The iPhone is almost as ubiquitous these days as the iPod that came before it. Despite it’s recent bad press Apple’s alluring smartphone is still a desirable object and something of a status symbol. So what is it about emails appended with “Sent from my iPhone” that I find so irritating?

Picture the scene; You’re sat in the waiting room at your dentists office leafing through the pages of an old National Geographic magazine that has clearly been living there for a while. As you read about the Mountain midgets of darkest Peru someone walks into the office and approaches the receptionist.

“Hello, I’m Mr Downing, I have a two o’clock appointment with Dr Johnson.” The receptionist looks at her screen taps a few keys then does that half smile thing as she tells the person to take a seat. With their exchange at an end he then announces “I came here today in my Mercedes Benz.”

That would be a little odd. I think people would furtively look the person up and down to assess just how big of a doofus he was. Why would he think we care how he got here or what kind of car he has. As a friend of mine is fond of saying, “Who does that?”

Well, lots of people do. Those smug bastards who own Apple iPhones do it all the time, sending emails appended with the footnote “Sent from my iPhone.” Like we give a crap what device they sent the email from!

I know it’s silly, but there’s just something about that footnote that just rubs me up the wrong way. It’s just not cool. It’s like owning a Porsche and then wearing Porsche branded clothing all the time. It has a swaggering quality to it, like some beefed-up tattooed and overly tanned bonehead at the gym who insists on wearing their ridiculously large gold bling as they sit in the sauna.

I won’t deny, iPhones themselves are cool, but that little footnote feels like a “fuck you” to me. “Fuck you and your shitty little Sony Ericsson with its cracked screen and crappy falling apart number pad. And fuck you for having a phone that still only has a number pad you loser!”

It’s like those words “Sent from my iPhone” are laughing at me. They’re trying to induce jealously, to bring out a need within me to get an iPhone so I too can be as connected, as switched on, as haughty and superior as all those iPhone people.

Of course, it’s not really the fault of the people who own iPhones. They’re just too lazy to remove the signature which is automatically appended to their emails. The truth is Apple want to create an iPhone shaped gap in my life and they’re just using my friends and colleagues to do it. “Sent from my iPhone, and by the way, because you don’t have and iPhone, YOU SUCK!”

Look, I know my phone isn’t beautiful, and it’s certainly not at all “smart.” It’s beat up and dumb as bricks, but it does what I need it to do. Yes, I know I would probably like an iPhone and find it immensely useful, but right now I’m a dumb phone user and I’m happy with that. In fact, I’m so happy with my dumb phone that if I was to ever to attempt using it to send an email to an iPhone user, I think I would spend the twenty minutes it would take me to append the message with “Sent from my piece of shit Sony Ericsson with a cracked screen and crappy falling apart number pad. Now go fuck yourself.”

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Remove or disable “Sent from my iPhone” email signature
Sent from my iPhone—You Suck!
What “Sent From My iPhone” Means To Me
Just so you know
Something for you iPhone users
The ringtone
Doing life the hard way
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