Welcome to Apple Product Names Trivia Night! Where the rules are all made up and the points don’t matter!
Question: There are four people in a room. Each of them has an iPhone. How many iPhones are there in all?
Answer: Zero. There are no iPhones. There are, however, four iPhone devices.
Confused? So were we, along with the entire world.
The primary cause of confusion was a Benedict Evans’ podcast, in which he referred to multiple “iPads Pro”. He used the plural form as we would in “mothers-in-law” or “persons-in-charge”. Technically there’s nothing wrong in that.
But Twitter did what Twitter usually does in times like these – it went into a tizzy. And fueling the fire even further were grammarians and Apple fanatics alike. Rules, conventions, and linguistic etiquette were furiously questioned. In the battle that ensued, reputations were ripped apart, beliefs shattered, and politeness was burned at the altar of inquiry.
With apocalypse imminent, a higher power had to be invoked to calm things down. And so it was that Phill Schiller, Senior VP of worldwide marketing, Apple Inc., descended to the level of us mortals. He tweeted thus:
@Gartenberg @BenedictEvans @stevesi @macintux One need never pluralize Apple product names. Ex: Mr. Evans used two iPad Pro devices.
— Philip Schiller (@pschiller) April 28, 2016
“One need never pluralise Apple product names,” said the master.
Do you know what this means, people? We’ve been saying Apple names wrong all along.
1 iPad + 1 iPad = 2 iPad devices.
Or just 2 iPad.
1 iPhone, and 4 iPhone.
Not 2 iPhones, like we’ve been referring to it in such a cavalier fashion.
Our world has just fallen apart!
When someone complained that it didn’t make any sense, Lord Schiller obliged once again with a reply:
@parks @Gartenberg @BenedictEvans @stevesi @reneritchie 2. It would be proper to say “I have 3 Macintosh” or “I have 3 Macintosh computers”
— Philip Schiller (@pschiller) April 29, 2016
Yeah, right. Now we’ve to worry about what’s “proper”? Like English wasn’t hard enough already!
And who uses the word “proper” anyways? What is this, 1856?
Anyway, what’s the moral of the day? Cross your t’s, dot your i’s, and don’t pluralise Apple devices wrongly! Ever.
