Apple Copies Microsoft

We're familiar with the story behind Windows, and how Microsoft created Windows to compete with Apple's Macintosh. (And tech-savvy folks know how Apple copied the Xerox Star to make the Macintosh -- but that's not important here.)

Apple has just recently copied Microsoft.

In a small way.

They did it with the numbering scheme for iPhones. Apple released two iPhones this year, the iPhone 8 and the iPhone X (which Apple insists is pronounced "ten").

There is no iPhone 9.

So what does this have to do with Microsoft?

Back in 2015, Microsoft released Windows 10. It was the successor to Windows 8 (or Windows 8.1, if you want to be picky).

There is no Windows 9.

There was Windows 95 and Windows 98, collectively referred to as "Windows 9x". Some software identified those versions with the test

windowsVersion.startswith("9")

which works for Windows 95 and Windows 98 -- and probably doesn't do what you want on an imaginary Windows 9 operating system. So "Windows 10" came to be.

Apple, of course, never had an "iPhone 95" or an "iPhone 98", so they didn't have the same problem as Microsoft. They picked "iPhone X" to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the iPhone.

Did they realize that they were following Microsoft's lead? Perhaps. Perhaps not.

I'm not concerned that Apple is going to follow Microsoft in other matters.

But I do find it amusing.