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Comment by timmattison | Hacker News Reader

They’ve been doing this with a lot of products for a long time. “Today we announce iPhone … with iPhone you can do anything!”

I think it is very strange.

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They're treating "MacBook Air" as a proper noun. It's to personify their products, presumably with the idea that people will "connect" to them, for some hollow, tech-oriented definition of "connect".

Even they find it hard to keep up this stupid convention. Ppl who work there of course say “the iPhone” but you even see it slip out frequently on stage at the big events. Even Steve Jobs, the originator of this convention and supposed stickler for detail used to say “the iphone” quite a bit.

One of the first ways a cult gets everyone on the same page is altered language and speech patterns.

I mean, apple knows their customer base. It wouldn't be unlikely that their writing is somehow catered to who they know would buy their devices.

Fortunately I have free-thinking windows installed on my desktop to counteract my Apple cultist indoctrination.

For me it's android. As long as I can replace the default apps like the sms app and the launcher. I will continue to use android.

It really does seem very cult-like with the way Apple wants everyone to change up English for their product specifically...

If you think this is changing up English, you may not be speaking English as a first language? Referring to products as a proper noun is very common. E.g. Ford will tell you "Mustang offers a powerful engine... blah blah blah" not "The Mustang offers..."

English is my first language, and yes to me that sentence would sound odd. Perhaps that's something common in American advertisement and not elsewhere

Maybe it's just that I'm a car guy, and I watch a lot of presentations about cars. They constantly refer to their models like this. Like it's a person, not an object.

https://www.ford.com/cars/mustang/

> Hear the roar of a Mustang as the ground starts to tremble and your legs start to shake. As always, Mustang draws upon its performance roots with features for enhanced handling, high-powered engine options and a classic Mustang design. For 2022, the soul-stirring Mustang Mach 1 and Mach 1 Premium stand at the pinnacle of 5.0L performance. The personally customizable Mach 1 continues its legacy, engineered specifically for quick turns and spirited drives.

Confusingly, they use Mustang both with an article and without.

This comment makes me sigh. I know you will defend yourself with "what? I'm just stating a fact!" but saying stuff like this makes me really dislike you. I really like Apple products, does that make me a part of a cult? If yes, why? I wouldn't die for them, I wouldn't go through pain for them.

The fact that my comment on the internet makes you "really dislike me" is probably all the confirmation you need.

This comment sent from my iPhone SE 2016.

One thing apple does very well is marketing. Just ask an average person what company they think does phones/laptops the best and they would say apple. Most people don't care about the specifications tech details but just the ease of use and looks, which apple (arguably) does well to optimize for.

-- doesn't the imply there are others of similar? maybe what apple is saying is that there is no other iPhone except the iPhone so the is redundant? - just a guess - i agree it's odd --

It certainly sounds weird to english speakers. I imagine they shorten sentences to not lose people's attention.

It's deliberate. I guarantee that it's about building a "brand mindset." They've been playing with text copy for decades.

If you say "iPhone," instead of "The iPhone," you've turned "iPhone" into a pronoun. That has a different "connection" to people that hear it.

Branding seems to be something that a lot of tecchies (including Yours Truly) have difficulty with. There's a lot of subtle psychological games that aren't easy to quantify.

Do you mean common noun instead of pronoun?

I think of it as a “pronoun.” It makes it into a “person,” or some kind of major deal, like we call localities (usually) by their single pronouns. Sometimes, “The” becomes part of the pronoun, like “The Netherlands,” or “The Bronx.”

Usually, though, we assign pronouns (I’m not an English major, though, so the proper term may be different).

Like, you can’t have “a brooklyn,” or “an amsterdam.”

They want to make it so we can’t have “an iPhone.”

Good luck with that…

The term you want is Proper Noun.

That makes sense.

Thanks!

>Like, you can't have "a brooklyn"

Every Brooklyn outside of the one in NYC is just "a Brooklyn" and not "THE Brookyln"

Fair point.

Then you also have Brookline, in Bastin.

It's already a proper noun (not a pronoun!), but it's being treated almost as though the name of every individual Apple device is the product brand name, which is weird. Using a product brand name without an article is normally only done for uncountable/mass noun things like "gorilla glue" or many food/drink products.

Would it be equally weird or correct to write the macOS? After all, it’s short for “Mac Operating System”.

I’m not a native speaker so I’m genuinely curious.

Only if you don't pay much attention to PR. Lots of manufacturers talk this way when referring to their own products. Apple isn't blazing a new trail here.

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