Breaking Conventions

Disclaimer: The following rant is long and pointless. If you decide to read it, you're likely to learn a few interesting things but you're unlikely to learn anything useful. Overall, it will probably be a waste of your time. If you're busy and have important things to do, turn back now, but if you're looking to kill some time and you've got nothing better to do, please proceed. You've been warned.

I'm a big fan of naming conventions. BMW used to have a good thing going (almost) but those days are long gone. BMW's naming convention for its passenger cars was as follows XYYz. Where X was the model designation, YY was the engine displacement, and z designated the type of engine.

For example, a BMW 330i was a 3-series with a 3.0 liter gasoline engine (the i was for fuel-injection), a 750i was a 7-series with a 5.0 liter gas engine and a 328d was a 3-series with a 2.8 liter diesel engine.

The beauty and simplicity of this naming convention was almost self evident. They would also occasionally add additional modifiers but those made sense too. The 760iL was a 7-series with a 6.0 liter gasoline engine and and extended wheelbase (L for Long). The 330xi was a 3 series with a 3.0 liter gasoline engine and X-drive (BMW's all wheel drive system.)

Even in the glory days there were divergences from the naming convention though. One early exception was the BMW 540i. Based on the convention above, you'd expect it to be a 5-series with a 4.0 liter gasoline engine. Nope. It had a 4.4 liter engine. That one always used to bug me. I can only assume that they didn't name it the 544i to avoid confusion with other cars like Porsche's 944.

There was another aspect of the naming convention that wasn't quite right. The 5 and 7 series had 4 doors while the 6 and 8 series had 2 doors. Odd number meant 4 doors, even number meant 2 doors. (Note: We'll leave out discussion of the 1 and 2 series since that further complicates matters and they weren't sold in the U.S. at the time.)

The 3 series was a weird exception since it came in both 2 and 4 door variants but BMW came tantalizingly close to fixing this issue when they discontinued 2 door variants of the 3 series and introduced the 2 door 4-series. Now we had 4 door cars (3,5, and 7-series) and 2 door cars (4,6, and 8-series).

This didn't last long before BMW messed it up again by releasing a 4 door variant of the 4-series putting them right back at square one.

With ever smaller, more powerful engines being put into cars, BMW has all but abandoned their naming convention these days.

Just as I was coming to terms with the complete write-off of this elegant naming scheme, the engineers over at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the Wi-Fi alliance announced a new naming convention that gave me hope for the world.

Since its introduction in 1997, Wi-Fi has had a naming convention that only an engineer could love. The Wi-Fi standard is known as IEEE 802.11, an already over-technical designation. To make matters worse, engineers append one or more letters to the end of the designation to differentiate the various iterations of the standard.

The first two widespread versions were aptly named IEEE 802.11a and IEEE 802.11b. From there things went off the rails. You see, the engineers are constantly refining the standards internally but most of those iterations never get implemented so the 3rd version was not 802.11c as you might expect but 802.11g.

After g came 802.11n and things get really fun because they ran out of letters in the alphabet and rolled over to two letters (much like the columns in an excel spreadsheet) so the next version was 802.11ac.

There was a brief stint of 802.11ad that never really generated any traction before the folks at the Wi-Fi alliance finally realized that selling devices to consumers with names they couldn't understand or remember was perhaps not the most effective way to go about things.

For that reason, the new standard (802.11ax) was instead called Wi-Fi 6. It was the 6th major iteration and they retroactively named the previous versions Wi-Fi 1-5.

Now we had a simple elegant naming convention that everyone could understand. Unfortunately, this didn't even last one generation before the good folks at the Wi-Fi alliance decided to mess it up again.

You see my dear friends, there is a new version of Wi-Fi that is going to come out soon. It operates on an additional wavelength which was newly approved by the FCC. Like previous iterations, you'll need entirely new hardware to take advantage of the new standard.

One might reasonably expect that this new standard would be called Wi-Fi 7. Unfortunately, I'm here to report that instead of making sense and naming this new standard Wi-Fi 7, they have decided to name the standard Wi-Fi 6E. Have they no shame?!

One day order will be restored to the world, but until then, hang in there... we'll make it through this nightmare. I promise.