Maybe hardware manufacturers should do like car companies do and use a model year. "Yea, I have a MacBook Pro 2015 but its about the same as my Surface Pro 2017".
That's actually how Apple does it. For example, the official names of the various Mac Pro models are "Mac Pro (Late 2013)," "Mac Pro (Mid 2012)," etc. It's a bit confusing because they don't show the year part prominently, so you have to do some legwork to figure out what you're buying or what you already have, but it works out OK.