By Dan Moren
September 30, 2022 3:27 PM PT
The Back Page: What’s in a name?
Okay, Apple, listen up. I’m calling you on the carpet.
Stop stealing my gig.
Oh, sure, play innocent. But I’ve been watching for you for years.
Look, it started innocently enough. Time Machine. I get it, it’s a pop culture trope. And the feature lets you go back in time and get your files. Plus, I have to admit, it’s saved my bacon more than a few times over the years so I’ll let it slide; after all, it’s not like you went the whole way and called it DMC DeLorean or TARDIS.
But then you couldn’t help yourself: you just kept going. Deep Fusion? Really? A16 Bionic? The Photonic Engine?
Is your marketing department just two people with a set of darts and a copy of the Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual?
I get it, I do. Naming is an important part of product development and not every product is going to be as instantly iconic as the Macintosh or the iPod or the iPhone 14 Pro Max with Super Retina XDR display. Sometimes you end up with a real stinker.
Frankly, you had a good thing going with the ‘i’. Those were the days, right? iPod, iPhone, iMac—stick ‘i’ in front of any old thing and Bob Mansfield was your uncle. Didn’t even have to spend that much time thinking about it: iDVD? iTunes? Wait, are there podcast and movies and TV shows in it too—never mind, ship it!
Next came your super-generic phase, where apparently you outsourced your naming convention to a toddler who was supremely pleased with their ability to identify simple objects: Pages. Numbers. Books. Music. (That toddler clearly didn’t know how hard it would be to Google a simple question about Apple software for years to come.)
But I’m asking you, please, for the love of Steve, leave the science-fiction jargon to the professional science-fiction authors. Like you haven’t already made it difficult enough for us hard-working writers? We painstakingly spend a two-hour brainstorming session that only looks like we’re blankly staring out the window at the pouring rain, racking our brains to come up with the perfect key piece of technology only to discover it’s instantly obsolete because you actually created it. But now you’re taking the hacky names that we come up with too? Enough is enough!
Unless, of course, you’re hiring. Because I’ve got a copy of Star Wars: The Essential Guide to Vehicles and Vessels, an itchy page-flipping finger, and a small child who will need to go to college some day.
[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His latest novel, the supernatural detective story All Souls Lost, is out now.]