The personification of the iPhone

Does it bother anyone else that Apple refers to the iPhone with and without the article the? The video demos, Steve himself, TV commercials, and other Apple-produced copy are rife with both the iPhone-is-an-inanimate-object and iPhone-is-alive phrasings. Personally, I think it sounds rather ridiculous when I hear something like, iPhone does this, or iPhone responds to that, or iPhone loves to fetch tennis balls.

Though they’ve been doing the same thing with the iPod for a couple of years now, it’s been largely ignorable; however, the current and incessant referencing of the iPhone without the the — as if it is sentient — is impossible to get away from and is really starting to grate. It just doesn’t ‘sound’ right.