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Comment by politelemon | Hacker News Reader

> But “sent from iPhone” is sometimes useful,

No, it is still an advert, and not useful in the least.

Back in the day, it was useful, as in, "Expect awkward phrasing and unintended effects of autocorrection, because mobile device. This message doesn't necessarily reflect the intent of the sender." (Considerate users would/could edit the signature to something w/o a product name in it.) Nowadays, this is pretty much the norm and no explicit warning ist required anymore.

So an automatic "I am a lazy piece of shit and think my time and convenience are worth more than yours" warning? I guess that's useful.

I always felt like it was "I prioritized a speedy response on my phone instead of an elegant response from my computer at a later time".

As in, "I put it on you to better check and follow-up before acting on this…" ;-)

That just means the person sending the message didn’t bother to proof read their message before sending. And you don’t need to be on an iPhone to mistype a message.

A simpler explanation was that it was a shameful advert injected into the end of people’s emails.

I guess, it was probably intended as the second one (it was also the default email signature, so advertising that feature, as well), but its usefulness was definitely in the implied warning.

Mind that a written message used to be the gold standard for expressed intent, which changed quite radically with smartphones. (Historically, this development is probably an important prerequisite for the acceptability of LLM generated text, I guess.)

When they added this it was extremely useful - it signaled that you could afford an iPhone. It was really easy to delete, yet people not only didn't, but they would go out of their way to respond from the iPhone just so that they could plausibly have this status symbol on their email.

That is also an advert, just a personal one.

It is useful. It tells me that the sender isn't tech savvy and/or likes to show that they prefer expensive apple products. It is like carrying a Prada or Ray-Ban.

It also tells me that they probably don't care about second hand embarrassment.

And it tells me that they checked my email while away from keyboard, which means they are hard working individuals who care about business, but not enough to rush to a computer to reply properly.

Lots of social ques on that one.

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