As spotted by Pike’s Universum, Apple has dropped the “Late” from the current MacBook Pro’s full “AppleCare” name.
This may seem like a silly topic for a blog post, but it is a break with tradition, and I do love traditions.
In the PowerPC days, model names would be set by the processor speed or a new feature found in the product. For example, my college roommate had a PowerBook G4 (15-inch FW800) while I had a slightly-newer — and slightly-faster — PowerBook G4 (15-inch 1.5/1.33 GHz).
After the switch to Intel, Apple moved to a more sane naming scheme that used the time of the product’s release in the name, as you can see from this list of iMacs in Mactracker:
By removing the “Late” label, Apple’s broken that tradition a little bit. Since there weren’t any other MacBook Pros released in 2016, maybe Apple felt that the exact classification wasn’t needed.
Joe Rossignol at MacRumors brings this point up:
Apple has also yet to remove “Mid” from its “Mid 2014” MacBook Pro, despite the fact that it was the only MacBook Pro model released in 2014, so this appears to be a clear deviation from the company’s traditional nomenclature.
There you go.