{"id":47894,"date":"2025-05-29T17:26:43","date_gmt":"2025-05-29T21:26:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=47894"},"modified":"2025-07-30T10:25:08","modified_gmt":"2025-07-30T14:25:08","slug":"apple-operating-system-version-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2025\/05\/29\/apple-operating-system-version-years\/","title":{"rendered":"Apple Operating System Version Years"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mark Gurman<\/a> (MacRumors<\/a>, Hacker News<\/a>, Slashdot<\/a>):<\/p>\n

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Apple will announce its biggest ever software rebrand at WWDC, tied to operating system redesigns. Apple is moving from version numbers to years (like Windows in the 90s). The new OSs: iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS 26, visionOS 26, tvOS 26, watchOS 26.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Adam Engst<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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The OS 26 updates are likely to be released toward the end of 2025, so these new version numbers are looking ahead to next year.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

Given Apple’s consistency in releasing major operating system versions every year since 2007 for iOS and 2012 for macOS, I doubt we will find ourselves in a situation where a major version remains current beyond its designated year. While it may not immediately benefit those of us who regularly need to reference older versions of Apple’s operating systems, the annual numbering will gradually simplify locating each subsequent upgrade on the overall timeline.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

If you’re curious, as I was, here’s how we got to where we are now[…]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Matt Ronge<\/a>:<\/p>\n

This makes sense to do with the iPhone naming as well.<\/p>

The iPhone names are incredibly confusing and it’s hard to know what year a model came out.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

And people get confused about the iOS version number vs. the iPhone model number, though I’m not sure whether this change makes that any better.<\/p>\n\n

John Gruber<\/a> (Mastodon<\/a>):<\/p>\n

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Presuming Gurman is right, this is going to seem really weird at first, and then very quickly seem very natural.<\/p>\n\n

One of the true oddities of Apple’s OS version numbering is that because they stuck with “10” as the leading digit of MacOS’s version numbering from Mac OS X 10.0 “Cheetah” (2001) through MacOS 10.15 “Catalina” (2019), before finally turning the dial to 11 with MacOS 11 “Big Sur” (2020), a casual observer would presume that iOS (currently at 18.5) is older than MacOS (currently at 15.5) when in fact it’s the other way around.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Tom Harrington<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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Will Apple skip ahead to Xcode 26 is what I want to know.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And iWork and iLife?<\/p>\n\n

M.G. Siegler<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Look, Apple has done the whole naming scheme based on years before, notably with the old iLife<\/a> suite of products. They also stopped doing it a dozen years ago. Because it’s dumb. It has long been dumb for the sports videogame franchises that popularized the notion and it’s worse for software, because there aren’t actually fixed “seasons” for software. Apple has sort of forced their teams into shipping that way, but increasingly, that’s not the case. Case in point: presumably a lot of ‘iOS 26’ features are going to ship in 2025, with some shipping in 2026. So I guess ‘iOS 26’ is like an NBA season, split between two calendar years. But Apple isn’t calling it ‘iOS 25\/26’, they’re calling it ‘iOS 26’.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Brian Webster<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Pick whatever number you want, just as long as I don’t have to deal with this fucking Sonoma Sequoia bullshit anymore.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Regular users get confused because the two recent “S” versions were adjacent. Yet another reason Apple should have done a Snow\/Mountain\/High Sonoma release.<\/p>\n\n

Christina Warren<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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look, windows 95, windows 98, and windows 2000 were all great names and great OSes. something about macOS 26 feels wrong tho. bring back the big cat names, cowards!<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Joe Rossignol<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The rumor has since been corroborated by AppleInsider<\/em>’s Marko Zivkovic<\/a>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Marko Zivkovic<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Individuals familiar with Apple’s internal operating system variants and pre-production builds of macOS 26 suggest Apple could drop support for multiple older, Intel-based Macs. […] Notably absent from this list are the 2018 MacBook Pro models, the 2020 Intel MacBook Air, the 2017 iMac Pro, and the 2018 Mac mini.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Matt Birchler<\/a>:<\/p>\n

I couldn’t resist a little snark, though, as this is a rare case of Apple adopting something Samsung has been doing for years. Samsung’s Galaxy S lineup<\/a> was numbered 1, 2, 3, 4…until the Galaxy S10 in 2019. Then the next phone was the Galaxy S20, indicating it was the phone released in 2020, and they’ve iterated on that system since then.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Craig Hockenberry<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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I have a sneaking suspicion that the “26” is only for marketing, much like Sequoia\/Ventura\/Sonoma are today, except across all platforms.<\/p>\n

We’ll still be doing availability and other version checks against iOS 19.0, macOS 16.0, etc.<\/p>\n

And it will be hell.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Steve Troughton-Smith<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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Hate to break it to you, but the OS version numbers will probably stay the same in the APIs even if the marketing names change, or else everything might break in weird ways 😅 So we’ll likely still have to keep track of versioning per platform.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Ezekiel Elin<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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I would counter that they did this for macOS a few years ago including a compatibility layer for the old format.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Scott<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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The biggest issue with the rumored (absolutely moronic) decision by Apple to name OSes by year isn’t the number jump… it’s that the decision cements the 1-year dev cycle, which has proven to be a MASSIVE failure for Apple software quality.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Simon B. Støvring<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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Everyone: Your yearly release cycle is making your platform increasingly lag behind.<\/p>\n

Apple: Doubles down on a yearly release cycle with a year-based naming scheme.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Previously:<\/p>\n