So for the remainder of the year it will be telling us we are upgrading to 26 even though it’s a different upgrade each time. I guess that works. Anyone have ideas on why they changed to doing it this way? Did it solve some problem they had been having? I can see no logic behind it.
Current Apple OS versions, which have relatively similar functionality: Mac OS 26, iPadOS 26, iOS 26, tvOS 26, VisionOS 26, WatchOS 26.
Previous Apple OS versions, which also have relatively similar functionality: Mac OS 15, iPadOS 18, iOS 18, tvOS 18, VisionOS 2, WatchOS 11.
Hopefully the logic makes sense now.
How'd we get to this point?
Mac OS goes all the way back to 1.0 in 1984, but essentially became an entirely new OS with the release of Mac OS X ("Ten") in 2001, so then it went to 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, all the way up through 10.15 before they finally turned it up to 11 and started incrementing in whole integers again.
iOS started with the iPhone in 2006, running what Jobs called "a special version of MacOS X". It was called iPhoneOS until after the iPad came out, and it has incremented major versions in whole integers on a mostly-annual schedule.
The iPad came out in 2010 originally ran iPhoneOS 3.2; it was updated to iOS 4.2 a few months later and both the phone and iPad ran iOS for a long time. Eventually, Apple recognized that there were things the iPad could do differently and better than just being a big phone, and split them up so there's now iPadOS. Since it had already been running iOS, they didn't start it over at 1, they started at iPadOS 13. iOS did not go back to being iPhoneOS.
tvOS was based on iOS as well, but didn't really have a name at first - It was just "Apple TV Software" and the version. 1.0-3.0 ran on the original AppleTV that was a fair bit larger than today's AppleTV boxes and had a pretty big spinny hard drive in it for local storage. When the 2nd gen AppleTV came out that was more streaming-oriented and had no hard drive, 4.0 software ran on it and dropped support for the 1st-gen boxes. The last version was 7. To emphasize that it was based on tvOS, they named it tvOS and synced up the version number with the iOS it was based on, which was 9 at the time, so there was never a version 8.
watchOS came out with the Apple Watch, and despite being based on iOS started with version 1 and incremented by integers until this year.
And finally, visionOS did the same, coming out as version 1 when the Apple Vision Pro shipped and incrementing by integers.
At least there's always been some rhyme or reason to it from Apple...
