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Side question with the product and processor names; any one else finding Apple's product naming getting ... complicated? Can't we just have the product names based on size, and a moniker dictate its features + processor?

Maybe something like;

- Mac, MacBook, iPhone, iPad, Watch

And you can get them in:

- Mini, Max or just "normal size"

With your choice of:

- M?, M? Pro, M? Ultra

Running

- MacOS, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS

We've already got a "mini" iPhone (SE), MacBook (Air), Mac. Plus the normal sized ones; 14" for the laptops and studio for the Mac, and then max being 16" laptops, or a tower mac, and the 12.9" tablet etc. Same for the watch too, and the iMac has played around the 21/24/27 sizes already.

Perhaps I just don't understand the product differential requirements from branding / marketing perspectives.

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Apple's product naming getting ... complicated?

On the other hand, compared to just about every other computer/tech company out there I find it by far the easiest and most sane. Is the 15" MSI GE67 better or worse than the 15" MSI Bravo 15? And where does the MSI GP67 fit into the whole picture?

> Apple's product naming getting ... complicated?

Compared to Apple's/Steve Jobs' own standards, yes.

In some cases, it's complicated by being TOO SIMPLE: e.g. try figuring out iPad versions.

Aside from iPad Air being better than iPad and iPad Mini, it all makes sense?

If you're comparing to Steve Jobs' Apple, that was a much smaller company with fewer customers.

I think people confuse Steve's simplicity with Apple's previous need to pare down product lines to cut costs and avoid bankruptcy.

There are a zillion iPhone models at every possible price point because more than half of the USA buys iPhones.

The closest thing to a MacBook mini would actually be the 12-inch fanless MacBook that was always highly constrained by thermals on the Intel platform. It would be a lot more interesting on Apple Silicon, perhaps for the school education market that seems to mostly use Chromebooks these days.

it continues to baffle me that they haven't yet reintroduced this model. It was always an assumption of mine, perhaps incorrectly, that that model was a design/engineering experiment that was just the wrong side of the line on practicality but served as a market test for that form factor.

Anecdotally it seemed very popular, and loved by the people who bought one. Perhaps the numbers said otherwise, because otherwise I have no idea why they didn't reintroduce it as an M1/M2 machine.

Perhaps, and this is maybe just being hopeful, they're waiting for the even better efficiency of the M3 etc before reintroducing it because they want to do it, but absolutely nail it when they do without any battery life compromise. After all, they already ran the market demand test, so this would make sense if so. If that turns out to be the case I'll almost certainly buy one.

I thought the same thing (got one for a gf), but since the introduction of pointer support in iPadOS, I look at the kinds of things most folks with the 12” books do (word processing, light spreadsheets, web), and I think Apple is correctly betting that that market is going for iPads with keyboard/trackpad folios now.

>Anecdotally it seemed very popular, and loved by the people who bought one. Perhaps the numbers said otherwise, because otherwise I have no idea why they didn't reintroduce it as an M1/M2 machine.

I loved mine, and put a couple of hundred thousand miles in carrying it (even wrote a lot of code in Emacs, but I remember the days when every compile was an excuse to stand up and get coffee, so the speed didn't matter to me).

AFAICT its target market was actually Asia, same as with the ultralight (for its time) Powerbook 2400c which was actually built by IBM Japan. But it didn't sell as well as expected even there.

They kinda did? The M1 Air is basically a better version of the 12" skinny Macbook. It's fanless, has a slightly larger screen (13" vs. 12"), and swaps a single USB 3.1 Type-C port for two TB3/USB4 Type-C ports, while knocking $300 off the price and dumping the awful butterfly keyboard. The only downside is that it's a tenth of an inch thicker (0.16"-0.63" vs 0.14"-0.52").

It's also 0.37kg (0.77lbs) heavier, which is almost +40%.

I would love one of those for traveling.

Even smaller; there was an 11" Macbook Air discontinued in 2016. It was too slow for me, but I really like the form factor. Would like to see that return with AS.

While featuring a smaller screen the 11" MacBook Air wasn't smaller than the 12" MacBook!

Here are their sizes for comparison:

    MacBook Air 11"    300 mm x 192 mm x 17 mm          1,08kg
    MacBook 12"        280,4 mm x 196,6 mm x 13,2 mm    0,92kg

There's a reason why naming things is one of the "two hard things".

You're forgetting the M? Max monicker. I would love to run an M1 Max Mac Max.

As other mentions “airpod Pro gen 2” is still much, much simpler than whatever it is Sony is calling their earbuds.

But on the other hand you need to be a bit of an expert to compare the different series of iPad.

And who can forget that the first iPad with Retina display was called “the new iPad” and the follow up was called “iPad with Retina display”. Talk about cluster fuck naming!

I wanna say Apple is doing better than the competition but worse than they used to, but they have a few fuckups from a decade ago that a bigger than anything they’ve got going on now, so maybe they’re not clearly doing worse.

So to answer your question: Is apples naming getting complicated? Inconclusive.

And include the year as a version number.

Then we can say things like "2022 was (not) a good MacBook-year".

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