This week I found myself on a certain situation involving an infamous four-word signature: when I replied to an email confirming my presence at a tech event, using the default Mail app on iOS (because someone on Twitter said it handles 2FA codes automatically — a handy little feature, I’ll admit), I hadn’t realized what I were about to do. I hit send, and there it was, attached at the end: Envoyé de mon iPhone. And immediately, I felt ridiculous.
It’s not just a signature, it’s a declaration: “I’m the kind of person who owns an iPhone.” And of course, in my case, there was an extra layer of pretension because it wasn’t even the standard English version, it was in French — my phone’s default language — which certainly made it even more obnoxious.
I think the whole absurdity of it is that this little, seemingly innocent sentence has evolved from a simple tech quirk int an entire commentary on who we are, how we communicate and what gadgets we choose to use. Back in the day, when the iPhone was a still, new, shiny object, having that signature was a plain and simple flex. This article from Slate.fr wisely states that there was this “need” to let people know they were being replied by someone using an iPhone because of status, signaling that they were part of the elite with that cutting-edge piece of tech. Over time, sure, it became more of an embarrassment — people started to remove it because they didn’t want to come off as showing off or even “out of touch”. No one wanted to be that one privileged person, even unintentionally.
Yet, when looking further into this subject I found a comment which stated that the iPhone signature has somehow boomeranged back into acceptability (mind you that this is from 2016), even becoming part of a so-called digital etiquette. It’s no longer seen as that much obnoxious, but as kind of “built-in excuse” for the imperfections that come with mobile communication. Typos, brevity and rushed responses are more forgivable when “Sent from my iPhone” is thrown onto the end. It’s like an apology: “I’m on the go, forgive me for any mistakes”. And somehow, that works.
An interesting perspective, sure, but not interesting enough for me to not cringe over my French signature. It looked as if I was trying to signal some kind of sophistication that really wasn’t there. It made me think about how easy it is to convey a wrong sort of idea on someone else by total, subconscious accident. But then again, I saw it for what it really was: just a little note at the end of an email, a minor detail in the grand scheme of things.
Sent from my iPhone
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