Why are the model names of TVs and other home tech so cryptic?
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Yep, it was all gibberish when I started at my job selling TV’s. Now I can speak in code to the warehouse and they know exactly what I want haha
Consider the alternative: if they all had pronounceable names, first there’s too many products to each have a unique pronounceable name which is also not a whole sentence long. Second, marketing names are such BS that it would be impossible to understand how different products relate to each other. A/b/c you know how they compare; versus Awesome/Superior/Amazing which one is bigger?
A lot of people have explained what *model numbers* mean, but you asked about names. Product names are mostly a marketing thing, and one of the reasons marketers make up words to name products is that they’re trying to avoid any preconceptions you might have that associate with a word. For instance, if Sony comes out with a new TV and they call it the “Sony Tesla 4k”, then there’s a whole host of positive and negative associations you have with that word – maybe you think of electrical pioneer Nikolai Tesla, or maybe you think of Elon Musk instead and now Sony’s in the position of either selling you a TV (because you like Musk) or not selling you a TV (because you hate Musk) based on nothing that has anything to do with the TV itself, it just has to do with the last thing you heard on the news about Elon Musk. (Maybe you think this is ridiculous and that you’re too smart to act like that, but sales of Corona beer were down 40% in 2020 because of negative associations coming from the media salience of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus so it’s actually a real effect.)
They don’t want that, so they try to make up new words that have less specific connotations and just sound nice and aren’t likely to wind up associated with negative events beyond the company’s control. Words like “Bravia”, which maybe has connotations of bravery and courage (good things), or makes you think of people saying “bravo!” in praise at how good the TV is. Or they can do commercials where they just tell you what their made-up word means and how you should think and feel about it; Volkswagen did a whole bunch of these in the 90’s to make us think that “farfenhugen” was a real word.
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The fun part is when they have retailer-specific names for the exact same product, just so you can’t use the “we will match any competitors advertised price” promotions. “Oh no, we can’t price match this, because if you look closely, even though the product is exactly the same in every way, the model number has a W for walmart here vs the one with an A for Amazon.”
Other folks here have given you the why but I can tell you why so many are virtually identical with different models:
Top reason is to stop price matchers. Companies are always offering a price match on stuff but because it’s an ever so slightly different model, they can say no despite it being the same product.
It’s like a vin number on a vehicle so once you know how to cipher the code you can know all the options without having to list them all out
Good answers here, but taking it back to ELI5, it’s because new technology is created so fast that no one had to figure out this problem before. When it was slow to create new technology, the items had pretty names for that one item. They would then give new names to new items. They eventually started to add “versions” to those items so they didn’t have to come up with new names.
Those version names were all over the place. Some starting with 1, 2, 3…then 1.0, 1.1, 1.2. Then some of them started using the year of the release (ex Windows 98, 2000). Then some of them started using descriptors in the model name to piece together all of the information that makes that model unique. This became popular when companies would release a dozen versions of a dozen products with a dozen individual options for each.
This is where /u/ApotheounX comes in…where each company comes up with a set of characters to represent the specifics about that product. Where it was made, for whom, with what features, when created, and more. Because there is no universal standard, every company comes up with new model naming criteria, depending upon the item, and the number of variants released, and in what timeframe.
Also helps to determine warranties. Models are built like cars for certain time-frame so you always know if it’s under warranty or not even if you buy it secondhand.
Mostly so that the manufacturers can sell slightly different models to different retailers so there’s no direct competition
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