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Robo
Formerly Roboman, still
awesome
 
Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Portland, OR
 
2012-03-07, 17:47

Quote:
Originally Posted by Xaqtly View Post
I can't help but think Steve would have throttled somebody for calling it "The New iPad". There's a reason you use numbers in your naming scheme. It's a terrible, terrible name. A year from now is it going to be "the new iPad 2"? Or "The new new iPad"? And then what will this one be, "The Old New iPad"?

Honestly I had hoped the Apple folks sans Jobs were competent enough to avoid this kind of ridiculousness. I was wrong! The iPad itself looks awesome. The name is just terrible.
This sort of naming isn't new for Apple, though. The iMac G4 was known as just "The new iMac" at launch. Every new iPod has just been known as the new iPod or iPod touch or iPod nano. They've never put numbers in those names. So I doubt Steve disapproved.

The addition of model numbers to product names is actually a fairly recent phenomenon for Apple, starting when Apple unexpectedly added "3G" to the name of the iPhone 3G. Which was actually the second iPhone, so they had to call the third iPhone the 3G...S. And then they had the iPhone 4, which made sense, but then they had the iPhone 4S, so we're either going to have a situation where the sixth iPhone is called the iPhone 5, or (more likely) they'll drop the number and just call it "The new iPhone."

Putting the model number in a name can get messy — it can lengthen the communicative name of the product and complicate things and paint you into a corner. People have a limited tolerance for numbers and abbreviations, and the iPad is already full of them — A5X! 4G! LTE! 1080p! — that we don't need any more, like "iPad 2S" or "iPad HD." It's better to just let the communicative name of the product be "iPad" — that's what matters — and let people know about the "newness" through advertising.

What worries me more is this weird tendency to see any change at all in Apple as Apple falling apart and making dumb mistakes since Steve's passing, even though in this instance the change isn't new and is really just aligning the iPad with all of Apple's other (non-iPhone) products. I'm not trying to call you out on it specifically, I've just seen it from several places, and it's weird, like it's considered that any change from Steve's Alleged Intention is automatically bad. Apple will continue to change, and that's good, because this is technology, and you either change or die.

and i guess i've known it all along / the truth is, you have to be soft to be strong
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