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Comment by sebleon | Hacker News Reader

Meh, iWatch and iMessage are surefire ways to get people to think of the right product. Technically incorrect terms, but they'll get the message right.

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iMessage is a real thing–I'm not sure what you're getting at here.

The service is iMessage, but the client is "Messages" on both iOS and macOS. The client was previously called "iMessage", leading people to assume that the marque "iMessage" is no longer part of Apple's branding. But no; extensions you install inside Messages are still called "iMessage extensions", and so forth.

Yeah. I think it's perfectly correct to still refer to it to "iMessage". While the client anyone is using is likely just called "Messages", it specifically uses what is referred to as "iMessage", among other possible ways (e.g. SMS, or Jabber on macOS).

Actually, both clients have been named “Messages” as long as they’ve supported iMessage.

The iOS client has been “Messages” since iPhone OS 3.0; before that it was called “Text” and had “SMS” written inside the chat bubble in the icon. iMessage wasn’t introduced until iOS 5.0.

The macOS client was originally “iChat”, then “iChat AV”, then “iChat” again; in this era it supported multiple protocols including AIM and Jabber. In OS X 10.8, the client was renamed to “Messages” and gained iMessage support in addition to the older protocols. Support for the older protocols was removed in the just-released macOS 10.13.

Actually, Jabber support still exists. It's all the other things based on IMServicePlugIn that were removed.

Oh… you're right. During the betas, sending messages through Google Talk gave me an error [1], and I removed the account. But I guess it's still supposed to work, at least in the release version.

[1] With a delightful/odd error message: "The targeted service Potato has been discontinued".

iWatch sounds like an app.

It would be less weird to refer the “apple phone”.

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