Am I the only one to notice that AMD, Intel and NVIDIA now all have products numbered 9500? Previously, ATI, Apple and Nokia have had the Radeon 9500, PowerMac 9500 and the 9500 Communicator. Quick googling reveals many more 9500s.

What is it about this number? I think it’s the 9 that’s important. 9 is the biggest single digit number, and hence the best. It’s the perfect marketing fiction: you simply can’t get better than 9 (the marketing department hopes you won’t notice the possibility of the existence of 10). The model number obviously has no relation to the actual specifications of the device, so it’s pure braggadocio and bling. To the marketroids, the number 9 and the letter X are talismans of bad-assedness, the computer equivalent of the hip hop chain. Look no further than ATI’s Radeon X1900 XTX. They had to scale it back a little from there with names like HD 2900, just like the James Bond producers had to settle for Casino Royale after they couldn’t figure out any new ways to fit the word “die” into the title. (Before Die Another Day came out, alt.fan.james-bond discussed plausible titles for the next film; the closest was Die Die Die).

I predict Microsoft will be next. Expect to see in 2010: The X-XBOX X9000 Yo Yo Yo X-Platinum, followed by simply Xbox 4 in 2015.