“What’s in a name?” Shakespeare famously asked in his Romeo and Juliet. “That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet.”
Something happened recently that reminded me of these evergreen lines.
I was reading a newspaper when I came across this rather ludicrous report about the Delhi metro. To make matters strange, it also made me think about Apple (not the fruit) and I’m fairly certain that it’s not a connection you’d expect.
The article stated that the Delhi government has decided to rename several metro stations across the city, and the way it’s been executed is so striking that I can’t help but notice parallels with how Apple approaches naming conventions. Allow me to elaborate!
I mean sure, the Shakespeare logic works for an Elizabethan drama. But if we’re talking about a vast network of trains connecting a country’s national capital region, you’d think giving stations proper, not-confusing, and easy to remember names would be the bare minimum. Apparently not so!
Or better yet, if there exists a multi-trillion-dollar company that is always making some of the most advanced tech in the world—products that millions buy—you’d assume they have the brains to come up with names that are, at the very least, easily recognizable. But there again, you’d be wrong.
Let me illustrate my point by quoting some examples:
Apple’s pro-level laptop is called MacBook Pro (fair enough!) and their pro-level laptop chips are also named ‘Pro’ (M3 Pro, M4 Pro, and so on). So you’ll think if you are buying a MacBook Pro with a M5 Pro chip, you are getting the absolute Pro level system. Wrong! There are Max and Ultra chips which are better than Pro chips. So the MacBook Pro with M5 Max is better than MacBook Pro with M5 Pro. Now, if you are wondering why don’t they just call the chip M5 Pro Max? Well, they used the Pro Max name for an iPhone model! (Read that slowly, maybe you’ll get it.)
Sadly, the madness does not just stop here!
Someone explain to me this: if the iPhone Pro and iPhone Pro Max are just bigger and better versions of the standard iPhone, then why are the AirPods Max not some amped up version of the regular AirPods (the wireless earphones) but a new device altogether (they are headphones)?
All those resources, all that talent, and somehow the final output is a naming system so convoluted it looks like those multiple choice questions where all the responses seem like the correct answer. Somewhere in the Apple Park, a room full of some of the smartest people in the world signed off on this, and not one person thought, “Hey, maybe this is unnecessarily confusing?”
And just when you think no one can rival this level of tomfoolery, enter the State Names Authority—engaged in their own shenanigans and renaming 9 metro stations in Delhi (2 renamed and 7 modified, to be exact) in mind-boggling ways.
So now Pitampura becomes Madhuban Chowk, Prashant Vihar stretches into Uttari Pitampura–Prashant Vihar, Derawal Nagar turns into Nanak Pyau–Derawal Nagar, West Enclave upgrades itself to Mangolpur Kalan–West Enclave and the list goes on. They might as well throw a pincode in there!
It is completely baffling to me that there’s a whole department dedicated to this endeavour and this is what they approved.
However, at least with metro stations, you can blame geography, politics, history, the need for government employees to feel like they did some work without actually doing it—something.
What’s Apple’s excuse? They’re not constrained by anything except their own imagination, and somehow the best name that they’ve managed to come up with in recent times is Neo. Most others are some iterations of the mini, max, pro, ultra, plus, and a digit.
Shakespeare was right—names don’t change what something is. But they absolutely change how easily people can use it, find it, or understand it. That is where both the Apple team and the people who renamed the Delhi Metro stations seem to have lost the plot (first in my bloodline to write this sentence, or perhaps this is a first for the whole mankind).
So I think, if there were an Olympics for pure idiocy in naming things, Apple and the Delhi Metro renamers would be going head‑to‑head for gold and silver. Elon Musk might sneak in to grab the bronze.
