Apple iPhone fans may soon feel like their parents, who had to watch their baby grow up way too fast. The latest reports suggest the tech giant won’t stick to its old naming convention. The expected iOS 19 will instead be called iOS 26 to line up with the year following now. All your Apple products, from your iPad to your Mac to your Apple Watch, will all sport the new nomenclature and a blanket redesign. If all goes according to plan, next year’s update will be named iOS 27, and so on.
This new naming convention means that instead of iPadOS 19, we’ll instead have iPadOS 26. Rather than macOS 16, get ready for macOS 26. The Apple Vision Pro will take an enormous leap from visionOS 2 to visionOS 26. The reported name change stems from Bloomberg tech journalist Mark Gurman’s usual slate of anonymous sources. Apple’s big plan is to try and unify its user interface across all platforms. We should hear Apple try to explain its reasoning at WWDC 2025 set for June 9.
Gurman’s latest reports suggest Apple’s next UI will sport more circular bubble icons for various apps and desktops across Apple’s phones, Macs, and more. The idea, as suggested by recent reports, is to make the company’s entire ecosystem more cohesive for the average user. For customers who are already very used to the current user experience on each of Apple’s various product lines, the changes could prove confusing. We won’t know the full scale of these changes until we finally see what Tim Cook and company have been cooking. We’ll have to wait until the fall (usually September) before we see any hint of what this redesign means for the iPhone 17, a reportedly chunkier iPhone 17 Pro Max, and the too-light iPhone 17 Air.
The one enticing prospect to the software revamp is that Apple could finally create a more Mac-like experience for iPad. Apple’s tablets are still some of the best in the industry, but they’re terrible for multitasking. The latest iPad Air and iPad Pro models include redesigned Magic Keyboards sporting a full function row, but if Apple wants a full computer experience, it needs to work up a UI that allows for more freedom where you can place apps.
There’s a precedent for Apple’s new naming scheme. Samsung did the same thing with its Galaxy phones back in 2020, naming devices that align with the year that they’re released. We’re now on the Galaxy S25, with the Galaxy S26 expected to arrive this year. What makes Apple’s supposed decision more confusing is its reportedly moving the number ahead by one year. Gurman notes that this is similar to how carmakers name their cars—for example, a 2025 model would have 2026 in its name. It’s confusing if you’re not aware of this! It suggests the full scale of each OS update won’t arrive until a full six months after the company annually reveals its update plans. Apple normally launches its OS updates outside of beta around September.
Gurman also suggests we could see a new live-translation mode for AirPods along with Siri. As for those still-missing Apple Intelligence features, we may see Apple open up its platform to allow more third-party AI companies, including OpenAI and Anthropic, the makers of Claude. In any case, we’ll find out more in just a few weeks at WWDC.
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