[toxik]

In my native language, the general advice from our language council is to NOT listen to corporation’s rules. You would write “an iphone”, and casing as usual. In fact you wouldn’t really use iphone at all, but smartphone. The idea is that the name casing rules are for showing respect, and an inanimate product does not deserve the same respect as a person.

OTOH you would say Apple though, but I guess that avoids some obvious ambiguity

[lokedhs]

I don't know what your native language is, could it be Swedish? In Sweden, media consistently write Iphone, because it's a name, and names start with upper case.

As you mentioned, what the marketing department says about the case of letters in the name does not affect this generic recommendation.

Of course, you'll find a lot of people writing it in accordance with the marketing style, bit typically you'll see media follow the Swedish spelling rules.

[yatac42]

> In fact you wouldn’t really use iphone at all, but smartphone

The sentence "Smartphone is a phone made by Apple" (or maybe "A smartphone is a phone made by Apple") would have a very different and wrong meaning though, so that doesn't make much sense to me.