Apple is probably the most infamous for giving product names to literally everything. From "Liquid Retina" to brand their curved display edges to "ProMotion" to describe their variable refresh rate displays (rather, just the ones that go over 60Hz, as the Apple Watch is not branded as such), Apple seems to have a name for everything and never calls the features what they actually are. The reason here is honestly really simple: people don't care. People aren't going to go around talking about Apple's antialiasing skills with the round corners of their devices, but people will talk about the Liquid Retina display.

Where did This Actually Come From?

So Apple's done this forever, but one of the best examples I can give you is the A10 chip. This was the first year that Apple introduced their version of the big.LITTLE core design (notably Apple's implementation was different from the standard ARM implementation). With this new core design, Apple decided to add the "Fusion" to the name of the chip since it fused two high-powered cores and two low-powered cores together (the cores could not fire simultaneously like the standard big.LITTLE implementation and presented as a dual-core chip to the system). Once Apple made this change to the branding, suddenly everyone was talking about the chip. It had a cool name, and that name highlighted the differences in the new chip as well. It was something simpler to explain than "well it's got two sets of dual-cores, one higher performing and two higher efficiency cores, but they don't all work at the same time" so people were talking about it more. The next year, Apple introduced the Neural Engine on the A11 and called it the A11 Bionic and the "Bionic" name stuck around for a while.

Why Does Apple Do This?

We know of a ton of examples of Apple doing this and I've listed them above, but I'll talk about perhaps their most recent example: Camera Control. With names like this, theres an important psychological factor to it. A lot of people go "why not just call it the camera button" since that's physically what it is, but that's not all it does. The reason the marketing team cares so much about not calling it a button is that it does more than that. It's not just a button, it's also a touchpad and a force sensor. It has multiple levels to the whole thing.

Wrap-Up

Basically, when it comes to stuff like this, Apple wants to be able to capture more in the brand name. People talked more about the A10 Fusion chip more than they did the previous chips, and people continued to talk about the Bionic chips from then on. It makes what's going on more understandable for the average person and it gives some insight to how Apple thinks the product should be used. And if your argument is that Apple should stop giving stupid names to these things: you're reading an article about Apple's product names. They won. It's one of those cases where "any publicity is good publicity" actually holds true. Complain all you want about the "Camera Control" name, at least you're talking about it and what it can do. I can be reached on Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, or via Email.