The next Apple operating systems will be identified by year, rather than with a version number, according to people with knowledge of the matter. That means the current iOS 18 will give way to “iOS 26,” said the people, who asked not to be identified because the plan is still private. Other updates will be known as iPadOS 26, macOS 26, watchOS 26, tvOS 26 and visionOS 26.
Apple is making the change to bring consistency to its branding and move away from an approach that can be confusing to customers and developers. Today’s operating systems — including iOS 18, watchOS 12, macOS 15 and visionOS 2 — use different numbers because their initial versions didn’t debut at the same time.
↫ Mark Gurman at Bloomberg
OK.
Sounds reasonable. Kind of what Ubuntu does, for example.
Kind of. The version of ubuntu also includes month in the versioning. Having only the year would suggest a much slower release cycle for iOS than previously. Not exactly great for the third/fourth most used OS on the planet (depending on how you count)
Not necessarily. You can keep your versions aligned sufficiently with 26.1, 26.2 instead of 26.4 and 26.10.
That is a good point, but highly unlikely.
26.Cheeta, 26.Tiger, 26.Lion, … ain’t that more clear ?
Kochise,
Or give the releases zodiac signs, haha.
I may lack creativity, but over time I’ve grown wary of clever names, be it candy bars (android), animals (ubuntu), movie references (debian), etc. It’s something “fun” in the moment, but over time it just becomes a hodgepodge of random words that have lost all associated meaning. My vote would be to just make it a date and be done with it. But then again I suppose more artistic people prefer the word play.
@Alfman
I agree with you but you can do both, as Ubuntu has shown. Let the fans and news media throw around the code name while they anticipate a release or while it is the current version. Let the rest of us use the version numbers, especially for making sense of a machine that has been running for a few years.
My biggest beef with Ubuntu is that they put the silly names in the sources.list instead of the much more useful version numbers.
I do not use Ubuntu so I am complaining about something that does not even impact me. Still, it has always seemed a wasted opportunity.
I suppose that in 2105 it will be macos 105. Then we will habe 975 to solve tje Y3K problem.
@NaGERST
macOS has come out in June annually for over a decade. iOS comes out once a year in September.
Do you mean point releases? I cannot see whey they would not happen exactly as before. The year would simply be the major version number.
This would sync up the iOS and macOS version number which right now are not aligned even though they both increment by exactly one annually.
Apple aims to create a more consistent branding strategy across all its platforms. Currently, different operating systems have disparate version numbers (e.g., iOS 18, watchOS 12, macOS 15, visionOS 2 or sprunki), which can be confusing for both customers and developers.
I am a fan of release time based versions like this in general. I wish all software would do this frankly. For Apple, it could either help or hurt them when an OS becomes unsupported because you can instantly see how old it is.
I guess Y2K did not teach us to use more than two digits for years. Then again, the chances that they will still be using this versioning scheme when macOS 98 rolls out are pretty slim.
LeFantome,
When ’00, ’01, etc rolled around none of us were thinking about 1900, 1901, etc. By the time macos 98 comes out, people will be mentally prepared for ’00 to mean 2100.
You just gave me a funny/horrifying mental image of what macOS 98 might look like, with a Start button and isometric pictographs for icons, and the big mid-version update is called macOS 98SE.
@Morgan
The true horror would be macOS ME
In the good old days, versions used to mean something. Like a major version bump used to mean years of development, a completely new architecture, tons of features. It was an event.
Now though, it’s all continuous delivery and so, there is basically nothing to look forward to. And the versions? They follow various meaningless schemes, like Chrome 256.7, iOS 24, Some 25-yo OpenSource Crap v0.0886, etc.
May as well simply use the year. I personally like the IntelliJ versioning YYYY.R, where R is the release number of the year.
drstorm,
That is true. It used to mean something significant. I suspect a lot of software companies want to disassociate from this expectation because the law of diminishing returns makes it hard to maintain innovation over decades. As products mature, upgrades become more marginal. Look at how boring android and iphone have become. Sure we may get some marginal bump in specs, but modern version bumps don’t come with as much anticipation or excitement.
Besides, companies tend to make releases on a schedule, rather then when something new is finished. Feels like updating for the sake of updating.
Well… “something new” is also happening on schedule: releases of new hardware.
And in a world where new version basically exists just to support new hardware (all other improvements are so marginal that it’s hard to distinguish versions released 10 years apart) it would make sense to use year for the version number.
If you sell software to businesses, the biggest problem with version numbers is that your customers anchor to them. Some of your customers will complain bitterly about stagnation if the major version “has not changed in forever” (even if there are many new features they are not even using yet). At the very same time, other customers will refuse to take on the “risk” of moving to a “new” major version. You can be trapped supporting large customers on older versions forever. Look at all the people trying to cling to RHEL7. But as long as you keep the version the same, you can roll out huge changes and nobody bats an eye. How many enterprises clung to Windows 7 forever but, once on Windows 10, let Microsoft roll out “updates” which changed more than moving from the last version of 7 to the first version of 10?
Applications like browsers moved to fixed release cycles and automatic updates so that they could treat installed software more like web or cloud deployments. You get to roll out new software all the time. Everybody is using the latest stuff. It makes support and maintenance massively easier which makes it easier to add new features with smaller teams. Firefox wants to move to releases every 4 weeks. They probably realize that the browser with the biggest release version will be perceived as more advanced.
As I said above, iOS and macOS have come out annually in the exact same month for over a decade. They are already completely time-boxed releases. They are just not labelled that way. And yet, we are still fretting about this change as if the current release numbers (or even better codenames) have greater meaning.
LeFantome,
Are they actually clinging to REL7, or is it CentOS 7?
I ask because I think CentOS is more popular than Redhat in hosting environments and a lot of centos users stuck with centos7 because it was the last LTS version of centos. Redhat then discontinued centos and created a new centos stream distro for testing changes before redhat, which is less stable and therefor less desirable for some production environments, which might explain the relative popularity of 7.
https://www.fosslinux.com/122411/centos-linux-and-centos-stream-whats-the-difference.htm
@Alfman
The change to the CentOS project is certainly a factor. Absolutely.
But CentOS 7 users had (and have) lots of options outside of CentOS Stream. There was Alma, Scientific, Rocky, and even Oracle. They all offer a RHEL upgrade path to release 8 or higher and even 8 is supported for 5 more years.
Shout out to the Alma Linux team. In my view, they have really stepped up and should be the leading option for anybody wanting an ABI compatible RHEL alternative.
LeFantome,
Yes, I know there are alternatives. Alma and Rocky were forked to counteract redhat’s actions.
Indeed, My point wasn’t so much about merit though, rather it was about the popularity game, which can be tangential to merit. Personally I have yet to come across Alma and Rocky systems “in the wild” but I still encounter centos 7.
Anyway, I merely wanted to offer the circumstances around centos as a hypothesis.
@Alfman
Not arguing. I think you are right.
My shout out to Alma is not a call for CentOS users to switch. I want to encourage distro shoppers to consider Alma over Rocky. I probably should have left it out of my comment. Just wanted to support them.
Meh. Versions have always been highly subjective scheme. Commercially usually aligned with whatever was the marketing spell of the time.
What you remember from the “good” old days was as arbitrary and marketing driven, as we have today.
E.g. The first Windows NT release was 3.1
That can still be argued, it can run applications designed for Windows 3.1, and they might check for that version.
I mean, it could also run OS/2 1.x applications, so why not name it NT 1.0 LOL…
>They follow various meaningless schemes, like Chrome 256.7, iOS 24, Some 25-yo OpenSource Crap v0.0886, etc.
Had to laugh out loud at the last bit
On a side note, Intel, please take a clue and drop the lake stuff, will you?
Blame tech bloggers for using project/uarch code names instead of the actual final consumer product names…
Fortunately I will be 115 years old by the time they roll out with the revolutionary new Macintosh95. There is a good chance I wont be around to need to think about the implications of that. Also what will they do after 99. MacME?
I think Microsoft had it right at one point with Windows 95, 98 and 2000 but then they dropped it for meaningless names like XP, Me and Vista before going back to version numbers again. With the huge amount of time between releases though I can kind of understand why. Windows 2021 would sound really old at this point. Maybe they should just drop the whole idea of waiting years for major versions and start naming their XXH1 releases as a new version. Instead of Windows 11 25H1 just name it Windows 2025,
They still drop what used to be called service packs. They could just make those the release and stop pretending like there is a real difference between 10 and 11, other than user space trash, an artificial constraints on what hardware you can put 11 on, I mean, I get it, they have to have some reason to “buy” the new version. Whatever. Why do people still use that thing?
I really don’t think people buy retail copies of Windows anymore. They either accept the new version Microsoft pushes on them if they have compatible hardware, or they get the newest version preinstalled when they replace a broken device, or a perfectly fine device that Microsoft says they can’t use anymore.
I don’t know if Microsoft even offers boxed copies of Windows 11, it’s all digital licenses tied to your PC and/or Microsoft account these days, and that covers 99.9% of home computer users. Enterprise customers will continue to do the Enterprise license upgrades they always have, and the 0.1% of us nerds who are left know how to get a newly built PC “licensed” (wink wink nudge nudge), or even better we just avoid Windows altogether and use another OS.
I hope they play Start Me Up at the announcement of iPhone 95 in 70 years. And what will macOS 84 look like?
macOS 84 will be a lot like 1984
How about they give up on their silly yearly release schedule and go back to releasing new versions when they have major new features THAT WORK?
[A new poop emoji is not a major feature.]
This is a bad sign. Apple is copying Windows from 20 years ago.
Apple’s move to using years instead of version numbers makes things easier for users to identify, but it also takes away some of the technical credibility that comes with each numbered update. https://agargame.io