The Apple world had a bit of a freak out this week over rumors that Apple was changing their operating system naming conventions to match the release year (or more accurately, the retirement year). Honestly, the software industry moved to this type of naming convention years ago so I really don’t see why this is a huge shock to anyone.

What I really don’t understand is why Apple is over-complicating everything based on the rumors. The idea of using the retirement year in the name makes no sense for software.

We know Apple releases major versions of their operating systems one time per year and then releases minor versions and patches sporadically until the next major release. In my view, it would be much more user-friendly to use {major release year}.{minor release}.{patch}. So, the version to be released later this year would be 2025.0.0. This is assuming Apple wants to keep assuming major releases can only happen once per year. If they really wanted to make things easy on end users and developers, Apple would scrap this idea all together and use a {year}.{month}.{patch} naming convention. Users would have no question whether or not they were on a later release.

The same goes for hardware. I think we can all agree that it is absolutely ridiculous that we need to go to a website to figure out which year our Apple devices were released. I think a {year}.{month} naming convention would make a lot of sense here.

I know this all sounds silly, but these small changes in the way we interact with technology make a big difference in the long run.