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Bikeshedding, or why I want to build a laptop

(geohot.github.io)
224 points cspags | 2 comments | 01 Dec 25 01:08 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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jedbrooke ◴[07 Dec 25 02:49 UTC] No.46178725[source]▶
> Consumer electronics naming is very simple. Make a good product with a simple name. “iPhone”, “comma”, “Z Fold”. Then every year or two, add one to the number of that product. If it’s a small refresh, you can add a letter after the number. “2 3 3X 4” “4 4s 5 5s 6 …” “2 3 4 5 6 7” Why is this so hard for companies like HP?

Oh man I feel this every time there’s a games console launch. I still have no idea what the latest Xbox is called but Sony gets it right with “Playstation <N>”

Apple loses some points here since every macbook from like 2007 until 2020 was just called “Macbook pro” with no year officially in the name so you have to be really careful when eg looking at used listings for macbooks. But since the M1 it’s been good with M<1-5>

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1. linguae ◴[07 Dec 25 05:25 UTC] No.46179366[source]▶
On the flipside, there were the days of the Power Macintosh 6100, 7500, 8500, 9600, and other models. It’s very easy to look up different models using these names, and there was also logic to the naming scheme, but it was confusing for people new to Macs to figure out, and this was back in the 1990s when there were still large amounts of people in the developed world who never owned a personal computer.

Once Steve Jobs returned, he replaced the product numbering scheme with a quadrant: consumer desktop (iMac), consumer laptop (iBook), high-end desktop (Power Mac), and high-end laptop (PowerBook). The high-end models had a suffix (G3, G4, G5), but it got confusing with all the variants (e.g., Wallsteeet vs Lombard vs Pismo PowerBook G3, various revisions of Titanium and Aluminum PowerBook G4, etc.)

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2. zahlman ◴[07 Dec 25 12:38 UTC] No.46181281[source]▶
> On the flipside, there were the days of the Power Macintosh 6100, 7500, 8500, 9600, and other models. It’s very easy to look up different models using these names, and there was also logic to the naming scheme, but it was confusing for people new to Macs to figure out, and this was back in the 1990s when there were still large amounts of people in the developed world who never owned a personal computer.

Nokia model numbers (and "series" numbers, too) in the 00s were far worse.