Gurman: Apple to Rebrand OS Versions with Year Numbers

Bloomberg analyst Mark Gurman reports that Apple will drop version numbers iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, tvOS, and visionOS and move to year numbers instead.

Under the new scheme, the next version of each of these product lines will thus use a 26, for 2026 to indicate the version number. So, iOS 19 will become iOS 2026 and macOS 16 will become macOS 2026.

If that sounds familiar, it may be because Microsoft briefly did the same thing. Granted, this was 30 years ago, starting with Windows 95 and Office 95. But it quickly discovered that users didn’t like the scheme because most of its platforms were not updated every year. So customers in 1997 would think that they didn’t have the latest version if they were still using Windows 95.

Apple shouldn’t have that problem, as it does update its platforms every year. And this system will at least give the platform versions some symmetry, which is fine. (Microsoft did that too, in the mid-1990s, with Office. Moving on.)

Gurman says that Apple will announce the change at its WWDC 2025 conference later this month. This change will be accompanied by the “Solarium” user interface change that will also be applied across these platforms, providing some consistency between each. That it mirrors what Samsung does with its Galaxy S smartphones is interesting. Usually, the copying goes in the other direction.