Why the hell did Apple decide to call the iPhone operating system ‘iPhone OS’? I realize this question sounds a bit (ok, more than a bit) rhetorical, but seriously….it’s a terrible name. When the original iPhone was unveiled in 2007, Jobs made a point to mention that “iPhone runs OSX“.

I tend to think that, even in 2007, Apple had bigger ambitions for iPhone OS than just the iPhone. The iPad may have only been a concept sketch or IRAD project at that point (if it existed at all). But still, the idea of an embedded version of OSX has a lot of potential, and I’m pretty sure they knew that.

The name has already created some confusion in the development world with the release of the iPad. OGRE, for example, was ported to the iPhone recently, so naturally all the configuration flags and other variables reference the iPhone specifically (‘OGRE_BUILD_PLATFORM_IPHONE’, for example). But the same port works perfectly fine on the iPad because the OS (and indeed, even the hardware architecture) is identical.

This may seem like a small gripe. “What’s in a name?”, one might say. I consider it a big deal only because platforms are a difficult thing to re-brand once a name takes root. Linux is still Linux. Windows is still Windows. OSX is a strong plaform, and the name itself is easy enough to spin off. Would ‘OSX Embedded’ have been so bad? Apple already has two device classes using iPhone OS, who knows how many more are to come. It seems odd to chain an entire software platform to the name of the original product it was launched with.