Jay Peters, writing for The Verge:

Apple is going to change how it names its next set of major operating systems, Bloomberg reports. Instead of just notching up the version number, Apple will instead switch to marking them by year.

However, the years will apparently align with the year after the one the update is actually released in, similar to cars. That means that the next big iOS update will be iOS 26 instead of iOS 19. Bloomberg says that other upcoming name changes include iPadOS 26, macOS 26, watchOS 26, tvOS 26, and visionOS 26.

I really love this idea for simplicity, but marketing it the way cars do makes zero sense. Apple wants to get away from number confusion by introducing iOS 26 at WWDC 25?! Please let this rumor be partially wrong.