming system. They are easy to understand if you look at them for more than a minute. Nvidia is 4090? 40 = Generation. 90 = Model. Higher model # is better. They've stuck with the general concept for the better part of 20 years.

Intel's naming is decent. Their cutsey names like Sandy Bridge, meh. No one can never remember those. But the Core numbering system is solid. i3 is lowest. i9 is highest. The processor numbers after that can be a little hard and do require a bit of a decorder matrix to understand. But as long as it's a system, with rules, that they follow, and can be explained fairly easily - I'm ok with it. Heck they have a page that gives you the magic decoder ring: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/processors/processor...

Except Nvidia uses the same branding for it's mobile and desktop chips, and in the past have rebadged different architectures under multiple gen numbers. (GT 510/520/605/610/710 all the GF119 chip)

It's all pretty bad.

I'll be honestly concerned for Sony if they stop naming their products from random bash line noise.

It's now as much part of their brand as all other things are.

Acer's monitor naming looks like a cat walked on someone's keyboard - KVbmiipruzx

The best named monitor recently is probably the Waysus 22.

KV looks like a Sony prefix for CRT TVs (the "k" presumably stands for "kinescope", which is the name for a CRT in a number of non-English languages.)

But I think the long and mysterious-at-first-glance model numbering is usually a good thing since it encodes a lot of useful information.

Sony’s naming problem is not because of engineers; It’s clearly the marketing team, and the goal is most certainly to make this incomparable, across continents, across years, or between the one that was given to the reviewers/journals/comparators and the ones that the customers can actually purchase.

Sony’s problem is that they try to sell bad products for the price of expensive ones, and the best way to do that is to have incomprehensible names.

The MDR-7506 has just as obscure a name as anything they're selling; it's not clear to me that the naming is so much a strategy as a lack thereof...

I think the goal is more so that big chains can sell model numbers that nobody else sells, making it risk-free for them to promise “we’ll match any cheaper price”.

For what it's worth, I bought a high end TV recently, the Sony Bravia A90J. I've left out some of the full product name, but this info is all you need if you care to look up that TV.

When I was looking in physical stores, at physical devices, I noticed that there were important differences between the [A-Z][8-9]0[A-Z]s, when I would research the model numbers online. 80 vs 90 indicated jumps in overall quality, depending on the other letters in the model name, which usually meant that the product was created specifically for the store (like Best Buy vs Costco vs buying direct), and would have other minor differences from the 'true' version.

A regular person would have probably just looked at the TVs in-store and decided based on whatever looked best, but I happened to have some specific features I wanted, and the weird-ass model names helped.

The A90J is the top model right? Was looking at those myself recently. Amazon warehouse occasionally has a cheap deal on one but I am always scared those probably have dead pixels.

I really wanted a Panasonic Plasma but it looks like the sole importer may not be getting them anymore or might be getting less. But from what I understand the A90J and the top end Panasonics are the best in that they have a much better heatsink

A90J is, by the research I did and the word of the person who sold it to me (a family friend, has owned a TV business for 25 years, and gave me his at-cost price), the best. I absolutely love it. And yes, the panel + heatsink are top notch. Some other models/brands use the same panel, but lack the stronger heatsinks, and aren't able to utilize it as best as possible.

It runs Android TV, which may or may not be a dealbreaker for you, but I enjoy it enough. I just wanted to be free of a vendor-specific TV os, in order to give myself more flexibility when I try to set up a pi-hole in the future. There's also a hardware switch to disable the TV's microphone.

Also, the sound comes out from the panel itself, and is (to me) great. It calibrates itself using the microphone within the remote, by having you hold it a certain way when performing setup.

Finally, there's an incredibly posh and satisfying 'click' noise when you turn it off. I don't know why, but this makes me like the TV more.

TV naming is especially crazy. They have variants for everything from geopraphical location to specific sales events.

My TV lacks the ability to transmit audio via Bluetooth (no, I can't enable it, I think it actually lacks the module). Nobody could have told me that before I bought it, the marketing material and manuals all claim that it has it. There is precisely NO documentation for my specific model.

I'm starting to think that they're actively counting on people not completely testing their devices after getting them.

I bought a TV from Fry's. There's no mention in the English manual, but according to the internet, this model has a DVR built-in, but it only activates if you tell it you're in Brazil when you first set it up.

I think you need to at least also consider the generation along with the bucket for Intel CPUs. For most users a 12th gen i3 is better than a ninth gen anything, yet plenty of retailers kept old laptop skus around long enough you would see both side by side at a retailer

No I cannot agree that Nvidia naming system is any good.

First, one could think that larger number means larger performance but this is not always the case. Second, one might think that "Ti" or "super" GPU is better than a regular one in every aspect but this is not the case also.

The same is about Intel. The best naming scheme is where numbers reflect performance or core count or cache size so that they can easily be compared by a consumer.

Marketing teams name things 360, One, One S, One X, Series S and Series X. I think that's the right order, I'm not sure.

When the Xbox One was announced, people complained that it was confusing, but really it had been long enough since the original Xbox that the name was just silly, not confusing.

The One/Series S/X crap is genuinely baffling, totally incomprehensible unless you've really been keeping up with every Xbox release. You can go on Wikipedia and figure it out in a few minutes, but...you should not have to do that.

Don’t forget the OG offender in this category, the PSOne / PSX

In Sony's defense, everything else with the PlayStation was actually pretty straightforward. PS1, PS2, PS3, PS4, and PS5.

"PSOne" was a weird way to brand a slim console, but it's still obvious that it's a PS1. And while Sony did originally use PSX to refer to the PS1, that was an internal codename, i.e. "different from the Nintendo PlayStation[0]". The gaming press ran with it because people in that era insisted on awkward three-letter acronyms for all games consoles. Reusing it for a weird PS2 DVR combo unit is still way better than Microsoft launching two different consoles with the same name.

[0] The cancelled SNES variant with the also-cancelled Super CD add-on built-in, both built by Sony.

The order is 360, One, Series.

The letter is just tier.

It's remarkable how thoroughly they managed to outdo the confusing nature of "One". Who would look at "Xbox Series" and think that's the name of a specific generation? It's an artistic masterpiece.

What is an iPod without context? Some sort of protective case with an RFID tag maybe?

PlayDate - is that a video conferencing product?

These are not good product names

Context is required for basically all product names, unless they've managed to make themselves generic. Ex https://www.businessinsider.com/google-taser-xerox-brand-nam... . Even then, if they are "generic" they still often require context of a specific country or language.

If I ask you about a Mustang, what do you think about first? Are you into cars and it's a Ford Mustang? Are you into Horses? Are you into Planes? Or maybe you're into ships? Heck, there is an entire list of options: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mustang_(disambiguation)

A good name is memorable, not necessarily descriptive. Most product and company names today are made up anyways. Or they are named after something else in a completely arbitrary fashion.

The problem comes when a company establishes a name for one thing, then uses it for another. The iPhone is a good name in concept. Pro/Max/Ultra/Mini not withstanding. But what if tomorrow Apple said there was an iPhone Super Ultra Max that was 10" and couldn't make calls. People would argue that was an iPad and that this new Super Ultra Max was a stupid name.

It is weird because Nvidia clearly has an instinct to give their cards car names (with the GTX, GT, RTX, etc etc stuff). They should just get rid of the numbers for the most part.

4090 -> 2022 Nvidia Optium

4080 -> 2022 Nvidia Melium

4070 -> 2022 Nvidia Bonum

4060 -> 2022 Nvidia Benem

(I barand-name-ified the latin words for best/better/good/okay).

Without the numbers, you have no idea which one’s better at a glance (which is why they’re retracting the “other” 4080).

And “Bonum”… are you sure?

The problem with the numbers is that we expect them to have some meaning. There's no inherent ordering between maxima/altima/sentra but if you are shopping for Nissan cars you figure it out. If you are spending a couple thousand dollars on something you shouldn't pick at a glance, you should look at the specs.

Bonum -- apparently that's the latin word for good? I dunno I just dropped words into google translate and then hacked off letters at random to fit the pattern. I'm sure they can come up with better fake words.