I think this is overestimating the amount of "brand recognition" that Intel gets out of the "i". Ordinary consumers don't give a damn about it whatsoever, hell, I guarantee 99% of ordinary people don't even know which manufacturer produced the CPU on any given device that they own.
Meanwhile, enthusiasts will roll their eyes and use whatever dumb naming scheme Intel replaces it with. It was terribly convoluted before, and it will certainly be terribly convoluted after. This is a non-event.
Personally I think the i-N naming convention (and Ryzen naming convention for that matter) may have slightly hurt sales of the higher performance i-3 chips, which could be better than even midrange i-<5-9> chips for specific or general scenarios.
If I were branding chips I’d do some combination of core count, clock speed (yes I know performance is much more complicated), chip type/power requirements/specialization, and iteration. Like I have no idea how to compare an i3-4971058373 to an i7-5927263849. I can much more easily compare an i6L-36v2 (six core, 3.6 GHz, laptop thermals/power, second version) to an i8D-38v1. And even more importantly I can seek out SKUs according to my requirements rather than having to go through multiple third party websites doing the work of cataloguing/comparing specs and explaining wtf each sku is.
> I guarantee 99% of ordinary people don't even know which manufacturer produced the CPU on any given
If you define 'ordinary people' as people who don't know what CPU their PC has you'll be right. But I generally I'd assume most people who buy their devices themselves might have some understanding about i3 < i5 < i7
Meanwhile, enthusiasts will roll their eyes and use whatever dumb naming scheme Intel replaces it with. It was terribly convoluted before, and it will certainly be terribly convoluted after. This is a non-event.