New 'iPhone' Leak Comes Directly From Apple?

There’s a problem with the iPhone 8 that no one seems able to solve, but then it struck me: Apple AAPL -0.37% itself has spent the last few years quietly trying to tell us…

It all boils down to a very simple question: What is the name of the 2017 iPhone? If you follow leaks then you’ll know the hot favourite is ‘iPhone 8’ but other names to have been floated include the ‘iPhone X’, ‘iPhone Edition’ and even what would be the traditional successor: iPhone 7S.

And yet none of these make sense. iPhone 7S is set to be reserved for incremental iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus successors which are expected to be launched alongside a radically redesigned new iPhone flagship with a glass chassis, OLED display, on-screen fingerprint reader and wireless charging. iPhone 7S just doesn’t cut it.

Neither does iPhone 8. Why call a potentially groundbreaking new iPhone the ‘8’ when it’s the 10th anniversary of the original iPhone? Why also call it the iPhone Edition when ‘Edition’ is currently reserved for such a niche model of Apple Watch it has zero brand awareness.

So maybe iPhone X makes sense, it means ‘10’ after all? Also Apple famously has ‘macOS X’ - except it doesn’t. Apple just dropped the ‘X’ from the latest macOS release: it is simply called ‘macOS Sierra’. Were it looking for brand unity that would not have happened. So again, no deal.

But then the clues keep coming. When Apple announced the second generation Apple Watch what was it called? ‘Apple Watch’ (with a tiny ‘Series 2’ almost in brackets). With the MacBook Air on its way out, Apple decided its long term ultraportable successor would be called ‘MacBook’ - and when it was upgraded to its second generation the name was? MacBook. And earlier this week Apple ditched the iPad Air and the new entry in the line-up was called? Yep, iPad.

And of course there’s macOS which does retain a second moniker with each new version, but that’s also because of the continuous upgrading of software rather than the annual line-in-the-sand upgrades to hardware. And even so, the ‘X’ is gone.

So how do you reinvigorate a line with a new definitive model like, for example, an OLED sporting, glass chassis-based, fast charging, wireless charging, on-screen fingerprint reading iPhone? You’re ahead of me: you call it iPhone.

Apple

Of course the fly in the ointment here is Apple’s love of the term ‘Pro’ for its most premium products, so perhaps ‘iPhone Pro’ is possible. Then again it seems unlikely Apple wants to trawl the iPhone 7S/8/8S/9/9S path for much longer so a reset to iPhone in 2017 with the overhauled model would then allow for the introduction of a larger ‘iPhone Pro’ to complement it in 2018 and the numerical models can be slowly put out to pasture.

On paper it all makes sense: iPhone and iPhone Pro, iPad and iPad Pro, MacBook and MacBook Pro. Maybe there could even be some semblance of order to the maze that is Watch models if Apple chose to separate its two sizes into Watch and Watch Pro.

Needless to say, there’s every chance I could be wrong.

It could well be that hot favourite ‘iPhone 8’ will indeed be what Apple thinks is the best name to celebrate the 10th year of the iPhone. Doesn’t sound great though, does it? And if I am right? Well that’s only because Apple seems to have spent the last two years laying out a trail of breadcrumbs as it quietly strips numbers and extraneous subcategories from its products in a move back to basics.

Besides wouldn’t it be just like Apple to have enjoyed hiding this in plain sight the whole time…