they should go the 911 way...keep the name, change the headlights design every year

According to the DOJ's antitrust complaint, the improvements are negligible because of lack of competition in premium smartphones insulating Apple and allowing them to deliberately target "good enough" and eschew new and especially expensive features. If that's true then this crawling-progress is entirely artificial and biennial announcements wouldn't really make a difference.

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.njd.544... (point #14)

The cadence is not just about shipping marketable products and features.

It's also about iterating on internal capabilities, processes, technologies across design, sourcing, manufacturing, etc.

What makes it into each year's phones is what's had the kinks ironed out, and all the commercials sorted.