This is going to sound like a really weird and irrelevant nitpick, but I dislike how they changed the version numbers to be year+1. I like that they all unified and have a relationship to the current year, but we're not buying cars. We're getting operating systems and not being confused about chronology is pretty important for bug tracking or other minutiae. Plus, the Mac lineup use(d) the year of release. Why move away from it? Is it really necessary to market and sell an operating system like it's a car or the latest Microsoft Office suite?
They’re telling you the year where the new OS will be stable enough that it’s a good idea to upgrade (joke’s on them, I still haven’t “upgraded” to Tahoe…)
TBH Tahoe feels like an especially buggy .0 still. I'm updating as soon as my laptop shows it as available in the hopes that it'll feel closer to a .1 than what Tahoe is.
From a psychological standpoint, maybe customers thinking 26 is old on their brand new device in 3 months isn't exactly good. People might start expecting 27 in 3 months when actually 27 is going to be around for most of the year.
It's not year+1, it's the year that most overlaps with that OS being the latest. 27 will be the latest OS for ~9 months of 2027 and only ~3 of 2026.
I also don't know why this would be considered more confusing for chronology. The year is in the name, whereas it was previously at best, years since version 1, or something more confusing in the case of macOS. I couldn't keep track of all the latest OS versions before, now we will be able to going forward.
They do yearly major releases in September for all their OSes. They are directly tied to the year.
But Ubuntu sticks to the year and month the OS was released. I think OP was complaining about MacOS using year+1 as the version, even though the OS is being released in the current year.
I personally find Ubuntu's versioning to be the easiest to understand because you know when this Ubuntu version was released. It would be very annoying if they called Ubuntu 26.10 Ubuntu 27, though.
As someone who has been doing iOS programming for ~16 years I'm glad they did something. Nothing better than running Xcode 16, on macOS 15, to do iOS 18 work. Unless, of course, you also have watchOS 11 work too.
This feels like the kind of thing where the mismatching version numbers bugged some influential people internally. But I suppose a practical application could be recommending matching versions if customers run into issues since they are trying to integrate devices more.
