Apple TV has rebranded into a simpler name, dropping the ‘+’ icon, but that homogeny has led to even more confusion across similarly named hardware.
It looks like Apple’s team is on a hot streak of brand identity refreshing lately. A month ago, Apple removed the «Plus» iPhone from its portfolio and substituted it with an Air model. A few months prior to that, every major operating system with a numerical identifier was uniformly updated to version 26. The next in line for the branding is the company’s streaming TV platform: Apple TV+ is no more, and is being replaced by Apple TV. Why did Apple make the move?
There’s no official explanation, but it seems there wasn’t any deeply philosophical or commercially critical reason behind it. Apparently, it was simply because the user base colloquially referred to the entire platform as simply Apple TV, without the «Plus.» Apparently, that’s what pushed the company to get rid of the «+» from the name. Apple was clearly not aiming for branding consistency here, it’s just that Apple didn’t want a «Plus» for the TV platform, even though it still lingers for services such as News+, Fitness+, and iCloud+.
