Apple blew up its naming scheme last year, ditching the expected iPhone 7S moniker in favor of the alphabet-less iPhone 8. Not only that, it also introduced the iPhone X as a separate standalone series.
Guggenheim analyst Robert Cihra thinks Apple is going to continue down this path of simpler branding for this year’s iPhones as well. He predicts that the company is going to take advantage of this upcoming cycle to formally change the iPhone naming pattern.
This is big news, since Apple has so far simply relied on numbers and the letter S for successive generations. Instead of using a number, it might just call the 6.1-inch LCD iPhone “iPhone” – no numericals involved. Similarly, the iPhone X will stay the same to convey its premium status.
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The investor note doesn’t mention what the upcoming 6.5-inch OLED iPhone could be called. The iPhone X Plus is a popular name being thrown around at the moment. Plus, it fits in with Apple’s new allergy towards numbers.
Apple has followed a similar pattern before with the iPad. It started out life as the iPad, changed to the iPad 2, followed that up with The New iPad, upgraded to the iPad Air by the time the 5th generation arrived, and finally went back to being called the iPad.
The iPhone was also just called the iPhone when it first came out, so perhaps it’s time for the lineup to go full circle. While all this might sound good to Apple, it will probably confuse consumers as the years go by as they won’t be able to tell one iPhone generation from another.
This in turn will force people to come up with some kind of extra identifying term like mentioning the year the iPhone was released or its screen size besides the official name. It’s what they’ve been doing for iPads so far, so it looks like this could get carried over to iPhones as well.