Apple is known for harbouring a bunch of design freaks, but did you know that you’re never meant to speak of iPhones, just “multiple iPhone devices?”
Phil Schiller, Apple’s marketing chief, revealed the proper grammatical style to be used with regards to iDevices in a brief tweetstorm the other day. In response to a tweet referencing “iPads Pro” (puke), Schiller appended the following:
https://twitter.com/pschiller/status/725937759022514176
This brief lesson in grammar was a preparation for the following clarification:
https://twitter.com/pschiller/status/725938369826414592
People then (rightly) assumed that Schiller meant all Apple product names should never be pluralised. Alas:
https://twitter.com/pschiller/status/725791354769399808
You might be (somewhat correctly) be assuming that semantics dictated by a company over the description of their fondleslabs is the most first-world issue ever encountered by mankind. But there’s actually an unfortunately serious point here. Apple is — just — the most valuable company in the world, and the iPhone its most profitable device. Given that we’re all going to be slaves to some form of iDevice in the near future, it probably matters how we refer to our new lords and master.