iPhone 17 unlikely to be part of Apple’s rebrand this year

Apple is apparently going to announce a rebranding of its operating systems at this year’s WWDC (Worldwide Developers Conference) event in June. However, industry insider Mark Gurman shares in his newsletter Power On that the company is highly unlikely to rename the iPhone 17 as well.

Apple’s operating systems — including iOS, macOS, iPadOS, and visionOS — will be numbered after current years from now on. To be precise, the operating systems will carry the number of the coming year, similar to how car manufacturers operate.

This, Gurman notes, is probably to give Apple more wiggle room for small software updates every now and then. Also, from a purely marketing perspective, this will make the company’s software sound more futuristic.

But the iPhone 17, which will be coming out later this year, is unlikely to be renamed to the iPhone 26. Samsung has done that already with its Galaxy phones when it jumped straight to the Galaxy S20 series for 2020.

Gurman believes that consumers are a lot more conscious of the iPhone naming convention, and that this change would be too jarring. Secondly, Apple wouldn’t want its phone names to be tied to years because then an older iPhone would feel even more outdated. It’s a game of the subconscious and there might be some truth to it, in my opinion.