Thunderbolt finds The Mighty Beard playing model number police amusing.

How dare they imitate Apple’s use of Arabic numerals! Even though iPhone 5 hasn’t come out yet, Apple should preemptively sue any other company that uses the number 5 in their product names.

There probably is an argument to be made that ViewSonic is trying to get some competitive notice by calling their phone model the 4S, but it’s no more revolting than a computer company riding the coattails of a popular heavy-duty server operating system by appending the letter associated with that server operating system to their operating system.

However, what I find funny is now the position is to defend the use of cryptic model numbers as the distinguishing name for a product. The Apple punditry usually argue the opposite; model number names are terrible. Here’s December’s entry to that oeuvre from Gene Steinberg, stating how model numbers are confusing and how can we distinguish from the A1297 from the A1286 and such. Although the no-model-numbers edict gave us such entertaining descriptions like “Summer 2001 (Northern Hemisphere)”.