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Every year, Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference gives us a first look at what's coming next to the company's many operating systems. But missing from today's keynote, apart from a single graphic listing all current Apple OSes next to a big "27," was any mention of tvOS. The whole structure of this year's WWDC was different, […]

Ask almost any engineer what "Wi-Fi" stands for and you'll hear the same answer: "Wireless Fidelity." It is one of the most repeated facts in tech, it appears in textbooks and product manuals, and it is wrong. Wi-Fi does not stand for Wireless Fidelity. In fact, it does not stand for anything at all. A name invented by a branding agency In 1999, the industry group then known as the Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance — today the Wi-Fi Alliance — had a problem. The wireless networking standard it was promoting carried the memorable name "IEEE 802.11b Direct Sequence." That string is precise, but no consumer was ever going to ask a store clerk for an 802.11b router. The technology needed a brand. So the alliance hired Interbrand, the same firm behind names like Prozac and the Compaq brand, to invent something catchy. Interbrand returned with a shortlist of about ten candidates, and the group chose "Wi-Fi." Phil Belanger, a founding member of the alliance, has been blunt about it for years: the name has no expanded meaning. It was picked because it was short, easy to say, and rhymed with "Hi-Fi," a term consumers already associated with high-quality audio gear. So where did "Wireless Fidelity" come from? The myth has a real origin. Some board members were uncomfortable shipping a brand name that "meant nothing," so the alliance briefly bolted on the tagline "The Standard for Wireless Fidelity." It was a backronym — two words reverse-engineered to fit the syllables "Wi" and "Fi" after the fact. The phrase was clumsy, it never described the technology accurately, and once the alliance brought on more marketing-savvy members it was quietly dropped. The tagline disappeared; the misconception it planted did not. Why this matters if you build connected things This is a fun piece of trivia, but it points at something real for anyone doing IoT and embedded development . The protocols we treat as immovable technical bedrock are often shaped as much by branding, licensing,

Apple's focus on efficiency and performance improvements is good news for older iPhones.

"It is actually challenging how you measure [Mach] from space."