Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg:

Apple Inc. is planning the most sweeping change yet to its operating system names, part of a software overhaul that extends to all its devices.

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.

I’m conflicted about how I feel on this, and I’ve taken a few days to think it through. (I did, however, have some fun on social media.) Apple’s OS versioning has been a mess for a while: the numbers aren’t organized by year or in sync with each other. macOS versioning has arguably been even worse because Apple switched from saving big-number releases (9, 10, 11) for massive once-in-a-decade updates to making them the standard yearly increment. macOS versions used to be 10.x, but since macOS 11 Big Sur, they’ve jumped from 11 to 12 and so on each year. This was good for consistency because it brought the versioning in line with iOS — major numbers (11, 12, 13) for yearly updates, dot numbers (11.2, 12.5, 13.4) for patches — but it meant macOS had to start at 11 when iOS was at 14.

watchOS and visionOS versioning have always fallen behind iOS/iPadOS because they came after the iPhone’s introduction, which makes sense, but tvOS also came after the iPhone, and it has the same number as iOS. There’s no rhythm or rhyme to these numbers, and it’s made it hard to keep track of all of Apple’s latest software and hardware. There’s only one normality to the numbers: that the A-series processor names and iOS versions remain consistent. The A18 is the latest A-series chip, and when the next version of iOS comes out, it’ll be the A19. But if Gurman is to be believed — and he should be — the next iOS version won’t be iOS 19. I think it’ll be pretty funny to jump from visionOS 2 to visionOS 26, though, but it’ll add some consistency.

One thing I don’t understand, though, is why “26” was chosen as the number. The software comes out in 2025, not 2026. The entire Threads platform came after me for my spitballing, going as far as to call me an engagement baiter for some reason, but I stand by this. Car manufacturers have always named their model years a year ahead — a car released in 2025 is usually named the 2026 model — but Apple isn’t a car dealer. When it releases new MacBook Pros in the fall, they’ll be the 2025 models, not the 2026 ones, even though there will only be a few months left in the year. Apple, whenever it omits model-specific numbers like the iPhone or the Apple Watch, always names its products based on the year they were announced. There are no exceptions to this rule.

I don’t care if iOS 26 will only be available for four months in 2025 — it was announced and released in 2025 as this year’s version of the software. Rest assured, there will be yet another version of iOS next year, and that should have next year’s version number. What is the point of settling on a year-based version number if it doesn’t even align with the current calendar year? I don’t think this is an engineer-oriented way of looking at it at all — it just makes sense alongside Apple’s other year-based names. The 2019 Mac Pro was announced in June 2019 and released in December of the same year, but it’s not called the 2020 Mac Pro. That would be confusing. Apple isn’t a car dealer.

Another quibble some have had is with the seeming omission of a comma before “26,” indicating that the “20” was sliced off the beginning of the year. While we’re at it, why don’t we name the next iOS version “iOS AD 2026” just to make sure people don’t get it confused with 2026 BC? It’s an iOS version number, not a calendar. We’re well into the 2000s for people to know what “26” means.