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Comment by Silica6149 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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.

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