plural

[idiotmike]

Dear all,

In the sentence below, I extracted from the economist, why don't they use "suffered from poor hardwares" since phones are plural?

"Some earlier Windows phones suffered from poor hardware"

Thank you

 

[RMislander]

The word ware by itself can be pluralized to form wares, as in "I am interested in purchasing some of your wares."

However, when ware is part of a compound noun, it becomes uncountable (as far as I can tell).

Off the top of my head, kitchenware, software, hardware, malware, and spyware are all uncountable, so they all remain in the singular form. (If there are exceptions here, I would be interested in hearing them!)

"Telephone" is unrelated to the word "hardware." You can count telephones when you walk into a store, but you cannot count hardware, strangely. You can count pieces of hardware though.