Talking about “iPhones” is grammatically incorrect, according to Apple’s head of marketing.

Weighing in on a discussion of how to talk about two or more Apple devices, Phil Schiller said that it’s not a question that needs asking - because nobody should be referring to Apple devices in the plural anyway.

“One need never pluralise Apple product names,” he wrote on Twitter. “Ex[ample]: Mr Evans used two iPad Pro devices.”

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Asked by a Twitter member whether he was really telling people that they should say “I have two iPhone phones”, rather than “two iPhones”, Mr Schiller said that was correct.

“Really!” he wrote. “Words can be both singular and plural, such as deer and clothes.

“It would be proper to say ‘I have three macintosh’ or ‘I have three Macintosh computers.”

While the ruling might seem odd, it does at least get rid of some difficult questions about how to talk about iPhone. It’s never been clear, for instance, how to say that you have two of the iPhone 6s - but now it’s clear that you would just say that you have two iPhone 6s, or two iPhone 6s devices.

The strange rule joins other proscriptions from Apple, which also include the fact that the company tends never to use the word “the” in relation to its products. In Apple’s results this week, for instance, Tim Cook described how the company was seeing very high customer satisfaction rate “for iPhone 6s and 6s Plus”.

Apple has always been very careful and strict about how it describes its products, even down to grammar. Perhaps the company’s most famous advertising slogan is “think different”, for instance - a grammatically incorrect but successful tagline that Apple used in the late 90s.