It was not necessary to skip S in the half-year list because 5 is not used there.įor 2020 and later, Apple will probably change the serial number format again, most likely extending it at least one more character. It appears vowels were skipped as an arbitrary choice, but B and S were skipped in the week list because of potential for visual confusion with 8 and 5 in that position. The week list starts with 1 for week 1 in the half-year and goes up to Y for week 27, skipping vowels, B and S, thus "123456789CDFGHJKLMNPQRTVWXY". The half-year list starts with C for the first half of 2010, and goes up to Z for the second half of 2019, skipping vowels, thus "CDFGHJKLMNPQRSTVWXYZ". Apple legal asked MacRumors to remove the article and they complied, but there were reposted copies around.īased on that article, your list of characters is almost right, but there are slightly different lists for the half-year and week. MacRumors posted an article back in 2010 with a partial explanation of the 12-digit serial number format, at least the general structure and how to decode the date. (this is kinda unfortunate, as it makes it a lot more complicated to figure out the manufacture date by eyeballing the serial number, I will miss that) If we stick with 27 and not 28, then when it wraps, 0 won't represent early year, it will represent late year, which also doesn't look too clean, possibly suggesting X will also be skipped when it wraps. Since they exclude vowels and BSZ for robustness, they could go through to y (unless counting it as a vowel I suppose) though only needing to apply it to the year component, but no one seems to know for sure. Apple needed to have at least a base-27 (not base-26) number system for this to work, because there are more than just 52 weeks per year. (before the change, 11 digit numbers were computer serials, 12 digit were service part serials, now 12 is computer, and iirc 17 or 18 are part)Īs my notes indicate, I don't know what will happen in 2018. # or will X be skipped and 0 be used for early 2018? # how apple interprets years when it hits 2018 is unclear. # (all years have 52 weeks plus one or two days, so the system must be able to handle 54 weeks) (either starting with the first or 28th week) # the week code is the number of weeks offset from the year. # the year starts in early 2005 with 0, 1 is late 2005, 2 is early 2006, M is early 2014, etc # the number notably does not include vowels AEIOU, and consonants BSYZ # apple is using a "base-27" numbering system for year and week, the digits are: 123456789CDFGHJKLMNPQRTVWX
# week is two digits, 00 through 51, week of year
repeats every 10 years, "4" could be 1994 or 2004 etc So I got that itch again this morning, and actually managed to dig up enough information that I could tease out the full rules for Apple's new serial number format
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