XR, XS, XS Max… The complicated game of Apple figures and letters |igeneration

15 days after the announcement of the iPhone XR, XS and XS Max, did you finally take the fold of these new names?"10", "x", "xs" or "xs" ...?Apple did not facilitate the task, regrets Ken Segall, even if the man of advertisement who worked for a long time for Jobs and his team, finds some reasons for satisfaction with this vintage 2018.

In a post he returns to this evolution of the matrices and concludes with a critical look at the advertising which accompanied the XS.

Last year, he recalls, we had 8, 8 Plus, X and again of the "two numbers, a Roman number, a pair of letters and a magic jump between 8 and 10.Or rather, in Apple's language, between 8 and x ".

There is better this year since all the new iPhone are finally stored under a single pavilion, that of a "x".As for the SE for which Segall has only bad things to say (compared to its name), it has disappeared.

However, it remains prohibited before the use again of the "S" in this range.This strengthens the feeling that this is a simple iteration of the previous range when beautiful innovations appeared on the iPhone "S", as Siri, Touch ID or prowess like the 64 bits with the A7 ofiPhone 5S.Or as this year with the iPhone XS Max which sees an unprecedented format arriving at Apple:

Follows the question about the "x" or the "10", which is not really one since Apple has always been very clear on this point.It is "10", at the Roman, but necessarily it is not obvious for the majority.It is enough to listen to around you to see it and even regulars (at MacG ...) sometimes go away:

And then there is the question of the why of this "R" in "iPhone XR" which does not refer to anything explicit (otherwise perhaps it precedes the "S" in the alphabet, as the XR precedes theXS in range levels, editor's note).

Another debate: should we write "XS" or "XS"?There is one answer contrary to what Segall suggests, but it is not obvious.

Go here to the Apple site and it is written in tiny, go there and it is in capital letters, while there it is obviously a tiny but if you take a look at the HTML code of the page, all the occurrencesof "xs" are actually made with an "s" in "small capital".

Except that your browser does not know how to display it as Apple the fact with in its marketing visuals.It is therefore "s" in a capital letter written in small and not otherwise and the last word will return to Tim Cook who tweets "XS".But congratulations for confusion.

Finally, the advertiser today retired has some regrets on the way in recent years the iPhone are presented, through the clip which still serves as an introduction to a range:

Not really humor, no human, no freshness.He invites you to compare the first advertising of the iPhone XS with that of the last Galaxy Note9 to illustrate his point.It is true that by playing both at the same time, it feels like being in two universes certainly different but not so distant.

We can retort this observation that over the next 12 months, other pubs will most certainly stage these iPhone in a lighter way, especially the colorful range of the XR [MàJ: it happened fasterWhat is planned: IPhone XS/XS Max ad: everything we love, in much larger].

A question to conclude: What does the future reserve for the name of the 2019 range?A priori it is the end of the simple numbers now that the "X" has imposed itself: "One day we would have ended up having an iPhone 23s".Perhaps we will have next year iPhone X2 and the following year of iPhone X2S?(and we don't even talk about "max" versions).