Apple is about to launch one of its biggest rebrands ever, report claims

Apple is about to rename all of its operating systems, according to a report.

In what would mark the biggest rebrand in the history of Apple's software, the company will simply refer to all of its operating systems by year.

Apple will name them after the year to come, so that this year's operating systems will be iOS 26 and MacOS 26, for instance, according to the Bloomberg report.

Each of Apple's operating systems will get the change, bringing them all in line with each other. As such, Apple will have iPadOS 26, WatchOS 26, tvOS 26 and VisionOS 26, in addition to the iPhone and Mac operating systems.

Until now, most of Apple's operating systems have simply been known by a number that references how many major versions there have been since the original release. The latest iPhone operating system is iOS 18, for instance, while the two-year-old Vision Pro headset runs VisionOS 2.

In practice, Apple has in recent years released those operating system updates in a dependable annual cycle that means the number has increased each year. But it has sometimes made it difficult to know exactly when a given operating system was released, or what number is the most current.

Changing the naming of the various operating systems is presumably intended to clear up that confusion as well as bring the different software in line with each other.

Apple is expected to announce the change at its upcoming Worldwide Developers Conference, the annual event at which it also shows off those new updates to its operating systems.

This year, the updates are expected to be as radical and wide-ranging as the new naming. Rumours have suggested that Apple will bring a dramatic visual change to iOS and potentially other operating systems too, inspired by the more transparent and glassy look of the Vision Pro headset.

MacOS is the only one of Apple's operating systems to have had its branding changed before. Apple released Mac OS X 10.0 in 2001, and gave the versions that followed both numbers and names that initially were big cats and then changed to California regions and landmarks.

That has led to a complicated naming system for the Mac operating system. The most recent version, for instance, is called MacOS Seqouia and is version 15.