Big Tech Hates Dyslexic People

I am excited to announce the new jPhone 20, to be released this August at a price of $749. The device sports a 5-megapixel camera, a 326 ppi multi-touch display, and compatibility with both Windows and Mac systems. This device will be sure to challenge your definition of what a modern phone is.

To the tech spec layman, the jPhone 20 might have sounded like any other modern smartphone. The jPhone 20 has identical specifications to the iPhone 4. The standard iPhone 15 has a 48-megapixel camera, 460 ppi screen, and compatibility with Windows and Mac (however minimal the former might be). What makes the jPhone confusing is the model number. That’s on purpose.

n+1 > n

When the first Xbox was released in late 2001, it was competing against Nintendo’s GameCube and Sony’s PlayStation 2. Microsoft sold about 24 million of the original Xbox and Sony sold 155 million PlayStation 2 units becoming the bestselling console of all time.

When it came around to the 7th generation of consoles, Microsoft needed to step up to take on Sony. When the second Xbox was released, Microsoft knew it would be on the shelf next to the PlayStation 3. Instead of naming it the Xbox 2, making it look inferior to the higher number Sony console, it was named the Xbox 360.

The consequences of setting this president continue to plague Xbox with the naming scheme becoming more and more confusing. The third console was named the Xbox One. The fourth was named the Xbox Series X/S which is extremely frustrating considering the Xbox One had variants called the Xbox One X/S. The inability to come up with a coherent naming scheme only becomes a bigger problem the more times they iterate on the console.

Meanwhile, PlayStation is still using the same naming scheme and simply adding one to each subsequent generation. Nintendo, targeting different segments, does not bother with numbering consoles and gives each a unique name.

P= V(x)+S+SKU+x

If what Microsoft did with the Xbox naming scheme was a misdemeanor, what CPU companies are doing with their names is a third-degree felony. Both AMD and Intel have had complicated and misleading CPU names for a long time and they both (perhaps intentionally) made them worse.

The convoluted naming of chipsets makes shopping for a CPU extremely frustrating. Not to mention when, walking through the aisles of Best Buy, everything is marketed as Core i7 or Core Ultra 5, giving no details on the generation or real-world performance. Consumers are unable to make educated decisions without proper research and end up dependent on a random employee.

If there is no solution to the naming scheme, the least sellers could do is provide common benchmarks results for machines to compare hardware capabilities across models.

Nobody Buys Android Phones

Naming something a lesser number does not have to be negative as long as the device’s feature set is properly marketed. There are many Google Pixel users despite the fact that their naming scheme puts them behind many other mobile phone brands.  

With even Apple releasing multiple variants of each iPhone now, the question must be asked: Have naming schemes and segmentation gone too far?