I wonder how long it takes Apple employees to learn to not use articles (the, a, an) with Apple products. It isn’t an iPhone, it is iPhone. iPhone is small. iPhone runs apps.
I picture the presenters being forced to wear a device (sorry, wear Device) that shocks them everytime they slip up.
(Maybe it is easier for the UK people. I hear they “go to hospital” instead of “go to the hospital”.)
I think this is a brand-vs-item distinction.
If you say “Chevrolet is…”, you’re talking about the brand or the corporation. If you say “A Chevrolet is…”, you’re talking about a physical car.
Similarly, “iPhone is…” is describing the brand, or the product series as a whole. “An iPhone is…” would be talking about an individual unit.
Apple is not presenting phones. They are presenting the brand.
I disagree. VW is a car manufacturer. They make the VW GTI. While the GTI has specific model years and trim levels, I would’t say “GTI has lots of torque.” I would say the GTI has torque.
Am doing it wrong? No, a typical Road & Track review of a GTI is consistent in calling it the GTI. And it is clear from the very first subtitle “Subtle improvements sharpen the GTI, but it loses the option of a manual gearbox.” that they’re referring to the GTI as a class, not one particular GTI sitting on the lot over there.
Apple is just trying to give the impression that their products have souls.
More on this the weird way Apple doesn’t use articles…
I Am Not A Linguist, but I believe the general rule in American English is you normally drop the article before proper name, like we don’t say “a David C.”. And a distinguisher is that a proper name is referring to one instance of what is named, not the name as a group or class.
So since there are many iPhones, it isn’t a proper name. The fact that it is s Brand NameTM is not supposed to matter. If I named my iMac “Macky”, then it would be a proper name.
In the example of Chevrolet, the confusion is that it is referring to the company or division of General Motors, not a car brand. There is only one Chevrolet division, so this is a proper name. If we’re referring to a Chevrolet Impala, the Impala isn’t a proper name, because there are many of them. So, we say “the Impala has great models this year” but not “the Chevrolet”. (Saying “I have a Ford” is because you’re really saying you have one of the many Ford cars, not Ford the company. Contrast to when you say you have Ford stock: “I have Ford”, because you’re referring to the one-and-only Ford company.)
This would be similar to the Beats relationship to Apple. You don’t say “the Beats” but I would say “the Beats Solo Buds”.
So really what’s going on is that Apple wants its devices to be considered proper names, as if they are each a singular entity. But I think it just sounds pretentious. It grates every time I hear it.
I had previously replied to this within another comment:
This is legal-speak. They have to do it to protect their trademarks.
However, I got curious about why I believed that, so I researched it, and I was just wrong. (It was an interesting case of ChatGPT refusing to go along with my incorrect belief.) It’s preferred when trademarks are used adjectivally (“an iPhone smartphone”) to avoid genericide, but I must have somehow conflated that with not using articles. Apple’s rules for trademark usage (which apply to them and partners, but not us) merely say:
Rules for Proper Use of Apple Trademarks
1. Trademarks are adjectives used to modify nouns; the noun is the generic name of a product or service.
2. As adjectives, trademarks may not be used in the plural or possessive form.
Correct: I bought two Macintosh computers.
Not Correct: I bought two Macintoshes.3. An appropriate generic term must appear after the trademark the first time it appears in a printed piece, and as often as is reasonable after that. For a list of suggested generic terms see the Apple Trademark List.
4. Always spell and capitalize Apple’s trademarks exactly as they are shown in the Apple Trademark List. Do not shorten or abbreviate Apple product names. Do not make up names that contain Apple trademarks.
Instead, the suggestion is that it has to do with branding and linguistic simplicity, plus consistency across languages.
I thought I could dramatically present evidence that Apple didn’t always speak this way. So I looked up the 1984 BYTE magazine interview with the Macintosh team and Steve Jobs, from when the Macintosh was introduced.
Guess what? The team slips up sometimes, but more often the references are sans-articles. “The first thing Macintosh will do is make the existing types of applications an order of magnitude easier and more approachable for people.”, for example.
This reminds me of similar requirements for use of the Bluetooth branding.
They are very keen on ensuring that “Bluetooth” is always an adjective and never a noun. You can not say “Connect to Bluetooth”, but must say something like “Connect to the computer’s Bluetooth interface”. And they do not permit abbreviations - you have to write “Bluetooth Low Energy”, never “BLE”.
Failure to abide by these branding issues can result in losing Bluetooth SIG membership.
Somewhere around the time (A) Jobs got ejected, and (B) the Macintosh product line branched into different models like the SE and II, they started referring to “the Macintosh” in the sense of the Mac platform, as in “We design all the major components of the Macintosh ourselves…” (Actual Apple ad copy from a brochure on the Quadra line.)
There was a time when they referred to “the iPhone,” as well, including in the “there’s an app for that” commercial campaign.
I’m pretty sure that, if they revived that campaign, they’d drop the “the.”
This whole conversation has left me more confused than ever.
As a non-native English speaker, the most difficult thing to learn is the correct use of articles, since my native language, Japanese, nouns do not take articles at all.
I’ve always attributed this behaviour to Steve. It seemed to me to be a choice to elevate the Macintosh to a kind of entity not seen before, a new being has arrived.
“Macintosh can…”
“Macintosh will…”
And it simply become part of how they do things.
How do you distinguish between a generic instance of an item (e.g. “a car”) and one specific instance of that item (e.g. “the car”)?
It is context-dependent whether a noun is generic or specific.
To an English speaker (who knows a very small amount of Japanese), Japanese can be quite vague as to which is which.
You will find that most of the time it doesn’t matter! 
Potato or tomato???
They rely on the context of the conversation, which works most of the time.
If they want to be specific, they may use the word such as “kono” meaning “this” and “ano” meaning “that”. Another word is “sono” which can mean either “that” or “the”.
For the the same reason you as a generic person named “Michael” aren’t addressed directly as “a Michael”. However if some one just wants ANYONE with the name “Michael”, they will say: “Get me a Michael!” iPhone is similar at being addressed as a particular product or a generic product using a prefacing article. There are dangers with this as happened with other products like Kleenex, Scotch Tape, Coke, Xerox, etc. Companies are continually fighting to keep their copyrighted product names from becoming generic.
They must struggle with the difference between “the” pronounced “thuh” vs. “thee” then…
I run into the same problem with one of my clients, Boys & Girls Clubs.
It’s not THE Boys & Girls Clubs, it’s not A Boys & Girls Club. It’s just Boys & Girls Clubs (with no preceding article and an S at the end of Clubs).
When they want to refer to a single specific Club location, they have to say "Boys & Girls Clubs XYZ Branch, where XYZ is the specific location (branch). Once they spell out the Branch the first time, then they can refer to it as the Club (with a preceding lowercase article and a capital C in Club).
I spend more time correcting even their own internal documents simply because it looks odd when people type it out. It takes years for some employees to learn the usage rules. But once it’s ingrained into your thinking, it’s easy to spot errors in use.
I’m so OCD about it that I can create a 40-page annual report filled with text and the first thing I notice is the one time out of 100 appearances when it is used incorrectly.
It’s like that GUI inconsistency you might see in macOS. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it, and you can spot it every time it appears somewhere. And I might add, the more aggravated you get every time you do spot it.