Objects have to earn the right to exist. We make so much stuff. Most of it unnecessary. Stuff that will soon be cluttering your home and then end up in a landfill.
This is not a product that deserves to exist. It is not made from quality materials ( Nylon (14%), Polyester (85%), Polyurethane (1%)). It is not innovative. It is questionable whether it solves its primary use case particularly well.
What makes this particularly objectionable is that it is from a design house that usually makes quality garments. And then they stoop to making this crap, slapping their designer label on it and then exploit ghastly people who don't know any better to waste tons of money on it.
Exactly my reaction. I hate this. I hate that someone thought of it and that it exists. I have no idea if it will sell, but I was like "no way, that cannot be a real launch from Apple"
Im not sure if you have spent any time in Asia but they love to have little throwaway bags for their to go drinks so they stay cold - and they hang in the same way. This looks like the exact same thing but pop an iphone in it.
What I am curious about is whether women in France, Greater China, Italy, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, the UK, and the U.S (where this product is going to be launched) don't use hand-bags? If not, do they hold the phones in their hands or keep it in their pockets? In India or the middle-east, I've never seen women carry their phones in anything but their hand-bags / clutches.
Yes, you're right. People in Asia do like to use small bags for their phones or lipsticks. But those little bags are usually really cute or nicely designed, not like this one. Collaborate with Issey Miyake? Seriously?
To some degree, but junk is junk even if it says Issey Miyake on it. But at the price they are asking I'd insist on higher quality materials. Not this junk.
It is like those horrible Louis Vuitton plastic bags. Yes they are expensive and probably better made than most plastic bags, but they are mass produced plastic bags. You can get nice, custom, handmade bags for a fraction of what this pointless junk goes for.
(The only reason I know about Issey Miyake is because years ago I happened to buy a couple of handmade linen suits while visiting Japan. And only later discovered that these suits were "a big deal" when some fashion people I shared an office with saw me wear them as "casual office clothes". To me they were comfortable linen suits that were obviously hand dyed. And they weren't even that expensive)
The MA-1 "works" under a relatively narrow set of conditions that I don't see most days. I tried. It is a miserable garment for how and where I live.
I'm not saying synthetic materials are always bad. I own a few jackets in synthetic materials that are good, but I have gone through a lot that are rubbish. For jackets it is more about the technical design than the exact material. I have had lots of expensive jackets that just don't work for my use cases. And a few that do. It is trial and error since I have no idea why some jackets just don't work.
I live in a place where it rains heavily, and in the winter it is often cold, and I spend a lot of time outside being physically active. This means that the challenge is to find jackets that can deal with heavy rain, cold, physical abrasion, and perhaps most important of all: moisture management.
If you spend a lot of time being physically active outside in all kinds of bad weather, you tend to start caring a lot about what materials you wear. Best case for sub-par garments: they start to smell. Worst case: you freeze because your clothes can't manage moisture.
But for what is more or less a glorified sock, at that price I am not buying a piece of plastic. I'd expect more pleasant natural materials.
MA-1s are inner lined with a 100% cotton/wool mix. The outer is nylon because synthetic fabrics are generally good for waterproofing (waterproofing is always a trade-off of quality over function) & also just because bombers are generally nylon, but a big part of their construction is using quality non-synthetic fabrics wherever they can to ensure overall quality.
Hadn't heard Issey Miyake mentioned in over a decade. He was an important designer in the 1980s, and died in 2022. Known for running completed garments through a pleating machine.
Looking at that thing, the overall impression is "a phone so big and heavy it needs its own shoulder bag?"
What do you mean? Nylon and polyester can be extremely durable, that’s always been their appeal. A knitted pocket is very likely to be a BIFL item even moreso than typical cotton or wool fabrics unless they’re specifically designed to be hard wearing, like canvas. That and the fact that it’s designed to fit any size and model of phone means it’s likely to be significantly less wasteful than putting your phone in a high end leather case that will age out when you upgrade.
Apple is clearly trying to experiment with more textile elements on its products, like with the Apple Watch band and FineWoven/tech woven cases to move away from using environmentally damaging leather and cheap feeling silicon. Stuff like this, sold in small lots, is how you test out whether people are into it before trying to work it into a product meant to sell to hundreds of millions of people.
I'd object to the notion of a free market. Free and fair markets don't actually exist in the way we like to think. Pretty much every kind of business I've been involved in has different strata of rules for different players.
Try to set up a HFT business. Or try to do anything interesting in telecom. Once you have cleared the capital and regulatory hurdles what kills you is that you need special relationships.
In this case, I doubt this product would become a success without the two brand names behind it, and completely astronomical amounts of financial might. They will sell literal tons of these even if people ultimately find out that they are junk. On its own, this is a bargain bin-liner.
You hate on Louis Vuitton but have you ever tried one? Have you looked at all the designs they have? I think LV is better than Hermes bags with that horrendous closure they have on the Birkin and other bags. LV has cool colorful designs also in their ready to wear. You might object to the branding but the bags work very well and are designed well in terms of how easy it is to get stuff in and out and if you don't throw it around the canvas can last a long time. Hermes might have nice Pogo leather and so on but that doesn't mean that closure is worth the hassle IMO.
Also IDK what to think about the iPhone Pocket. It LOOKS like a hassle to get stuff in and out of it but if they have somehow managed to make it easy, maybe it's well designed. If not then I agree with you the product is probably garbage.
They hate on Louis Vuitton plastic bags, not Louis Vuitton in general, and they are entirely right to do so. It's the same with their perfumes, keychains, wallets and most other small accessories. All products which are far too expensive for what they are but remain reachable by the average person to capitalise on people who want the brand but can't afford the "real" products.
Buying entry level products from luxury brands is hard to justify. At their price point, you can generally get a far better equivalent product from a brand with less appeal. It's especially true with Louis Vuitton where the brand's cachet has been severely diluted by how many people own their bags.
Other random LV fact: Louis Vuitton was a lock maker, and the locks he made were advertised as “unpickable” (more advertising than reality, sadly.) He even had Houdini try to pick one. No, this has nothing to do with TFA, but I like locks.
You're right, of course, but I don't think blame rests solely on the individual consumer here... I guess it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem, wherein Apple makes $200 knitted iPhone scrotes because they know people will line up to buy it, and people will line up to buy $200 knitted iPhone scrotes because Apple made them.
And people have brand loyalty to Apple stuff because quality, or design, or something... but for a product like this, which to me is prima facie a ridiculous, impractical, high-priced, fast-fashion item, you know that the marketers are cashing in on that brand loyalty almost exclusively (in the absence of any intrinsic value).
Half-baked thoughts, I'm sure people have written properly about this. But the conclusion I leap to is that marketing people are the great Satan here. Fuck those guys.
The tech industry is basically entirely run on Advertising. Google, Facebook, even Apple owe a huge chunk of their revenue to Ads.
Clearly Ads work. You cannot blame the individual who has been brainwashed, addicted to buying things, by the hyper-capitalist advertising mega-monopolies around us. They are victims too.
>It is not made from quality materials ( Nylon (14%), Polyester (85%), Polyurethane (1%))
Polyamids like Nylon are some of the highest quality and most durable fabrics in the world, with some of the best material characteristics fabrics can have.
Given the constraints of the product and looking at it from an engineering standpoint, these are the materials you want for a product like this. Flexible, durable and resistant to weather. I do not see what other materials you would use to achieve a better quality product.
That said, it is of course a stupid fashion accessories. The world is full of them.
> It is not made from quality materials ( Nylon (14%), Polyester (85%), Polyurethane (1%)). It is not innovative. It is questionable whether it solves its primary use case particularly well.
It is impossible for Apple to innovate. It's way too much work to compete with BYD/Tesla on real things like Electric Cars.
It's a LOT easier just to extract money from idiots who pay top dollar for 'fashion'. They will market this as the Balenciaga of phone bags, to differentiate it from the $2 phone bags that will appear on Temu next week (or they are already there; Apple is slowly catching up after a few years).
Meanwhile this looks like this sort of man-purse that in my corner of the world is referred to as something that loosely translates to "quiver of righteousness".
Us iPhone 13 Mini holdouts need to get a little louder. It feels like I find more and more on the internet every month -- I'm pretty sure there're far more than just "dozens of us" who want a reasonably-sized phone.
It does initially look like a stupid and Insanely Facile fashion statement, I agree, but I think the iPod sock v2 could be one of the most practical and cleverly designed products Apple has ever released.
It's clearly intended to be used as bait for phone snatchers. That iPhone dangling loose a foot below your arm in free air is just too tempting… no thief can resist. But, then! You start swinging that motherf*cker, and your iPhone becomes a deadly weapon before any potential thief has time to think.
Third parties are sure to fill the market with the most obvious additions, e.g. metal spikes, studs, mildly poison-laced hooks. I assume there will also be training courses scheduled in Apple Stores around the world to clarify this accessory's purpose — not to mention, to teach proper technique and the ethical considerations of when to stop striking with the iPhone Pocket to avoid manslaughter charges in your region.
This is a move by Apple to subtly promote armed, deceptive martial arts as self-defence. To promote the Bushido spirit as a practical coping mechanism in these stressful times, and to empower its users in everyday situations. I for one think it's Insanely Great, and right on that bold frontier of innovation and Thinking Different that Apple built its reputation on.
Me too, I still have my iPhone SE, I was hoping they would bring back some smaller version of the iPhone + Touch ID, I refuse to upgrade just because of the lack of Touch ID
The camera is what finally pried my SE out of my hands, replaced by a 17 Pro. Hate it. Heavy, no more Touch ID, forced into iOS 26. Even the button placement drives me bananas. The amount of times I accidentally take a screenshot because I’m trying to adjust volume...
Still have my SE. When I pick it up, it’s striking just how much better it feels.
Rather than a standalone phone, I'd love a small companion iPhone that uses the same number liked the Apple watch. Just a pocket-sized phone with a camera and the ability to use iPhone apps that I could take places where I don't want or need the full slab-sized behemoth.
Since it’s clearly April 1st inside the reality distortion field, I’m disappointed there are no throwback designs sized for the mini and se at the bottom of the page.
(As an aside, I swear by pants from the Issey Miyake Homme Plissé collection. Since investing in some pairs about 10 years ago, I have hardly worn anything else—no other pants match their comfort. The iPhone Pocket is of course ridiculous anyway.)
The pants cost around 500 bucks? I don't necessarily believe that a priori spending $500 on a pair of pants is irrational, but I really struggle to imagine any pair of pants being worth that much money unless they are lined with gold or something.
I usually buy cheap clothes and mend them and ten years for a pair of pants isn't unusual for me. I probably haven't spent $500 dollars on clothes in a year ever in my entire life (except maybe the year I bought a suit for getting married).
I guess I'm just genuinely curious how you found yourself in the position of even contemplating $500 for pants.
> but I really struggle to imagine any pair of pants being worth that much money unless they are lined with gold or something.
It depends on how much you earn. I don’t mind spending tens of thousands on Loro Piana cashmere because it’s really nice, but at my income level the price difference between that and Zara is pretty much immaterial.
Keep in mind that HN is packed with people with salaries above $1M/yr and entrepreneurs with way higher income levels.
A few years ago I too would’ve considered $500 for pants to be absurd, at this point I just go to a tailor and pay slightly more than that but save tons of time in the long term and always have perfect fitting pants. The time savings alone are tremendous, after getting a pair fitted properly I can just order new ones whenever I need without having to spend hours going through shops looking for the right pair of pants.
I never knew what a difference good pants can make. I usually just bought my pants from H&M/other retailers or Amazon. I usually bought what I considered good value pants for like $30-80. I then, out of curiosity, bought pants that were 2-4 times as expensive (~$150) and it really made a difference. I never really liked the pants I had… they never fit right… they felt very uncomfortable. The new pants I got about 2 years ago (the more expensive ones) were very very different. Very comfy. They also had a lot of nice features that I never knew I needed but that I now want by default…
- A button that just "clicks". Most pants I usually owned had a traditional pants button. Those more expensive ones had buttons that just "clicked". Away goes the worry about a button falling off while you are on the go.
- Pockets with hidden zippers: My pants have pockets and in those pockets are smaller pockets with a zipper. Perfect to store things that are small and easily lost.
There are more "features" but those are the important ones. The most important feature is just the material that is used. I barely feel it. Also the company that makes those pants makes other things as well. I ordered a lot of cloths by now and the amazing thing is that everything they make fits me perfectly. I don't know how they do it… When I usually buy pants I have to try on like 10 pants to find one that fits. Even if I pick the "correct" size.
Different strokes for different folks. I'm a fashion lover but a fan of cheap cars, and I could equally say something similar about people who drive new luxury cars when there's plenty of reliable functionality to be had under $10k. There's a lot of craftsmanship that goes into nice clothes, and you can get way more expensive than $500. And fashion is a form of art in a way. What makes a painting worth thousands of dollars?
$500 for something you might wear for a decade straight? A brand-new pair of Levis at JC Penny is gonna run you like $90 anyways. It's not that much more expensive.
But also, quality has diminishing returns in basically every category. At the low end, it's extremely efficient to improve the quality of your product and charge a bit more. At the high end, you can't make any more inexpensive moves to set yourself apart, so you use higher end materials, fabrication methods, and workers.
I don't necessarily believe that a priori spending $500 on a pair of pants is irrational, but I really struggle to imagine any pair of pants being worth that much money unless they are lined with gold or something.
I don't think Steve Jobs went shopping for pants. Nor do many of the people who buy this sort of garment. They either have an assistant who buys things for them, whose goal is to keep them happy and not blow a predetermined budget, or they go to a store and sit in a nice suite where a personal shopper suggests things to them. In either scenario the price of individual items probably don't even get a mention.
They save you from buying 10 pairs at $100. They not only are durable, including not fraying, etc., but keep their form and color, and they have a beautiful form and color to begin with. You get what you pay for (if you buy the right $500 pants).
Someone outside IT might say, why pay for a Macbook when you can buy a $100 Chromebook? Why use Vim or Emacs when you can use Notepad/TextEdit (though those all cost the same!).
I once paid $1000 for some sneakers. I’m still regularly wearing them 7 years later. I’ve bought $50/$100 and they never last that long. It was an insane purchase at the time, done in a moment of jet lagged madness when my shoes fell apart in an airport. But over time it’s turned out to be a great investment. Smart, comfortable, well made.
I don't necessarily believe that a priori spending $500 on a pair of pants is irrational, but I really struggle to imagine any pair of pants being worth that much money
Maybe he's amortizing them.
He says they've lasted ten years, so that's $50/year.
Don't rule out until you've tried it. High end clothing (not just brand name, but real advanced stuff) is pretty amazing in how it makes you feel. I'm inclined to spend on anything I interact with, and clothes is pretty big interaction.
This is kind of getting into the weeds a little bit but for me and a lot of others luxury items can be fun to own. You can get an affinity for certain designers style, whether it's Gucci, Louis Vuitton or Balenciaga. The items are ridiculously expensive sometimes but it's kind of a tough line to balance because the fact that they cost so much make them more special. So how cheap should they be before they don't feel as special anymore? Is it all a bit irrational? I guess. There isn't a clear definitive defense for luxury items I think other than the feeling they can give. Some people can spend all their income on luxury items rather than other discretionary items because it's the most fun to them.
I got excited until I saw they cost $600? Once in a while I'm reminded we exist in very different universes. Still trying to justify splurging on common projects 2 years later.
in my experience as a tech guy who got into fashion and then after several years went back to not caring: Sneakers are the product category with the least differentiation in value-for-money between the high end (especially designer, but also not-designer-but-still-expensive like common projects) both in terms of aesthetics and quality/durability. You're paying $300 more for a 10% better product. Jeans, outerwear, knits, boots, you can more easily justify that cost
I am wondering what you call consumption that feeds $499 designer margins on polyester like that, while so many people can barely afford to scrape by day to day.
Income inequality is a phrase that pathologizes what appears to be a universal truth. In all types of economic and political systems (after we left the forest, and probably while we were still in the forest), some people have been desperately poor while other people are not. What would be interesting is a single counterexample of sustained "income equality."
That said, our current degree of inequality and the particular way it is distributed seems to be unusual and remarkable. But pointing to someone having a hard time is, IMO, not a critique of that.
I had a coworker who lost a lot of weight and showed up at work one day wearing new clothes and looking sharp. The pants were from Costco. I have since gone and bought a few pairs of pants from them. They feel fairly high quality, made of sturdy and comfortable materials, and are wife-approved. And of course they are very inexpensive.
I'm sure expensive pants have their benefits but no matter how much money I have, I will always baby expensive things, and it's very inconvenient to baby clothes (e.g. must be dry cleaned, can't use a washer or dryer, can't risk getting stains on it). There are good reasons why dads gets their clothes from Costco.
I'm pretty confident the answer on both counts would be "no".
(This teminds me of a show I once saw where various design students were given the task to design things. Philippe Starck was the judge. One of the students made a iPhone cover and Starck almost blew a gasket. I don't remember exactly what he said when he saw it. But he pointed out that the iPhone itself was a beautiful design so defacing it with an ugly piece of plastic was just a horrific waste of resources.
He also said something about objects having to deserve to exist -- though that was probably in a talk he gave at some point. Where he pointed out that his famous Alessi sitrus press was a good example of a pointless object that shouldn't exist. At least it looked good, but it was a pretty poor sitrus press).
Since Steve's famous turtle neck was from Issey Miyake and he wanted everyone at Apple to wear an Issey Miyake vest as a uniform [1], I think he might have been into this. This is also the man who launched the iPod sock.
I get the sentiment but was this actually some big launch announcement? When I look at the store online, you have to dig a bit just to even find the product.
It's a joke even before looking at the price. "3D-knitted" WTF is that? Isn't all knitting in "3D"?
It's a crappy handbag, and it's just for a phone.
It looks like they had to use models to advertise it because they couldn't use "everyday people" in "everyday situations" to advertise because it looks like it would be garbage in that scenario.
Is Apple expanding to the "luxury" fashion market?
Inspired by the concept of "a piece of cloth", we give you this "3d-knitted" piece of cloth to put your phone in. It's kind of difficult to actually get a phone into and out of, and it looks a bit ridiculous, but don't worry, it's only $160 (unless you want the long strap).
Like, if you were doing this as an April Fools joke post, what would you even change?
Kind of like those fashions where the model wears some kind of artistic interpretation of a yellow flower when really they look like they're wearing more of an art installation than functional clothing?
Awww... I was so much hoping for an iPhone that will fit into my pocket. The 1st iPhone SE was the perfect form factor. But no, Apple's phones just had to grow and grow and grow like cancer ...
In my opinion, the fact that Apple is now selling a bag to carry your oversized phone around in, is an admission that they failed to make phones that are convenient to carry.
> they failed to make phones that are convenient to carry.
I loved the iPhone SE and small phones generally, but at the same time I realize Apple's not failing at anything. They're giving the market the size people actually want. The smaller phones don't sell nearly as well. Most people prefer a bigger phone even if carrying it is less convenient.
I've just accepted my phone will be bulky now, so I double down and attach a magnetic wallet to it, and carry it in my hand or jacket pocket or bag rather than my pants pocket like I used to. During meetings it lies on the table rather then in my pants pocket. C'est la vie.
Maybe there's room in the world for a device people want, even if it's not the device the majority want? I mean I know Apple is just a small startup company with only a $4 trillion valuation, but maybe they could just do one thing that isn't maximally profitable once in a while.
What “the market wants” is a maximally addictive device. It’s a really low bar even if highly profitable. Bigger screens make it more exciting and addictive.
Just profoundly weird to me that small manufacturers can’t make small phones because they’re small and can’t pay for it, and large manufacturers can’t make it because…(checks notes)…they’re large and don’t want to pay for it even if there’s demand.
I don't think they even set out to make a small phone with the SE, they set out to make a cheap phone. They achieved that by reusing older generation iPhone tooling which just happened to be smaller, as was the style at the time. When they refreshed the SE line it too got larger as it graduated to using later generation tooling.
> They're giving the market the size people actually want.
Are they, though?
In my experience the smaller phones are almost always substantially worse products: they have several gigabytes less RAM, usually half the storage of the alternatives, often lack features like wireless charging, have a slower CPU, have a worse camera, and in general are made using cheaper materials.
We don't know what the market wants, because the market was never able to make a fair choice. It wasn't "big phone vs small phone", it was "big full-featured phone vs shitty watered-down small phone" - no wonder people "chose" for the big phones.
If Apple produced an Iphone SE with battery life that lasted, by making it a little thicker, then people would buy it IMO. The problem with the small phones is they arecreated on the premise that they should be crappy phones.
Of course everyone has a different version of what they consider crappy but bad battery life has got to be at the top of most people's crap-o-meter
Is it too big as a phone/SMS device? Yes. But as long as it's smaller than an equivalent digital camera or handheld gaming device or portable GPS it's still appropriately sized for how I mostly use it.
I suspect the iPhone Mini didn't sell well for reasons beyond people generally preferring larger phones, and suspect it might sell better today.
The biggest issue is that it was introduced in 2020 when many people were in lockdowns. A phone's portability was not as important, and people mainly using their phone at home on the couch likely preferred large screens more than usual.
The second issue is that the screens used slow pulse width modulation for dimming and could appear flickery for some users.
Finally, battery life was uncompetitive. Sony Xperia Compact models introduced years earlier had larger batteries. My guess is accepting a tiny bit more thickness would solve this problem.
This is solving an entirely different problem than you imagine. This is solving the problem of “no one can tell I use an iPhone when it’s in my purse/pocket”. This is a conspicuous bag that loudly announces “I’m carrying an iPhone”. That’s what it’s for.
Also, can you actually not fit a phone in your pocket? I can fit the biggest iPhone in my pocket just fine in all of my pants. Conversely my wife cannot, but that’s because women’s pockets are vestigial. She couldn’t fit the 3GS in most of her pockets either.
The price is incredible. Many phones on the market are cheaper than this accessory. Maybe the true market need is “people don't know how much disposable income I'm willing to throw at nonsense”.
> I can fit the biggest iPhone in my pocket just fine in all of my pants
New pro max fits perfectly fine in all my dressier trousers, it is rather big for some joggers though. Especially with Cuccinelli joggers it’s hard to get the phone to reliably stay in the pocket because they’re just not deep enough, so the top of the phone sticks through the opening.
The very easy solution to this has been to just buy joggers with reasonably sized pockets, Lululemon does not have this problem for example.
Anecdotally, just this past month I had a pair of good quality jeans from J. Crew wear out and tear at the pocket due to friction from my iPhone 13 Pro Max. The jeans are fairly lightly used.
I would love a smaller phone that doesn't kill my pants...
Phones have grown, but people are the same size as ever. It's as if the industry has collectively forgotten what ergonomics is. It's especially frustrating for me as someone who is a comparatively compact person and who still considers the phone a secondary device mostly for use outside.
I'm typing this on an iPhone SE 2022 (the last one with a home button). I'm done with iPhone as soon as I am no longer able to use this model. I don't like the new, oversized pieces of junk, and I also like the home button as opposed to the new Face ID/swipe up workflow.
For people that have good visual acuity, the smaller screen is ideal; it's such high resolution that you can fit a lot of things in a small area. For people that turn the font size up to 600, the bigger screen is obviously ideal, but nobody really wants to have to hold something that is bigger if they don't need it for the screen size. That's the market I fit in and Apple has abandoned at market, along with all common sense (re: liquid glass, the recent Apple/Google Gemini deal, etc.).
I wish the iPhone 12/13 mini had been a few mm thicker for a bigger battery, and had been in the Pro class of devices. As it stands they didn't have a good enough battery to last a day, and most people interested in smaller devices had probably just picked up the new SE that was released just half a year earlier.
I believe the issue is that with Jobs gone, Apple's design team is now apparently unable to continue their job. Instead of developing their own UI paradigm for small screens, they keep copying from Google Pixel both the UI ideas and the screen size. And now that they ran out of useful ideas, they turned everything transparent. Why make the iPhone look more like Apple Vision when people so obviously hate the latter? [1]
My prediction is that the age of AI and LLM assistance will make tiny devices the norm. Like those AI pins. Like Siri inside AirPods. Like Meta's AR glasses. But it seems that Apple is losing the race here. They lost their edge when it comes to developing new user interface paradigms.
This isn't a pragmatic item though. It's a fashion item. Similar to when Apple made the real gold Apple Watch. It's not a statement on the broader market, it's Apple associating its brand name with high fashion and prestige. They've done this for many years.
Yep. If someone is looking for a more functional item similar to this, Fjallraven sells a "Greenland Pocket" which I used to solve the "too much phone" problem. (And, unsurprisingly, costs many times less while doing much more.)
(I'm not associated with Fjallraven, I just enjoy this bag and think it makes the functionality of the Apple Pocket look even more ludicrous in comparison.)
> In my opinion, the fact that Apple is now selling a bag to carry your oversized phone around in, is an admission that they failed to make phones that are convenient to carry.
Can any woman with a purse or man with a fanny pack chime in and let us know if they've ever thought about putting their phones in their bags before?
Is this supposed to dispute the claim? A man putting his phone in his fanny pack would also signify apple's phones are inconvenient to carry. Apple releasing a 'solution' is them admitting it
Yes, I do this because when I'm using my bike to get into work as it often involves more than one set of clothes and swapping everything between different pockets is annoying so I have a big 'unipocket' fanny pack, my 6.7" phone is still cumbersome in there making digging out other items annoying. And when I'm wearing some pairs of pants and the phone isn't angled just right it will dig into my hip while walking up stairs until it's adjusted.
(and that's with a relatively budget android phone, smaller devices are a tiny niche of old less powerful devices that barely have support)
I have a fanny pack. I usually put my phone, a notebook, my wallet, some band-aids, and a couple diapers. Sometimes I add a charger if I think I'll need it. It's quite convenient, and I basically don't put anything in my pockets. Phone sits on its charger or in the bag, usually.
> In my opinion, the fact that Apple is now selling a bag to carry your oversized phone around in, is an admission that they failed to make phones that are convenient to carry.
Marketing 101: Create a customer. Even if phones were small enough that there was no need for such a product, Apple's marketing team would convince you that you needed this product for [reasons].
Same... back in my day, people worked to reduce the size of mobile phones. Call me old fashioned, but I still prefer small phones, which is why I still have an iPhone 12 mini.
> In my opinion, the fact that Apple is now selling a bag to carry your oversized phone around in, is an admission that they failed to make phones that are convenient to carry.
I think it's an admission that consumers prefer phones that are large enough that they have become inconvenient to carry in a pocket.
Some people have never had pockets big enough to comfortably fit even a smaller smartphone and have been carrying them in bags this whole time.
The worst part of this is the UI bloat that came along with it. Since there's no longer a need to consider smaller phones, everything got bigger and more padded also worsening the information density on larger phones.
Absolutely this. I was so excited for a second that they were re-branding and re-launching the mini. My 13 is getting long in the teeth, and won't be supported for OS updates in a few more years.
I was also hoping it was a small phone announcement but it not being part of a keynote didn't give me high hopes.
I've been on Android since day 1 but I'm thinking about switching to iPhone. If they ever made foldable (clamshell style, not book style) phone I would buy it immediately. I just want a small phone.
Yes I could get an Android foldable that already exists but I like to stick with Pixels and they don't have one yet and I'm kinda of done with Pixels. They are crap quality.
I had a look for covers, and I could only find silicone (?) or plastic sleeves and the 'handbag straps'. I think / suppose a lot of people just have their phone in their hand or on a table all the time, so why make it pocket sized?
"But no, Apple's phones just had to grow and grow like cancer ..."
Larger screens are better for advertising
Maybe there are more eyeballs on mobile than on larger form factors
Mobile OS are, with few exceptions, exclusively corporate-controlled. The corporations controlling the OS are enagaged in advertising services
Might make sense for them to try to increase mobile use for more tasks. Perhaps increasing screen size will help
I still have an old iPhone 4. Is it still possible to jailbreak and install some old software for experimentation. I'm not interested in using it to access Apple servers. All computers I own access the web through a TLS forward proxy. I see no advertising
One of the subtext reasons is that women’s’ clothing lacks proper pockets for whatever sexist reason, so a pocket you wear on the outside can seem like a great idea.
Surely you're not suggesting that modern women's fashion is governed by some vestigial sexism and not actual desires and wants of consumers who are otherwise spoiled for choice when it comes to any other property of their garments, whether functionality, style, colouring, percent coverage of any and all body parts, etc.
The current form factors are what people are buying. Even the Apple design team is surprised. I think even iPhone Air sales aren’t as good as they projected
But I have kids, and am less willing to compromise on camera quality than I am size.
I’d pay the same price for a smaller phone if the camera specs (and ideally battery life—go ahead and make it a little thicker, they’re too thin anyway) were the same as the larger phones, but they’re not.
I bet those kinds of differences are what do it for a lot of folks. They’re like me and would prefer smaller, all else being equal—but all else is typically not equal, even compared to standard iPhones and not the ultra-high-end ones.
I've been yelling into the void for smaller phones for ~15 years now. I get that I'm not the audience... I use a PC all day. I only use my phone for text communication, talking with my parents, maps, weather, and maybe a bit of web surfing while I'm waiting in line somewhere.
I see a lot of similarities between big cars and big phones: i.e. They're not really well suited to their most-common applications and there is also not much of another choice. The average person seems to just gobble it up without much thought though. Very strange from my perspective.
iPhones have always fit in my pockets. Even in different types of pants and different brands. This is already the case and I don't understand how the iPhone isn't already pocket sized.
If Google sold five million iPhones Mini it would be considered a smash hit. But because it's Apple it's considered a flop because of the ridiculous sales numbers of their other models.
It's kind of hilarious to me when the tech world collides with the high-end fashion world. On the one hand, I get how absurd this seems from a tech perspective. On the other hand, dropping a couple hundred dollars on a fashion item that will be trendy for a season among a certain group... it's no different from any other high-end fashion accessory. It's just that the two worlds so rarely overlap.
The fashion world's biggest sellers are handbags and shoes, which are practical purchases and tend to feature pretty intricate design details. This is a Speedo for a phone, and it makes Apple's already over-the-top descriptions of its products sound even more absurd.
I’m so glad there are some people willing to pay over $200 for “a piece of cloth” which I assume is a translation issue but it sounds uninspired- who knew your inspiration for a bag could be the material that most bags are made of?
I especially like how it’s sized to fit almost any iPhone ever made. So not only are you getting a bag made of cloth, for over $200 it’s not even custom fitted!
Anyway, this product isn’t for me. I suppose enough other people will buy it.
Edit: I suppose the short version is under $200 but my sentiment hasn’t changed. Perhaps I’m even more cranky now that increasing the length of the strap costs $80. That’s the same level of rip-off that Apple charges for increased SSD storage on their Macs.
I bought my current phone for $94 brand new. It can communicate with other devices over the air through literal magic. It has 2.5 million tiny lights, each independently controlled to be any color I want. It knows where I am anywhere on the planet. Through it, I can access an essentially infinite pool of entertainment, hail life-saving emergency services, perform monetary transactions, acquire food, etc.
This piece of cloth is twice the price and it can't even make phone calls.
Literally not magic, but millions of patents and innovations that we understand down to the quantum level.
That's why the Romans could never make huge advances, they didn't understand the fundamentals. They knew using coal to make swords gave them better, harder edges, but they found it by raw accident, not knowing that the iron and carbon were combining atomically.
This is like complaining about the $400 Hermès band. The "iPhone Pocket" is obviously a luxury item from a high end designer, of course it's going to be expensive.
With this you don’t even get the designer in the name.
Plus, I can see spending money for things that are nicer or specially designed. There is a huge quality difference between a Loungefly bag made out of synthetic material and a Coach bag of leather (or even Louis Vuitton, although that is a big step up in price). But this iPhone bag isn’t that- 3D knitting isn’t even that special, you could just as easily put a cheap Android phone in this bag, and I don’t think it’s going to be any more durable than a moderately priced crossbody or small purse.
Any tech focused social media site (or tech subcommunity on one) are having a fieldday poking fun and/or expressing how baffled they are.
In the tech world, this is a laughable proposition to most people even at $22.90 (though an order of magnitude more palatable at that price).
In the fast fashion world, this is pretty typical pricing for a seasonal trendy item with a "premium" brand/designer attached. Of course, that's predicated on the trend actually taking off, which isn't guaranteed. But all this social media activity around it in the tech circles is certainly boosting it's visibility to people in the fast fashion world that have iphones, which - going out on a limb here - wouldn't surprise me if it were a not-insignificant number.
Besides, at this price point vs what it is and what it costs to manufacture, even if it "flops" it's unlikely to be a big expense to write off.
Whether or not this tarnishes the Apple brand by shear ridiculousness of it remains to be seen, but Apple's general strategy in the post-Jobs era seems to be "Enshittify, just not as much/fast as everyone else and people wont want to leave even if they complain because we're still not as bas as everyone else"
At this point, you may as well get a powerpack for a mini and put it in one of these slings, you could have a crazy powerful machine in your "sock-et" sling thing here...
When the iPhone Air was just another huge phone...but thinner...smh. Apple should put up some page to check interest level in a smaller phone, and with enough interest, go manufacture it. If it is more expensive because economies of scale don't work out, but they create one that is small yet powerful, that's what I would buy at premium, because apparently compactness is a luxury.
And they say you can “create your own personalized color combination”. This is just literally just the pairing of the phone color and whatever color you pick for the bag. Who calls this a customized color combination?!
Hacker news is probably not Apple's core audience for this product.
I recently saw in Southeast Asia everybody had their phone with a strap going around their neck. Which is why Apple made a first party case recently that does this. Apple's making products to cater towards international trends. People paying a lot of money for a fabric product is not unheard of, simply take a walk around the nicer mall in your area with multi-thousand dollar handbags as a demonstration.
Apple is a tech company. Their last two tech products (Vision Pro and iPhone Air) were colossal and unexpected failures. The industry is holding it's breath.
We already know Apple can manufacture lifestyle products and market fashion to fashionable people - that's not the issue. We're starting to turn the corner on Apple's true desire to stop competing. They can't innovate like they used to with the iPad and the Apple Watch; the "new" Apple products today are expensive alternatives to superior products. Apple's most-lucrative investments are turning out to be the App Store and iCloud, software investments that have nothing to do with their hardware quality. So we're now in the awkward position of getting precisely zero innovative hardware and tons of useless and expensive bric-a-brak like iPhone Pockets and iPad laptop-cases to convince people the ecosystem doesn't need to compete to be fun.
On the one hand, yes, I am not the target audience for this in the same way I would ignore the Apple CPAP machine. On the other hand, this is setting a new low for Apple that hadn't been challenged since the polishing cloth debacle. Nothing here is innovative and it seems to confirm the industry's broader suspicion that Apple's business model is bankrupt.
People don't need to carry wallets anymore. No cash, no physical plastic credit card. It's little surprise that the purse will trend smaller as people need to carry less and less inside it.
Apple is hitting a revenue growth plateau, which means the time has come to expand into adjacent categories. In a world where people put their phones into purses, why not the purse? And at a Apple-brand price point to match?
Yeah, most Americans don't understand how ubiquitous this is in Asia. I doubt this will catch on in America because of how unsafe the cities are. I would never wear this in New York but I definitely would in Tokyo
Wow, that article is wild! Talk about "aged like milk." I'm not saying iPhone Pocket will be a hit as big as AirPods, but it goes to show how unimaginative early reactions can be.
Apple should experience the same surge of collective excitement everyone felt when they first saw the headline "iPhone Pocket," followed by the crushing disappointment of discovering it's just a grocery bag for your iPhone.
This makes me wonder how strong this thing is because on first sight it just asks for being cut by a random thug. Same goes for this strap thing they introduced.
I thought I won't be seeing anything else more ridiculous this decade regarding phones than people talking on speaker and holding them like piece of pie and here we are. There's no practicality whatsoever - I'd rather buy a strong case, probably that would cover both screen and cameras and a good urban backpack where I can put other stuff like physical wallet and a bottle of water, some charging cable.
It's more a gadget sold as a status symbol - bit like some cases had that small rounded window for apple logo.
I was out with my young coworkers and was absolutely baffled to see a bunch of them with slings for their phones. That was the only time I’d heard of such a thing until now. I kinda thought I’d drunkenly hallucinated it.
I was just talking to my wife about this, literally 5 minutes ago. I just moved from the 13 mini to the Air and am hating that it doesn't comfortably fit in my jeans, to the point where I might go return it today. My young cousin was wearing her iPhone on a cross body sling, and I was commenting that we've gotten to the point where the phones are so big that you need bags or extra things to carry it comfortably.
To a contemporary person their smartphone is probably the single most functionally important object they carry with them. People have always modified their clothes around common items, and then those modifications become subject to fashion trends and then eventually tradition themselves. Think like briefcases and wallets, but also japanese inro, european snuffboxes, decorative scabbards, etc.
This is more like an ancient and near universal practice being applied to a modern tool, rather than a totally new thing in itself.
You would think pants manufacturers would cotton on and start making decent phone pockets.
I wear jeans a lot and the back pockets are dangerous for phones, and the front pockets are uncomfortable when sitting if there's a phone in them. I want a phone pocket on the outside of the leg that's big enough for a phone but not too bulky/puffy.
For those surprised by the cost, this is an Issey Miyake product, and the price is in-line with that. It's no different than the $800+ Hermes leather Apple Watch straps.
Honestly… was having a conversation with my aunt about this last week. Knitting, crocheting, and quilting are all high-skill activities and no one charges enough for it.
Ha, I bet the muggers/phone thieves will have a field day.
I find it interesting that anybody is that surprised. Remember, this is the company that overcharges for SSDs (no they're not magical super SSDs that only Apple can make)/extra ram.
They charged $1000 for a monitor stand that's pretty much just a thin block of aluminium.
Its just a stiff translation of a marketing term. If you look up 一枚の布, you'll see a bunch of Miyake's clothes, where the whole gimmick is that they have no seams. A better translation probably would have been "inspired by the concept of seamless design"
Emphasizing a central concept/theme is common with Japanese brands, restaurants, events, etc. The translation is often slightly peculiar.
For example the Osaka Expo theme is "Designing Future Society for Our Lives". Or the retail store f.k.a. Tokyu Hands says, "Our concept is 'Create your own life in your own way with what is available within reach.'"
You can ask a traditional crafts person in most the world to make you a custom one with traditional patterns and it would be significantly better. Then they can feed their family for a least a week.
Apple isn't the only one who can make a giant sock!
Apple wants to charge $150 for this sock. My premium fair-trade version, woven using traditional indigenous practices from sustainably-grown biodegradable materials, blessed via an aboriginal ritual, complete with an autographed certificate of authenticity from a rural craftsperson who subsequently follows you on social media, will cost $200. Joke's on Apple.
I think the discussion is missing the real purpose of this (and which can't be achieved by other vendors) which is to normalize carrying your phone in a way that it's recording without your holding it in your hand to make it obvious that you're recording.
Nah I'll give them credit for that one, the dual knit band is what the Vision Pro should have shipped with in the first place. The original designs were the baffling ones, you had to choose between a fancy knitted band without any top support, or a cheap band with top support, but now you get the best of both in one. Which you really want for such a heavy headset.
I found the reddit ManyBaggers recently and there is a cottage industry of high-end bags that seem incredibly made for the price that are in no way luxury products.
It sucks that most people don’t see the pocket as the perfect overlap between fashion and tech. It’s the ideal Issey Miyake bag, it’s just something tech people won’t get.
That and the design misattributions. Even going in blind, if you actually read the Newsroom post and find the Store page, you can figure out that this isn’t even an Apple product. It’s an ISSEY MIYAKE product. If you end up finding any of the Vogue articles, it says right in the article that this was a design project initiated by and done within ISSEY MIYAKE by an ISSEY MIYAKE team, with some input from Apple employees they (proactively) approached and talked to.
I’m sure a lot of people get it, but “this is kinda neat” makes for less of a HN comment than [insert an elaborate rant on how ridiculous it is to charge markups for fashion stuff]
It sucks that most people don't see that Apple totally stole this (iPhone Pocket) after it became trendy. I bought it as a gift last year. It was very trendy then. I forgot the store's name. Just like apps, Apple steals fashion ideas.
Back when Steve Jobs was at Next, Apple released the Duo Dock. Instead of plugging your laptop into a docking station, you put it in a slot like a giant 3.5" floppy. It was different, sure, but I still don't know what design problem it solved.
I always have a little chuckle when I see people holding a tiny delicate smartphone in a massive fat case to protect it from the damage it will inevitably take in normal use. I always think that it would have been better if they had just made the phone itself a little tougher!
I'm not a native speaker, I tried googling and translating and still did not get what "ablative" means. Do you mind explaining like I'm 5 what does it mean please..
It's good to have a choice. I know I'm going to drop my phone from time to time, and sometimes it will be onto a hard surface, so I always get a case. I once managed to shatter the back glass while it was in a case, not sure how I managed that. Other people may be less clumsy, or more tolerant of living with damage, or more willing to pay for insurance or replacements.
It's also nice to be able to choose a texture. In my latest iteration, I got Apple's techwoven case, and I really like the feel compared to the usual silicone stuff, or bare metal. The texture also makes it easier to grip so maybe I'll drop it less. I can hope.
I haven't had a screen break in almost a decade now. I do buy flagship phones. So I don't think we need to make glass anymore thicker. But I also use screen protectors, and I had maybe 1 break in the last 10 years.
It shouldn't be legal to sell products under the name of a dead person (at the very least in cases where there's a strong chance buyers are given the impression that the person had something to do with production of the product).
> a collaboration between ISSEY MIYAKE and Apple
Issey Miyake died 3 years ago. He has not participated in this "collaboration".
I added a qualifier because these exist (see also pretty much every Japanese company), though if such a hypothetical law were implemented I'd honestly see no major moral gain in protecting the creation of new names like those either. If Strauss had decided to name his company something other than his own name it wouldn't have altered the quality of the product.
But no, those aren't comparable here because people today don't believe Henry designed the latest F150
Almost no one who actually uses one has ever been bothered by the charging port on the bottom.
If for some reason they ignore the low battery warning that occurs days before it runs out of power and it actually dies, 2 minutes on the charger will provide enough charge to get through the rest of their day.
Every Mac user I know complains about this regularly.
I don't own one, so I genuinely don't know, but when are you supposed to charge it then? I turn my laptop on when I start working, and I turn it off and slip it in my bag when I stop. My coworkers all seem to do the same. There is no time where the computer is on but I don't want to use the mouse. I have never charged my Logitech trackball while not also using it.
Yet it still continually comes up. You ever wonder why? It's because "Almost no one who actually uses one" is incredibly dismissive of the people who do have a problem with it. It's like being disabled, like blind people or wheelchair users, or foreign language support. In this case, it's neurodivergent people. It's "you're holding it wrong", it's Apple shuffling things under the bed and pretending they don't exist, just buy their shiny new thing and your problems go away. And consumers supporting them in that while Tim Cook laughs all the way to the bank.
Yeah, no one you know has that problem. For the people for whom it's a problem, it's a problem! You can dismiss them and say well they shouldn't be like that, or that they're being crazy, but at the end of the day, even after you've called them crazy and don't care about them, they're still them, and they still have to deal with a mouse that doesn't work for them. They still have to deal with the problem. Severe untreated ADHD means poor time management, low executive function, and zero impulse control. This means waiting until right when the project is due to start working on it, this means emotionally the user is panicking, so having to sit still and let it charge is physically painful.
Yes, neurotypicals don't have this issue. Good for them! Apple isn't the problem user's therapist, that user can't access healthcare anyway, and it's their problem, not yours.
The charging point on the bottom of the mouse is fine.
Phone thefts where I live (London, UK) are at an all time high. If ever a product was needed to self identify as a target this has to be it. "See this expensive iPod Sock? It's holding my expensive iPhone"...
[1] [Issey Miyake] was also inspired by fashion designer Madeleine Vionnet's use of geometric calculations and "a single piece of beautiful cloth".
The apple release chose some poor wording / translation in it's description 'Inspired by the concept of “a piece of cloth”', but that part actually makes _some_ sense in the context of Miyake's designs. I make no such claim about the product as a whole...
The people shocked by this are the same people who still believe Apple can sell a normal sized phone but isn’t doing so possibly just to piss us off. The thing is there are millions and millions of suckers out there who will suck these Sock™s and Pocket™s up in possibly dozens - some for the colours and some for the mere satisfaction of getting to pay Apple. If you venture across iForums and iSubs you will slowly start seeing comments about these fabric things are already curing haemorrhoids and insomnia, in anticipation (even before shipping starts).
Oh my... I'm just left wondering if Apple releasing a giant sock for your phone equals to the proverbial moment of your taxi driver giving you advice on stocks to buy.
The problem is not that ordinary clothes pockets aren't "designed to fit any iPhone". The problem is many iPhones no longer fit inside many pockets.
For now at least, Apple is still selling to people who wear clothes, and their devices are becoming less compatible with those clothes. This is what a "workaround" or "kludge" looks like in the non-software world, and the consumer gets to pay for it to boot.
I take the pants that have insufficient pockets to a tailor, and ask them to extend the depth of the phone pocket. You can even ask them to do the extension in phone size if you want to restrict its movement in your pocket. On average I've needed about a 3" extension which both restricts lateral phone movement, and also carries it low enough on my thigh that the phone doesn't pinch into my hip when I sit down.
$30 or so later you'll have an integrated Pholster and don't have to carry another thing around with you. For $200 you should be able to update all the pants you have that lack a proper pocket. This is also an incredibly easy thing to sew yourself, by hand, while you watch TV. $30 for a tailor to do the first pair to give you a template to follow, $50 at a craft store will get you some decent scissors, needle, thread, and a yard of whatever material you like. You'll butcher the first pair of pants, but the second, will be better and the third will be perfect.
This does look like a gag to me too, but 3D knitting technology is interesting. I have a pair of carbon-plate marathon race shoes made with 3D knitting. They're very light and very comfortable, with stretch in some axes and stiffness in others as needed, no seams but form-fit around my foot in compound curves.
Instead of making the thing out of 2D pieces of fabric, even stretchy knit fabric, and sewing those planar shapes together into something 3D, they made this as one continuous knit object that adds and drops stitches to give it shape without seams. The machines and programs that manipulate the yarn and partial garments, tying knots at crazy speeds to create something 3-dimensional out of something 1-dimensional, are just astonishing. Equally astonishing is the fact that with two sticks and their hands, it's not that challenging for a human knitter to do the same. I think that "knit a sock" is one of the most challenging tasks to give a humanoid robot.
They bought a bunch of 3D knitting machines to make Vision Pro headstraps, and since that isn't selling I guess they're using the excess capacity to make iPhone socks.
I don't want to kink shame anyone, but I'd be concerned about getting all of that fuzzy caught in someone's throat. Unless I missed the version made of silk.
I do not use Apple products so I do not have an opinion about them.
One thing I know is that they are z making beast. The fact that they could sell a monitor stand for ~1000 € and wheels for something I do not remember for I think 200 €, and now this, means that they are genuises.
The next product Apple will unveil will be an iPhone case made of human fingernails from those who have tried to climb this K-shaped economic ladder and failed. It'll be a steal at only $500 a pop.
Issey Miyake was the most interesting high end clothing designer, many of his high fashion designs didn’t sync with any trends from other fashion designers, they were instead highly sculptural and informed by art rather than design.
He was interested in fashion enabled by technology, and there is the long standing connection between him and Steve Jobs.
It is okay to dismiss high fashion brands that don’t suit your needs, this is a niche thing that doesn’t appeal to everyone. It makes sense as a part of the Apple product portfolio that is fashion conscious.
This pattern repeats itself in "high" fashion quite a lot. Simple, ridiculous things that are relatively trivial to make, yet massively expensive due to hype/brand/fomo. I guess it wouldn't exist if people didn't pay for it, but it also shows how people don't value craftsmanship so much as status symbols.
Show them two identical products, one from Apple, one from Auntie down the street, and they'll pick Apple and tell you the other is inferior.
I'm sure theirs is better than anything I could make myself in all sorts of little ways. I'm just not sure it would be $140 better.
On the other hand, if I did make one for myself (which I won't - one purse is enough) it would probably have a 2-color brioche stitch or something like that for more visual interest.
Same company makes a Jelly Max, which is a larger volume than an iPhone, but about 2cm shorter in height and 1cm shorter in width than what I think is the smallest-screen iPhone currently for sale (16e).
1. It gets the camera out of your pocket, which could give your ai assistant more context about what you're doing.
2. The high price tag helps get the word out (e.g. this thread) and invites third parties to compete with cheaper and more practical versions. This makes sense if Apple's goal is #1
Pretty much every other Apple product has appeal to every demographic: young, older, professional, student, all walks of life - as long as you can afford it.
This product has a very narrow and limited target customer base.
I’m not going to walk into the office with my fuchsia Apple sock around my shoulders.
Amazing that Apple would prominently highlight a product made with 3D knitting, as I’ve just gotten in to machine knitting as a hobby after buying an old Brother KH-910 on eBay and modding with with an AYAB (all yarns are beautiful)[1] open hardware/software knitting machine board from the AYAB discord. I just got a second needle bed for my knitting machine (KR-850 ribber) so I can do double bed jacquard knitting and other more advanced stuff.
But this has also led me down the rabbit hole learning about industrial machine knitting and 3d “wholegarment” knitting, invented by Masahiro Shima first in the 1960’s for autonomous glove knitting and later for entire full size garments in the 1990’s. [2,3,4] That’s what Apple is using in this product (now two companies offer 3D knitting machines according to Wikipedia). In traditional machine knitting you still have to make multiple flat sections and stitch them together, but in 3D Wholegarment knitting the machine is capable of knitting an entire complex garment, bag, utility item, whatever all in one go fully autonomously. Shima Seiki invented a new kind of knitting needle and expanded the system from two needle beds to four to enable the most advanced form of Wholegarment knitting. What I find fascinating about this technology is that it makes it possible to run a garment manufacturing business which is almost fully autonomous, eliminating the need for often poorly treated overseas labor [5], and potentially simplifying business operations dramatically.
The piece linked in [2] talks to an Italian knitting company that was able to keep manufacturing domestic thanks to these machines, and this helps explain how Apple can offer these bags as made in Japan in these volumes. I daydream about getting a used Mach2x and parking it somewhere to make it run 24/7 to make warm garments for the homeless around the Bay Area, perhaps with a low volume boutique fashion brand which helps pay for it. Anyway they’re really neat machines and this has been my little autistic hyperfocus lately, I thought I would share!
I think apple is short on some cash and they are trying to get some quick money. The issue is now you will see this ugly looking “case” all over the streets and especially among women, it might be the next Stanley cup all over again.
The thrill I had clicking on this link, thinking I was about to see the next evolution of the iPhone mini, an even smaller, minimalist iPhone, only to discover it's just a completely useless novelty product.
The is the ultimate Rincewind accessory - you can put a half-brick in it and wallop people, without having to take off one of your socks. In a pinch you can even just wallop people with your phone, if no bricks are to hand.
> I already have a pocket for my phone, it’s my.. pocket.
As Steve Jobs intended.
(Like, really. I think the original "one more thing" presentation was also so powerful became he could just casually pull some next-gen tech out of his pocket)
given Apple's track record in the past, this is the first indicator that there will soon be an annual line of iPhones that will not fit in these slings
This is gonna launch first in Taipei (among other stores) and looks a lot like the bags people use to carry their boba tea in here. It's a bit expensive for a drink bag though.
If this is released on April Fools' I would just gig and skip it as a joke. If it is not then I would just think Apple is a stupid money grabbing machine just like EA
I do wish they sold a double-side magsafe that you can put on your shirt/jacket so I can just clip my iPhone on my chest. Pro Max is too big for my pockets.
Aww. I was hoping for a super mini flip or foldable low-power minimalist iPhone, but it's another weird Apple hipster fashion accessory. Very disappointing.
They expect me to walk around with my phone in a long sock? A fannypack even looks more appealing.. also, isn’t this a sign that phones are getting too big?
here i am replying from my iphone air. My favorite iphone to date, by far. I “downgraded” from a 16 pro. Phone feels like a feather. Fits so nicely into my cross body bag as well!
hilarious seeing so many folk here turning their nose up at spending so much on an accessory from a well known designer brand. Apple devices could be considered by many (particularly outside of Californian circles) as of the same ilk.
Like many, I was disappointed this wasn't a new iPhone mini.
$30 for a pack of six iPod socks always seemed like a horrible value to me in the mid-2000s. I'm not denying they were fun and whimsical, but as cases, they didn't protect your iPod or allow you to use it while inside them. It felt like a rip-off two decades ago, and these are 30-46 times more expensive per-sock.
I know Apple does things like this to position themselves as a luxury brand and as a shareholder I still do not buy the idea stunts like these are what's best for the company. At best, a small segment of the target demographic will see this as a curiosity at the cost of further damage to Apple's reputation. People will see this as further proof Apple is more concerned with products and services which rip off their customers and developers, as opposed to providing real value.
I will be the first to welcome Apple bringing back some semblance of fun and whimsy into their product line-up, and this is not the way to do it.
The long strap version is too short on that model. Purse straps hang to hip level for a reason. Hanging at the hip makes reaching in substantially more ergonomic.
Also lmao at the photo of the little bag strapped to the other larger bag. Yo dawg, I heard you like bags.
Also they're super ugly. But I guess that's "subjective".
Meanwhile, can I have multi-message selection back in (iPad) Mail? Whoever decided to axe that feature apparently has a spam-free inbox.
This company has become such a joke. Maybe Apple should start being concerned about building computers that Just Work well again rather than continuing to flounder after Cook's obsession with bad fashion.
I suppose the underlying message here is that, if you can no longer innovate, shill overpriced purses instead.
Quote: “ Inspired by the concept of ‘a piece of cloth.’” Is this some kind of joke? If it were April 1st I’d assume the whole article is meant for comedic effect.
This is yet another sign of the K Shaped economy. While I am homeless through no fault of my own, people can buy a $200 sweater pocket for their iphone.
I genuinely find it hilarious that everyone has such a strong opinion about a random accessory. Seriously, who cares? Why is it that any company could make any random thing an everyone shrugs their shoulders and either likes it or ignores it but when apple makes something everyone’s knickers get in a twist?
Why do y’all care so much about something you’d just walk past and ignore in literally any other scenario?
Hope. For better or worse tech nerds (me included) maintain a hopeful optimism that Apple will make good products.
For the longest time they were the only tech company that really cared about design, and most people don't encounter good or thoughtful design or ever really see behind the scenes or think about design and designers.
Jony Ive and Steve Jobs really glorified design I think rightly in many ways, and elevated what industrial design could be in technology and engineering companies that historically had treated design as something you paid an external agency to do.
Most people don't know Dieter Rams or Donald Norman, tech people maybe know Edward Tufte. Loads of people know Jony Ive.
Unfortunately the only good ideas Apple have had this decade are the M-series processors, which are fantastic. Their software and hardware are otherwise lacking, across all categories.
So, when Apple releases _anything_ people hope it's (a return to) good, of all the consumer product makers I think Apple has the highest level of goodwill, people are excited and hopeful that the next thing they release will be great, and are disappointed when it isn't.
This predisposes that people are currently on average disappointed with apple products - which is just so far from the truth I don’t know where to start. Sure, a small percentage of tech nerds like us might be, but we are so far from the norm.
My pension. When "jokes" like this hit the frontpage of HN, I am reminded that every dollar I put into my 401k will never see the light of day. The FTC should be mauling Apple for resting on anticompetitive laurels, but instead they're letting them grow fat and become a high-risk business. If you're not filing for retirement tomorrow, you should be considering the consequences this will have when you turn 65. Letting Apple fuck off and manufacture high-margin designer is terrible for America in the long-term.
The economy is not as simple as "don't buy the product then" at Apple's scale. Look at how John Deere transitioned from a blue-chip brand to an Oracle-level scourge on humanity. I don't want Apple to head down that same road, but we might be too late to save them at this point.
I’m sorry but you can’t expect me to take you seriously if your position is a small collab with a Japanese design studio to make an iphone accessory is a sign of them tanking the economy…
I’m not trying to be glib here, but this genuinely looks like something a satirical blog might post.
I’m not a product or UI/UX designer but when you have to design a new, ridiculous way to carry a phone your company’s manufacturing and selling, I’d have thought that’s your sign to focus on making it less awkward to carry. “Think different”, indeed.
"Crafted in Japan, iPhone Pocket features a singular 3D-knitted construction that is the result of research and development carried out at ISSEY MIYAKE."
How would a 2d knitted construction look like? Lmfao.
Didn't we turn the clocks back recently? Maybe someone just gave it too big a push... oh god, so it's only April 2025? I don't want to go through all that again.
As silly a product as this is, the fact that it made it to the front page of Hacker News makes it a bigger deal than it actually is.
It's not like it's sitting on Apple's frontpage. It's not some major product announcement. To get to the `/newsroom` page where the product was listed, you have to literally scroll to the bottom of https://apple.com and click a tiny link.
I will however comment on the price and utter lack of functionality. This product is utter garbage--a total niche for art goblins (said lovingly).
I don't have an iPhone and will not get one at least until Google kills ReVanced, nor would I ever get a sock for my phone but wow, I fully expect this to be hit. Not only in this collaboration, it will spawn a thousand copies as well.
Everything about this is perfect. The Japanese origin, the idea, high tech manufacturing (single cloth, 3d knitted, whatever), the cheap material, the timing... I am in awe. The kind of shock and awe that militaries aim to deliver.
Apple has ingested a million tiny current trends of craftsmanship, story telling, accessorizing, ground them into this magnificent triumph of corporate capitalism. This is why commies never even stood a chance.
Or a 2000 euro Hermes Apple Watch with bracelet, but it comes with special wallpaper you don’t get if you just buy the strap or 1000 euro bracelet separately
The strap and bracelet are both really nice though, do recommend if you aren’t very price sensitive.
I was excited when I saw the headline -- I thought Apple had finally brought back a smaller iPhone, like the Mini.
But nope. It's just an ugly phone purse.
Look, it's bad enough that the much-hyped Vision Pro didn't take off (1), and the much-hyped iPhone Air didn't take off (2), and default Apple apps will soon have ads (3), and the latest MacOS is full of issues that would have been caught if they did any QA on it before release (4)... but Tim Apple is also throwing bribes at Trump every chance he gets (5)...
Irredentist pro-war language, Tim Cook? I am so done with Apple. They knew what they did when they chose the words; they certainly spent thousands of hours deliberating them.
This is Lebensraum with Chinese Characteristics.
> "The term is often used to avoid invoking sensitivities over the political status of Taiwan.[16] Contrastingly, it has been used in reference to Chinese irredentism in nationalist contexts, such as the notion that China should reclaim its "lost territories" to create a Greater China.[17][18]"
With respect, this topic is of immense interest and significance to a large number of us on HN. The many engaged and enthusiastic responses attest to that.
Is it off-topic to talk about the adversarial role of tech companies in a potential war, one that would be devastating to many of us? About the entanglements of their supply chains? Have I truly, in your judgement, derailed this thread away from curious discussion? Because, this subthread looks to me comparatively thoughtful (if mildly heated), while the more narrowly-construed topic of discussion is a polyester fashion accessory.
To paraphrase Anakin Skywalker: "from my point of view, it's the iPhone Pocket that's generic and uncurious".
It's a large step up from "it's used for job postings in (or closely working with) mainland China", to "it's featured in Apple product announcements targeting a global audience of millions".
Has it been used in an Apple product announcement before? My search is imperfect, but I actually can't find an example (on their /newsroom subdomain).
As recently as two months ago, with the Airphone announcement, they weren't doing this:
It's not a "loose geographical region". It's usually denotes precisely the PRC (People's Republic of China, including mainland China and the special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macao) together with the ROC (Republic of China, usually known as Taiwan).
> Just like how they removed all the gay dating apps in China yesterday (by request of the government of course).
Those apps have always been illegal in China. Of course, one could say Apple should not operate in China (and this is perhaps true), but they cannot both operate there and break the law.
The iPhone is a Chinese product. China ultimately controls whether or not the iPhone exists. No place else on earth can manufacture 20,000 iPhones an hour, 24/7/365.
Making two hundred million devices of the iPhone’s complexity and quality is not a trivial matter, and takes tens of thousands of skilled (and experienced) workers. Almost all of those people are Chinese, in China, subject to Chinese law. Apple cannot meaningfully fight Chinese law.
“sit comfortably” is a big stretch here. I imagine it must upset him as much or perhaps more than it does you and I. We, after all, can speak publicly about how upsetting it is. He cannot.
This is why, as a gay man, I give people a look when they ask why I still rant about gay rights "even though you guys have marriage and stuff now".
It's 2025, almost 2026 and we're still doing this shit. I don't care if you think I'm icky, I think other people are icky sometimes but I don't try to stop them from existing for it. People are entitled to be who they are.
I didn't know that tim cook was gay and here is one message from wikipedia I want to quote
> In June 2014, Cook attended San Francisco's gay pride parade along with a delegation of Apple staff.[85] On October 30, Cook publicly came out as gay in an editorial for Bloomberg Business, saying, "I'm proud to be gay, and I consider being gay among the greatest gifts God has given me."[86] While it had been reported in early 2011 that Cook was gay,[87][88] at the time, Cook tried to keep his personal life private
I feel like Tim Cook should be a man of his words and try to actually help the community he is proud to be in but I am sure that investors might not be happy but that just goes on to show that maybe even some CEO's could be puppets of shareholders and can be forced to do things solely for profit where their heart might not lie.
I think that another point is that shareholders can also be puppets of CEO's in the case of Elon musk 1 Trillion $ deal shows that imo
I feel like we live in the times where morality can be side-lined for profit and be celebrated. The whole idea why even people can be puppets of each other could be because they get profits and power and influence because of it (basically money most of the times)
But what power do those CEO's have if they can't stand for what they think is right or educate themselves on these matters.
There is no middle ground. Mentioning "Greater China" isn't neutral. It's precisely the idea of considering "Greater China" as neutral that is de facto siding with the PRC.
No, this is Apple being confident that the USA will drop Taiwan and that this and that siding with China is the "responsible" thing to do.
Nothing pro war about it. Read history books instead of making assumptions. It is referring to the mainland, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau as a whole. It became popular with the rise of China. Try any business newspaper in the 90s. It is less relevant now as Hong Kong and Macau are now part of China.
It isn’t unlike Benelux, or Scandinavia, or Iberian, or Balkan, or Gulf countries.
The CCP has Apple hostage. Their products are (effectively) all made there.
China has more control over Apple than the US does, at present. They are, of course, in crash override priority mode trying to change that, but nowhere else on earth can manufacture (on average) 20,000 iPhones per hour, 24/7/365. (TBH it’s probably closer to 50k per hour in the months up to release day.)
The iPhone is a Chinese product, made by tens of thousands of Chinese people, on machines in China, subject to Chinese jurisdiction and law. That’s an uncomfortable fact for the US economy.
If Apple doesn’t do exactly what China wants them to do, the iPhone does not exist, and Apple as we know it today does not exist.
US government has FAR more control over Apple as a company. China only has control of the Chinese operations. The president is personally beefing with companies and buying stakes in them. The tariffs alone could have severely hurt Apple, but Apple bent over backwards to appease the president. The US government can simply request an app be removed and Apple and Google will do it worldwide.
China does not have that power over Apple. China can threaten Apple but they have already diversified their manufacturing to other countries so China does not have a strangle hold on the supply line.
"Pro-war" seems like an odd assertion here. They're recognizing the status quo in a reasonably neutral way, which seems anti-war to me.
It seems like you're advocating for Western powers to take a position, using either soft or hard power, on a war that already ended many decades ago. Sounds quite a bit like imperialism to me, and pretty far from being anti-war.
An anti-war position, at least from the perspective of a Westerner and Western companies, is more like, you guys lost, suck it up and stop asking us to intervene on your behalf.
Push back, as in this thread, can change which hierarchies are accepted and which aren't.
In particular, the use of "Greater China" normalizes corporate acquiescence to Beijing's explicitly revisionist policy preferences.
Taiwan is an independent nation. It isn't lost. And all free nations should intervene whenever the right to self-determination of another is threatened.
They've been using this term for years. It's nothing new and nothing unique to Apple.
Don't forget that the "we are the only legitimate Chinese government and we own it all" attitude is shared by both Chinese governments. The PRC claims Taiwan, but Taiwan claims all of China as well.
It is unfortunate that iPhones cannot be made anywhere else in the world. No other country has the right tooling, workforce, or skill set, at that volume.
China made a strategic decision to go deep there, and the rest of the world decided it was post-industrial
of the 193 members of the UN, only 12 (6%) recognize Taiwan as a country.
the Kuomintang lost the war. its effectively the same as if the confederacy retreated to the Florida keys and China maintained a policy of deliberate ambiguity.
Why is UN recognition the metric here and not, like, idk the fact that Taiwan is a liberal democracy with the rule of law and freedom of speech and not a hypercapitalist dictatorship that disappears dissidents?
Your comment is the actual prowar propaganda though in my europeean eyes.
The US is worse than China in many aspects, from forever wars to climate over colonialism to fascism and support for an ongoing extremely violent genocide on over a hundred thousand civilians, - where is China geonociding hundreds a week right now? Yeah nowhere, but the US is doing that every decade.
Incredible to see this angle that 'the good guys' are bowing down to bad China in this context when you have so much poverty, political repression and lack of gay rights, abortion etc in many right wing states to straight up hyper right wing terrorism targeting vulnerable populations every year.
I feel like in geo-politics. No country can be good.
Personally, I feel like america still has (had) hope with zohran mamdani but after the recent american shutdown, I would consider democratic party to be an extension of republican party or not doing anything radical except bernie,aoc, zohran and some other people.
I feel like America could have a hope to swing whereas china doesn't imo.
although, I feel like what is happening is that people made (short term?) decisions earlier generations earlier which lead us to where we are today where any country over-all needs a radical change as both europe and america and a lot of other countries need to radicalize what they are doing to give hope to the youngsters
Personally I feel like we shouldn't care much about US or chinese products but rather the ideologies of the product creators if we are worried about things and I think this is one of the reasons I love open source so much.
>The US is worse than China in many aspects, from forever wars to climate over colonialism to fascism and support for an ongoing extremely violent genocide on over a hundred thousand civilians.
My man, the US and China are more or less the exact same here with the exception of forever wars.
Climate? China pollutes like crazy, and so does the US.
Colonialism? Maybe not in the same vein but China does engage in actions to other nations, such as Macau, Hong Kong, and Taiwan that could be classified as colonialism.
Fascism? Well yeah both countries are pretty much openly fascist right now.
Support for an ongoing extremely violent genocide of over a hundred thousand people? Yeah the US and China are both complicit there. In fact, in China, you're speaking about the regime itself, with context to the ongoing genocide of Uyghur people.
Looks like you almost have this habit of explaining/talking about things 'as a European', particularly when bringing up USA in the context of international relations like now...
I guess it's OK — I'm European too, for example — but it does seem like you're doing it to imply that your views are somehow (at least relatively more) popular among, or representative of, well, Europeans. But now that we're making such massive generalisations, I'd claim that well-educated English-speaking Europeans are often likelier to be more familiar with the views and internal debates among Americans than those of many of their fellow Europeans, and that you're probably no exception.
As for your comment, had you not addressed it to 'you Americans', I'd be hard-pressed to tell it apart from a pretty standard-issue American Left (or 'Progressive') rant, perhaps somewhere from the younger and more identitarian part of that crowd, for example (despite some of the quasi-tankie undertones). While I'll admit that scoffing at things like pro-life policies and/or American poverty is certainly easier and more common throughout the political spectra in (Western) Europe, I'd say your cringe-inducing bothsidesism with USA and China falls closer to the crackpot left camp in Europe as well.
Europe contains multitudes, and undoubtedly for some but not all, up until now at least, it has been a bit too easy to comfortably observe and judge things for so long as a world-political bystander from under the US nuclear umbrella, typically further from the Russian border too — whether you were an insular French with casual contempt for all things 'Yankee', a German atomic-phobic pacifist (or worse, a far-right, Pro-Putin knuckle dragger) from that 'European powerhouse' heated with Russian non-renewables, or even a Swede from the world's leading moral superpower, or something like that, anyway... ;)
I sometimes wonder what the comments will look like here when China invades/blockades Taiwan, and I suspect they will look a lot like this. Lots of US whataboutism. Note that the OP doesn’t mention the US at all.
Objects have to earn the right to exist. We make so much stuff. Most of it unnecessary. Stuff that will soon be cluttering your home and then end up in a landfill.
This is not a product that deserves to exist. It is not made from quality materials ( Nylon (14%), Polyester (85%), Polyurethane (1%)). It is not innovative. It is questionable whether it solves its primary use case particularly well.
What makes this particularly objectionable is that it is from a design house that usually makes quality garments. And then they stoop to making this crap, slapping their designer label on it and then exploit ghastly people who don't know any better to waste tons of money on it.
This is pissing on Issey Miyake's grave.
It's November, but I still had to make sure the date on the page wasn't April 1st.
Exactly my reaction. I hate this. I hate that someone thought of it and that it exists. I have no idea if it will sell, but I was like "no way, that cannot be a real launch from Apple"
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I came here to say, how I wish it was an article from The Onion.
Im not sure if you have spent any time in Asia but they love to have little throwaway bags for their to go drinks so they stay cold - and they hang in the same way. This looks like the exact same thing but pop an iphone in it.
Wild waste of materials and design.
What I am curious about is whether women in France, Greater China, Italy, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, the UK, and the U.S (where this product is going to be launched) don't use hand-bags? If not, do they hold the phones in their hands or keep it in their pockets? In India or the middle-east, I've never seen women carry their phones in anything but their hand-bags / clutches.
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Yes, you're right. People in Asia do like to use small bags for their phones or lipsticks. But those little bags are usually really cute or nicely designed, not like this one. Collaborate with Issey Miyake? Seriously?
Are you familiar with Miyake's work? He did a lot of innovative design with synthetics, including the entire Pleats Please line.
To some degree, but junk is junk even if it says Issey Miyake on it. But at the price they are asking I'd insist on higher quality materials. Not this junk.
It is like those horrible Louis Vuitton plastic bags. Yes they are expensive and probably better made than most plastic bags, but they are mass produced plastic bags. You can get nice, custom, handmade bags for a fraction of what this pointless junk goes for.
(The only reason I know about Issey Miyake is because years ago I happened to buy a couple of handmade linen suits while visiting Japan. And only later discovered that these suits were "a big deal" when some fashion people I shared an office with saw me wear them as "casual office clothes". To me they were comfortable linen suits that were obviously hand dyed. And they weren't even that expensive)
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Synthetic fabrics are perfectly capable of being high quality. Buzz Rickson aren't making their MA-1s out of junk.
The MA-1 "works" under a relatively narrow set of conditions that I don't see most days. I tried. It is a miserable garment for how and where I live.
I'm not saying synthetic materials are always bad. I own a few jackets in synthetic materials that are good, but I have gone through a lot that are rubbish. For jackets it is more about the technical design than the exact material. I have had lots of expensive jackets that just don't work for my use cases. And a few that do. It is trial and error since I have no idea why some jackets just don't work.
I live in a place where it rains heavily, and in the winter it is often cold, and I spend a lot of time outside being physically active. This means that the challenge is to find jackets that can deal with heavy rain, cold, physical abrasion, and perhaps most important of all: moisture management.
If you spend a lot of time being physically active outside in all kinds of bad weather, you tend to start caring a lot about what materials you wear. Best case for sub-par garments: they start to smell. Worst case: you freeze because your clothes can't manage moisture.
But for what is more or less a glorified sock, at that price I am not buying a piece of plastic. I'd expect more pleasant natural materials.
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MA-1s are inner lined with a 100% cotton/wool mix. The outer is nylon because synthetic fabrics are generally good for waterproofing (waterproofing is always a trade-off of quality over function) & also just because bombers are generally nylon, but a big part of their construction is using quality non-synthetic fabrics wherever they can to ensure overall quality.
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Except microplastics rub off and penetrate the skin barrier.
Hadn't heard Issey Miyake mentioned in over a decade. He was an important designer in the 1980s, and died in 2022. Known for running completed garments through a pleating machine.
Looking at that thing, the overall impression is "a phone so big and heavy it needs its own shoulder bag?"
There are at least two graves I can think of that this is pissing on.
What do you mean? Nylon and polyester can be extremely durable, that’s always been their appeal. A knitted pocket is very likely to be a BIFL item even moreso than typical cotton or wool fabrics unless they’re specifically designed to be hard wearing, like canvas. That and the fact that it’s designed to fit any size and model of phone means it’s likely to be significantly less wasteful than putting your phone in a high end leather case that will age out when you upgrade.
Apple is clearly trying to experiment with more textile elements on its products, like with the Apple Watch band and FineWoven/tech woven cases to move away from using environmentally damaging leather and cheap feeling silicon. Stuff like this, sold in small lots, is how you test out whether people are into it before trying to work it into a product meant to sell to hundreds of millions of people.
> It is questionable whether it solves its primary use case particularly well.
The primary use case is to show off that you can afford useless pretentious crap. It fulfils this role perfectly well.
When you put it like that I can find no fault with your argument :-)
> Objects have to earn the right to exist.
Yes, and that is what a free market is for
I don’t understand this either but you and I are obviously not the target market
I'd object to the notion of a free market. Free and fair markets don't actually exist in the way we like to think. Pretty much every kind of business I've been involved in has different strata of rules for different players.
Try to set up a HFT business. Or try to do anything interesting in telecom. Once you have cleared the capital and regulatory hurdles what kills you is that you need special relationships.
In this case, I doubt this product would become a success without the two brand names behind it, and completely astronomical amounts of financial might. They will sell literal tons of these even if people ultimately find out that they are junk. On its own, this is a bargain bin-liner.
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You hate on Louis Vuitton but have you ever tried one? Have you looked at all the designs they have? I think LV is better than Hermes bags with that horrendous closure they have on the Birkin and other bags. LV has cool colorful designs also in their ready to wear. You might object to the branding but the bags work very well and are designed well in terms of how easy it is to get stuff in and out and if you don't throw it around the canvas can last a long time. Hermes might have nice Pogo leather and so on but that doesn't mean that closure is worth the hassle IMO.
Also IDK what to think about the iPhone Pocket. It LOOKS like a hassle to get stuff in and out of it but if they have somehow managed to make it easy, maybe it's well designed. If not then I agree with you the product is probably garbage.
They hate on Louis Vuitton plastic bags, not Louis Vuitton in general, and they are entirely right to do so. It's the same with their perfumes, keychains, wallets and most other small accessories. All products which are far too expensive for what they are but remain reachable by the average person to capitalise on people who want the brand but can't afford the "real" products.
Buying entry level products from luxury brands is hard to justify. At their price point, you can generally get a far better equivalent product from a brand with less appeal. It's especially true with Louis Vuitton where the brand's cachet has been severely diluted by how many people own their bags.
Other random LV fact: Louis Vuitton was a lock maker, and the locks he made were advertised as “unpickable” (more advertising than reality, sadly.) He even had Houdini try to pick one. No, this has nothing to do with TFA, but I like locks.
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> We BUY so much stuff. Most of it unnecessary.
Fixed it.
You're right, of course, but I don't think blame rests solely on the individual consumer here... I guess it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem, wherein Apple makes $200 knitted iPhone scrotes because they know people will line up to buy it, and people will line up to buy $200 knitted iPhone scrotes because Apple made them.
And people have brand loyalty to Apple stuff because quality, or design, or something... but for a product like this, which to me is prima facie a ridiculous, impractical, high-priced, fast-fashion item, you know that the marketers are cashing in on that brand loyalty almost exclusively (in the absence of any intrinsic value).
Half-baked thoughts, I'm sure people have written properly about this. But the conclusion I leap to is that marketing people are the great Satan here. Fuck those guys.
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The tech industry is basically entirely run on Advertising. Google, Facebook, even Apple owe a huge chunk of their revenue to Ads.
Clearly Ads work. You cannot blame the individual who has been brainwashed, addicted to buying things, by the hyper-capitalist advertising mega-monopolies around us. They are victims too.
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>It is not made from quality materials ( Nylon (14%), Polyester (85%), Polyurethane (1%))
Polyamids like Nylon are some of the highest quality and most durable fabrics in the world, with some of the best material characteristics fabrics can have.
Given the constraints of the product and looking at it from an engineering standpoint, these are the materials you want for a product like this. Flexible, durable and resistant to weather. I do not see what other materials you would use to achieve a better quality product.
That said, it is of course a stupid fashion accessories. The world is full of them.
I've never seen a bag similar to this so from that perspective it's a bit innovative.
I am so very very far from the target market here though.
Reminds me of waterproof phone pouches.
Beatifully said and you are right. I will get mine on Temu.
and then exploit ghastly people who don't know any better to waste tons of money on it.
It's attempting to be a Veblen Good.
First thing I my mind went to was the iPod Socks. I still have my old ipods in them... Only me? Ok :|
To be fair a lot of garments from Issey Miyake are made from similar material.
I see you haven't seen designer collabs from ikea and target then.
But… but… it’s a 3D-knitted construction!
None of that matters, Apple drones will buy it.
>It is questionable whether it solves its primary use case particularly well.
It solves the problem of "how do I flaunt the fact I carry an iPhone to everyone around me"
It's a conversation piece and way to flaunt your wealth and status by uncovering a iPhone 17 Pro Max S+ Duo XTX from it when asked.
> It is not made from quality materials ( Nylon (14%), Polyester (85%), Polyurethane (1%)). It is not innovative. It is questionable whether it solves its primary use case particularly well.
It is impossible for Apple to innovate. It's way too much work to compete with BYD/Tesla on real things like Electric Cars.
It's a LOT easier just to extract money from idiots who pay top dollar for 'fashion'. They will market this as the Balenciaga of phone bags, to differentiate it from the $2 phone bags that will appear on Temu next week (or they are already there; Apple is slowly catching up after a few years).
I got excited for a moment, thought it was a new line of iPhone Mini -- you know, the actual handheld iPhones. I still use my 13 Mini.
This was the biggest letdown of clicking a link since my last Rickroll in the early 2000's
Me too! I thought it was an announcement for an iPhone that actually fit in your pocket! The phones are too damned big!
No No, your pockets are too small
-Apple
(See "you're holding it wrong" for an historical reference)
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Has there even been a decently-sized phone since the Sony Compacts? And the iPhone minis of course.
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Exactly what I thought!
And instead of making a practical phone that would fit my pocket, we get this stupid, overpriced sock. What a joke.
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I'm replying to this on a 16 Pro (not Max) and it's a perfectly portable size imo
The Maxes are really huge tho
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Same.
Meanwhile this looks like this sort of man-purse that in my corner of the world is referred to as something that loosely translates to "quiver of righteousness".
It’s about 4x the price of a man purse, even a brand-name like Nike.
lol! What corner is that?
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Us iPhone 13 Mini holdouts need to get a little louder. It feels like I find more and more on the internet every month -- I'm pretty sure there're far more than just "dozens of us" who want a reasonably-sized phone.
You too?!? Where can we congregate. Apart from no Live Translation for AirPods 13mini has everything you want. In a tiny form factor.
Indeed, how exciting a phone would be that fit in... you know... bear with me... your pants' pocket you already have... lol
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Not just you with this. Was hoping they brought back the mini instead we got iPod sock version 2.
It does initially look like a stupid and Insanely Facile fashion statement, I agree, but I think the iPod sock v2 could be one of the most practical and cleverly designed products Apple has ever released.
It's clearly intended to be used as bait for phone snatchers. That iPhone dangling loose a foot below your arm in free air is just too tempting… no thief can resist. But, then! You start swinging that motherf*cker, and your iPhone becomes a deadly weapon before any potential thief has time to think.
Third parties are sure to fill the market with the most obvious additions, e.g. metal spikes, studs, mildly poison-laced hooks. I assume there will also be training courses scheduled in Apple Stores around the world to clarify this accessory's purpose — not to mention, to teach proper technique and the ethical considerations of when to stop striking with the iPhone Pocket to avoid manslaughter charges in your region.
This is a move by Apple to subtly promote armed, deceptive martial arts as self-defence. To promote the Bushido spirit as a practical coping mechanism in these stressful times, and to empower its users in everyday situations. I for one think it's Insanely Great, and right on that bold frontier of innovation and Thinking Different that Apple built its reputation on.
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Me too, I still have my iPhone SE, I was hoping they would bring back some smaller version of the iPhone + Touch ID, I refuse to upgrade just because of the lack of Touch ID
The camera is what finally pried my SE out of my hands, replaced by a 17 Pro. Hate it. Heavy, no more Touch ID, forced into iOS 26. Even the button placement drives me bananas. The amount of times I accidentally take a screenshot because I’m trying to adjust volume...
Still have my SE. When I pick it up, it’s striking just how much better it feels.
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Yeah, I'm on a 3rd gen SE and hoping when it finally dies there will be some sort of similar option.
Not hating on people who do, but I just do not use my phone enough to justify the hassle of having a freakin' cinder block in my pocket.
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Out of curiosity, what makes you attached to Touch ID? Face ID is one of my favorite things about my SE to mini upgrade.
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My iPhone 13 mini broke last week and I was pleasantly surprised that AppleCare replaced it. "4 more years!"
I got my 13 mini battery replaced the other day, instead of upgrading.
No regrets, and saved $1800.
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Rather than a standalone phone, I'd love a small companion iPhone that uses the same number liked the Apple watch. Just a pocket-sized phone with a camera and the ability to use iPhone apps that I could take places where I don't want or need the full slab-sized behemoth.
Yeah I was imagining it being more like the "Game Boy Pocket"
I got rickrolled by Claude last year if it makes you feel any better.
Since it’s clearly April 1st inside the reality distortion field, I’m disappointed there are no throwback designs sized for the mini and se at the bottom of the page.
[dead]
Just some trivia (and an aside):
The collaboration is with Issey Miyake. Steve Jobs black turtlenecks was Issey Miyakes:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jenniferhicks/2022/08/10/heres-...
(As an aside, I swear by pants from the Issey Miyake Homme Plissé collection. Since investing in some pairs about 10 years ago, I have hardly worn anything else—no other pants match their comfort. The iPhone Pocket is of course ridiculous anyway.)
The pants cost around 500 bucks? I don't necessarily believe that a priori spending $500 on a pair of pants is irrational, but I really struggle to imagine any pair of pants being worth that much money unless they are lined with gold or something.
I usually buy cheap clothes and mend them and ten years for a pair of pants isn't unusual for me. I probably haven't spent $500 dollars on clothes in a year ever in my entire life (except maybe the year I bought a suit for getting married).
I guess I'm just genuinely curious how you found yourself in the position of even contemplating $500 for pants.
> but I really struggle to imagine any pair of pants being worth that much money unless they are lined with gold or something.
It depends on how much you earn. I don’t mind spending tens of thousands on Loro Piana cashmere because it’s really nice, but at my income level the price difference between that and Zara is pretty much immaterial.
Keep in mind that HN is packed with people with salaries above $1M/yr and entrepreneurs with way higher income levels.
A few years ago I too would’ve considered $500 for pants to be absurd, at this point I just go to a tailor and pay slightly more than that but save tons of time in the long term and always have perfect fitting pants. The time savings alone are tremendous, after getting a pair fitted properly I can just order new ones whenever I need without having to spend hours going through shops looking for the right pair of pants.
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I never knew what a difference good pants can make. I usually just bought my pants from H&M/other retailers or Amazon. I usually bought what I considered good value pants for like $30-80. I then, out of curiosity, bought pants that were 2-4 times as expensive (~$150) and it really made a difference. I never really liked the pants I had… they never fit right… they felt very uncomfortable. The new pants I got about 2 years ago (the more expensive ones) were very very different. Very comfy. They also had a lot of nice features that I never knew I needed but that I now want by default…
- A button that just "clicks". Most pants I usually owned had a traditional pants button. Those more expensive ones had buttons that just "clicked". Away goes the worry about a button falling off while you are on the go. - Pockets with hidden zippers: My pants have pockets and in those pockets are smaller pockets with a zipper. Perfect to store things that are small and easily lost.
There are more "features" but those are the important ones. The most important feature is just the material that is used. I barely feel it. Also the company that makes those pants makes other things as well. I ordered a lot of cloths by now and the amazing thing is that everything they make fits me perfectly. I don't know how they do it… When I usually buy pants I have to try on like 10 pants to find one that fits. Even if I pick the "correct" size.
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Different strokes for different folks. I'm a fashion lover but a fan of cheap cars, and I could equally say something similar about people who drive new luxury cars when there's plenty of reliable functionality to be had under $10k. There's a lot of craftsmanship that goes into nice clothes, and you can get way more expensive than $500. And fashion is a form of art in a way. What makes a painting worth thousands of dollars?
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$500 for something you might wear for a decade straight? A brand-new pair of Levis at JC Penny is gonna run you like $90 anyways. It's not that much more expensive.
But also, quality has diminishing returns in basically every category. At the low end, it's extremely efficient to improve the quality of your product and charge a bit more. At the high end, you can't make any more inexpensive moves to set yourself apart, so you use higher end materials, fabrication methods, and workers.
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I don't necessarily believe that a priori spending $500 on a pair of pants is irrational, but I really struggle to imagine any pair of pants being worth that much money unless they are lined with gold or something.
I don't think Steve Jobs went shopping for pants. Nor do many of the people who buy this sort of garment. They either have an assistant who buys things for them, whose goal is to keep them happy and not blow a predetermined budget, or they go to a store and sit in a nice suite where a personal shopper suggests things to them. In either scenario the price of individual items probably don't even get a mention.
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I believe the word for it is "rich".
They save you from buying 10 pairs at $100. They not only are durable, including not fraying, etc., but keep their form and color, and they have a beautiful form and color to begin with. You get what you pay for (if you buy the right $500 pants).
Someone outside IT might say, why pay for a Macbook when you can buy a $100 Chromebook? Why use Vim or Emacs when you can use Notepad/TextEdit (though those all cost the same!).
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I once paid $1000 for some sneakers. I’m still regularly wearing them 7 years later. I’ve bought $50/$100 and they never last that long. It was an insane purchase at the time, done in a moment of jet lagged madness when my shoes fell apart in an airport. But over time it’s turned out to be a great investment. Smart, comfortable, well made.
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I don't necessarily believe that a priori spending $500 on a pair of pants is irrational, but I really struggle to imagine any pair of pants being worth that much money
Maybe he's amortizing them.
He says they've lasted ten years, so that's $50/year.
If they last another ten, that's $25/year.
Oh, great. Now I've invented Pants-as-a-Service.
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decent hand-sewn raw denim made in the EU/US jeans are minimum $500. and i'm talking non-designer. just fair wages and good materials.
Don't rule out until you've tried it. High end clothing (not just brand name, but real advanced stuff) is pretty amazing in how it makes you feel. I'm inclined to spend on anything I interact with, and clothes is pretty big interaction.
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Yeah, that is wild. I can't imagine spending that kind of money on pants.
Pro-tip. You can buy them used for a significant discount to rrp.
Gee... And I thought $5 spent at Starbucks was outrageous...
statistically, inheritance
This is kind of getting into the weeds a little bit but for me and a lot of others luxury items can be fun to own. You can get an affinity for certain designers style, whether it's Gucci, Louis Vuitton or Balenciaga. The items are ridiculously expensive sometimes but it's kind of a tough line to balance because the fact that they cost so much make them more special. So how cheap should they be before they don't feel as special anymore? Is it all a bit irrational? I guess. There isn't a clear definitive defense for luxury items I think other than the feeling they can give. Some people can spend all their income on luxury items rather than other discretionary items because it's the most fun to them.
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I always liked this story because they seemed to connect person to person.
Sadly, Jobs died in 2011, and Miyake in 2022.
I guess you could call this a small homage, but it feels different in that their founders are gone and it's just corp to corp dealings now.
I got excited until I saw they cost $600? Once in a while I'm reminded we exist in very different universes. Still trying to justify splurging on common projects 2 years later.
in my experience as a tech guy who got into fashion and then after several years went back to not caring: Sneakers are the product category with the least differentiation in value-for-money between the high end (especially designer, but also not-designer-but-still-expensive like common projects) both in terms of aesthetics and quality/durability. You're paying $300 more for a 10% better product. Jeans, outerwear, knits, boots, you can more easily justify that cost
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I am wondering what you call consumption that feeds $499 designer margins on polyester like that, while so many people can barely afford to scrape by day to day.
Income inequality is a phrase that pathologizes what appears to be a universal truth. In all types of economic and political systems (after we left the forest, and probably while we were still in the forest), some people have been desperately poor while other people are not. What would be interesting is a single counterexample of sustained "income equality."
That said, our current degree of inequality and the particular way it is distributed seems to be unusual and remarkable. But pointing to someone having a hard time is, IMO, not a critique of that.
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Have you tried Costco pants? They're pretty good.
I had a coworker who lost a lot of weight and showed up at work one day wearing new clothes and looking sharp. The pants were from Costco. I have since gone and bought a few pairs of pants from them. They feel fairly high quality, made of sturdy and comfortable materials, and are wife-approved. And of course they are very inexpensive.
I'm sure expensive pants have their benefits but no matter how much money I have, I will always baby expensive things, and it's very inconvenient to baby clothes (e.g. must be dry cleaned, can't use a washer or dryer, can't risk getting stains on it). There are good reasons why dads gets their clothes from Costco.
Big fan of the Homme Plisse stuff but I do wish it wasn’t polyester.
It is a nice way to wear essentially a fancy pair of joggers while people assume you’re being somewhat smart though.
These ones, right?
https://us.isseymiyake.com/products/hp56-jf362
I will look suspiciously at my Le Sel bottle after this collab.
The brushstroke pants look really attractive
Who cares, Steve would have hated to sell a sock for $200, really makes you think how much they pay the chinese for the iphone
Sorry but 500 eur for polyester pants? Not even cotton?
You misunderstand, it's 20EUR for the trousers; 480 for the name printed on them. (And why you even want a name/logo printed on them...)
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I looked it up, and Issey Mikaye seems to have died in 2022.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Issey_Miyake
I wonder
... would jobs have approved?
... would issey miyake have approved?
I'm pretty confident the answer on both counts would be "no".
(This teminds me of a show I once saw where various design students were given the task to design things. Philippe Starck was the judge. One of the students made a iPhone cover and Starck almost blew a gasket. I don't remember exactly what he said when he saw it. But he pointed out that the iPhone itself was a beautiful design so defacing it with an ugly piece of plastic was just a horrific waste of resources.
He also said something about objects having to deserve to exist -- though that was probably in a talk he gave at some point. Where he pointed out that his famous Alessi sitrus press was a good example of a pointless object that shouldn't exist. At least it looked good, but it was a pretty poor sitrus press).
Since Steve's famous turtle neck was from Issey Miyake and he wanted everyone at Apple to wear an Issey Miyake vest as a uniform [1], I think he might have been into this. This is also the man who launched the iPod sock.
[1]: https://www.npr.org/2022/08/10/1116769827/the-story-of-steve...
Had to double check the date here. This really is indistinguishable from an April 1 post.
I get the sentiment but was this actually some big launch announcement? When I look at the store online, you have to dig a bit just to even find the product.
It's embarassing enough that it exists as a product, regardless of the size of the announcement.
I checked the url a couple of times to make sure it really was legit... I was certain there'd be like 3 p's or a non visible character in there...
$149.95 (U.S.), and the long strap design at $229.95 (U.S.) plus tax. What a joke.
Most expensive sock ever.
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It's a joke even before looking at the price. "3D-knitted" WTF is that? Isn't all knitting in "3D"?
It's a crappy handbag, and it's just for a phone.
It looks like they had to use models to advertise it because they couldn't use "everyday people" in "everyday situations" to advertise because it looks like it would be garbage in that scenario.
Is Apple expanding to the "luxury" fashion market?
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I imagine that a lot of poor people will pay this, in order to try to show off as rich
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I've been seeing the headline going around today and have been assuming all day that it's some trending joke post. Nope!
Really? Why? I think it fits right in. Apple products are heavily designed, and this is a fashion item that adds something.
Inspired by the concept of "a piece of cloth", we give you this "3d-knitted" piece of cloth to put your phone in. It's kind of difficult to actually get a phone into and out of, and it looks a bit ridiculous, but don't worry, it's only $160 (unless you want the long strap).
Like, if you were doing this as an April Fools joke post, what would you even change?
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Not GP, but it’s probably a personal thing.
I remember the iPod socks. Now make them bigger. Now stretch them out a bunch. Now make it look a little more like Borat’s speedo.
Now charge like 7x-10x what the iPod socks cost.
If the first place I had seen this was not a direct link to apple.com I too would’ve thought this was a complete joke.
Kind of like those fashions where the model wears some kind of artistic interpretation of a yellow flower when really they look like they're wearing more of an art installation than functional clothing?
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https://www.apple.com/shop/product/hs8p2zm/a/iphone-pocket-b...
https://media.gq-magazine.co.uk/photos/5f8efdba9b357099d70a9...
Suspiciously missing if the color shown in the press release, the one closely resembling the one Borat is using.
If you change the "Size" on the store page from "Long" to "Short", the yellow is there. https://www.apple.com/shop/product/hs8r2zm/a/iphone-pocket-b...
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Damn you! Can't unsee it now. ;)
I saw it too before clicking the second link!
lol I came here to post this too - perfect
https://images.macrumors.com/t/h94LDq8hcQZUYyGkE_wGSaDm1bE=/...
https://cdn.motor1.com/images/mgl/9mQnP0/s3/fiat-multipla-19...
Awww... I was so much hoping for an iPhone that will fit into my pocket. The 1st iPhone SE was the perfect form factor. But no, Apple's phones just had to grow and grow and grow like cancer ...
In my opinion, the fact that Apple is now selling a bag to carry your oversized phone around in, is an admission that they failed to make phones that are convenient to carry.
> they failed to make phones that are convenient to carry.
I loved the iPhone SE and small phones generally, but at the same time I realize Apple's not failing at anything. They're giving the market the size people actually want. The smaller phones don't sell nearly as well. Most people prefer a bigger phone even if carrying it is less convenient.
I've just accepted my phone will be bulky now, so I double down and attach a magnetic wallet to it, and carry it in my hand or jacket pocket or bag rather than my pants pocket like I used to. During meetings it lies on the table rather then in my pants pocket. C'est la vie.
Maybe there's room in the world for a device people want, even if it's not the device the majority want? I mean I know Apple is just a small startup company with only a $4 trillion valuation, but maybe they could just do one thing that isn't maximally profitable once in a while.
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What “the market wants” is a maximally addictive device. It’s a really low bar even if highly profitable. Bigger screens make it more exciting and addictive.
Just profoundly weird to me that small manufacturers can’t make small phones because they’re small and can’t pay for it, and large manufacturers can’t make it because…(checks notes)…they’re large and don’t want to pay for it even if there’s demand.
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> They're giving the market the size people actually want.
No - call it what it is. They are catering to the largest market segments and ignoring the smaller segments who desire smaller phones.
Reasoning as to why is another thing, but it doesn't negate the existence of the segment who does want one.
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"iPhone 16e Sales Lag Behind SE Models"
Ooops ?
https://www.macrumors.com/2025/06/03/iphone-16e-sales-lag-be...
Looks like the market did like the SE size.
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I don't think they even set out to make a small phone with the SE, they set out to make a cheap phone. They achieved that by reusing older generation iPhone tooling which just happened to be smaller, as was the style at the time. When they refreshed the SE line it too got larger as it graduated to using later generation tooling.
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While small iPhones don’t sell nearly as well as larger sizes, I suspect they are still a very profitable product as Apple keeps releasing them.
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> They're giving the market the size people actually want.
Are they, though?
In my experience the smaller phones are almost always substantially worse products: they have several gigabytes less RAM, usually half the storage of the alternatives, often lack features like wireless charging, have a slower CPU, have a worse camera, and in general are made using cheaper materials.
We don't know what the market wants, because the market was never able to make a fair choice. It wasn't "big phone vs small phone", it was "big full-featured phone vs shitty watered-down small phone" - no wonder people "chose" for the big phones.
Mind that there is also a feedback loop: applications only work correctly on bigger phone screens.
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> They're giving the market the size people actually want.
Some people clear still want those small phones, just not enough for Apple's profit margins.
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If Apple produced an Iphone SE with battery life that lasted, by making it a little thicker, then people would buy it IMO. The problem with the small phones is they arecreated on the premise that they should be crappy phones.
Of course everyone has a different version of what they consider crappy but bad battery life has got to be at the top of most people's crap-o-meter
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Is it too big as a phone/SMS device? Yes. But as long as it's smaller than an equivalent digital camera or handheld gaming device or portable GPS it's still appropriately sized for how I mostly use it.
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Can’t really want a smaller modern iPhone if no one is selling it.
I suspect the iPhone Mini didn't sell well for reasons beyond people generally preferring larger phones, and suspect it might sell better today.
The biggest issue is that it was introduced in 2020 when many people were in lockdowns. A phone's portability was not as important, and people mainly using their phone at home on the couch likely preferred large screens more than usual.
The second issue is that the screens used slow pulse width modulation for dimming and could appear flickery for some users.
Finally, battery life was uncompetitive. Sony Xperia Compact models introduced years earlier had larger batteries. My guess is accepting a tiny bit more thickness would solve this problem.
Foldables…
And yet, they sell, so people do want them.
This is solving an entirely different problem than you imagine. This is solving the problem of “no one can tell I use an iPhone when it’s in my purse/pocket”. This is a conspicuous bag that loudly announces “I’m carrying an iPhone”. That’s what it’s for.
Also, can you actually not fit a phone in your pocket? I can fit the biggest iPhone in my pocket just fine in all of my pants. Conversely my wife cannot, but that’s because women’s pockets are vestigial. She couldn’t fit the 3GS in most of her pockets either.
The price is incredible. Many phones on the market are cheaper than this accessory. Maybe the true market need is “people don't know how much disposable income I'm willing to throw at nonsense”.
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> I can fit the biggest iPhone in my pocket just fine in all of my pants
New pro max fits perfectly fine in all my dressier trousers, it is rather big for some joggers though. Especially with Cuccinelli joggers it’s hard to get the phone to reliably stay in the pocket because they’re just not deep enough, so the top of the phone sticks through the opening.
The very easy solution to this has been to just buy joggers with reasonably sized pockets, Lululemon does not have this problem for example.
Anecdotally, just this past month I had a pair of good quality jeans from J. Crew wear out and tear at the pocket due to friction from my iPhone 13 Pro Max. The jeans are fairly lightly used.
I would love a smaller phone that doesn't kill my pants...
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Phones have grown, but people are the same size as ever. It's as if the industry has collectively forgotten what ergonomics is. It's especially frustrating for me as someone who is a comparatively compact person and who still considers the phone a secondary device mostly for use outside.
The industry has given consumers the choice, and they overwhelmingly prefer to spend their money on the larger phones.
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Literally this.
I'm typing this on an iPhone SE 2022 (the last one with a home button). I'm done with iPhone as soon as I am no longer able to use this model. I don't like the new, oversized pieces of junk, and I also like the home button as opposed to the new Face ID/swipe up workflow.
For people that have good visual acuity, the smaller screen is ideal; it's such high resolution that you can fit a lot of things in a small area. For people that turn the font size up to 600, the bigger screen is obviously ideal, but nobody really wants to have to hold something that is bigger if they don't need it for the screen size. That's the market I fit in and Apple has abandoned at market, along with all common sense (re: liquid glass, the recent Apple/Google Gemini deal, etc.).
I wish the iPhone 12/13 mini had been a few mm thicker for a bigger battery, and had been in the Pro class of devices. As it stands they didn't have a good enough battery to last a day, and most people interested in smaller devices had probably just picked up the new SE that was released just half a year earlier.
I believe the issue is that with Jobs gone, Apple's design team is now apparently unable to continue their job. Instead of developing their own UI paradigm for small screens, they keep copying from Google Pixel both the UI ideas and the screen size. And now that they ran out of useful ideas, they turned everything transparent. Why make the iPhone look more like Apple Vision when people so obviously hate the latter? [1]
My prediction is that the age of AI and LLM assistance will make tiny devices the norm. Like those AI pins. Like Siri inside AirPods. Like Meta's AR glasses. But it seems that Apple is losing the race here. They lost their edge when it comes to developing new user interface paradigms.
EDIT: [1] Bloomberg claims 10-15% return rate, which would be massive: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-02-18/apple-... (for comparison, Galaxus reports 2% as normal for Smartphones and <5% for Meta's Quest)
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This isn't a pragmatic item though. It's a fashion item. Similar to when Apple made the real gold Apple Watch. It's not a statement on the broader market, it's Apple associating its brand name with high fashion and prestige. They've done this for many years.
Yep. If someone is looking for a more functional item similar to this, Fjallraven sells a "Greenland Pocket" which I used to solve the "too much phone" problem. (And, unsurprisingly, costs many times less while doing much more.)
(I'm not associated with Fjallraven, I just enjoy this bag and think it makes the functionality of the Apple Pocket look even more ludicrous in comparison.)
> In my opinion, the fact that Apple is now selling a bag to carry your oversized phone around in, is an admission that they failed to make phones that are convenient to carry.
Can any woman with a purse or man with a fanny pack chime in and let us know if they've ever thought about putting their phones in their bags before?
Blazers and sport coats.
They’re purses you can wear that also tend to make you look better.
They’re friggin’ great, and even the largest smart phones easily fit their hip pockets.
No more keys poking you through jeans pockets. No more sitting on your wallet. Even room for a smallish paperback book.
We never should have moved away from them. They’re a utility garment.
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Is this supposed to dispute the claim? A man putting his phone in his fanny pack would also signify apple's phones are inconvenient to carry. Apple releasing a 'solution' is them admitting it
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Yes, I do this because when I'm using my bike to get into work as it often involves more than one set of clothes and swapping everything between different pockets is annoying so I have a big 'unipocket' fanny pack, my 6.7" phone is still cumbersome in there making digging out other items annoying. And when I'm wearing some pairs of pants and the phone isn't angled just right it will dig into my hip while walking up stairs until it's adjusted. (and that's with a relatively budget android phone, smaller devices are a tiny niche of old less powerful devices that barely have support)
I have a fanny pack. I usually put my phone, a notebook, my wallet, some band-aids, and a couple diapers. Sometimes I add a charger if I think I'll need it. It's quite convenient, and I basically don't put anything in my pockets. Phone sits on its charger or in the bag, usually.
> In my opinion, the fact that Apple is now selling a bag to carry your oversized phone around in, is an admission that they failed to make phones that are convenient to carry.
Marketing 101: Create a customer. Even if phones were small enough that there was no need for such a product, Apple's marketing team would convince you that you needed this product for [reasons].
It’s no such admission anyway, it’s just a random fashion accessory. Everyone takes everything apple does too seriously lol.
Same. I got so excited by the thought of a new iPhone that would fit in my pocket, but clicked on the link to see… phone socks?
Same... back in my day, people worked to reduce the size of mobile phones. Call me old fashioned, but I still prefer small phones, which is why I still have an iPhone 12 mini.
This is not any kind of admission about phone sizes. This is an "exclusive" tie-in with a high fashion brand, nothing more.
> In my opinion, the fact that Apple is now selling a bag to carry your oversized phone around in, is an admission that they failed to make phones that are convenient to carry.
I think it's an admission that consumers prefer phones that are large enough that they have become inconvenient to carry in a pocket.
Some people have never had pockets big enough to comfortably fit even a smaller smartphone and have been carrying them in bags this whole time.
I also thought it was like Gameboy Pocket - another small form iPhone. Yeah not too excited about whatever this sling is. I already have pockets
> I was so much hoping for an iPhone that will fit into my pocket
Yes, and I was about to write "so some Android manufacturer will copy Apple and deliver a phone of the size that was common 10 years ago."
Almost all of them are too large and they weight too much. 200 grams, why?
The worst part of this is the UI bloat that came along with it. Since there's no longer a need to consider smaller phones, everything got bigger and more padded also worsening the information density on larger phones.
Absolutely this. I was so excited for a second that they were re-branding and re-launching the mini. My 13 is getting long in the teeth, and won't be supported for OS updates in a few more years.
Instead it's an ugly, phone-only purse.
Bleh.
Apple can pry my iPhone 13 Mini from my cold, dead, normal-sized hands.
I was also hoping it was a small phone announcement but it not being part of a keynote didn't give me high hopes.
I've been on Android since day 1 but I'm thinking about switching to iPhone. If they ever made foldable (clamshell style, not book style) phone I would buy it immediately. I just want a small phone.
Yes I could get an Android foldable that already exists but I like to stick with Pixels and they don't have one yet and I'm kinda of done with Pixels. They are crap quality.
I too thought we were finally getting a reasonable sized phone again.
Instead it’s an overpriced Apple branded jock strap.
Yep We need iPhone mini. Every year the phone is bigger which is worse. Android is the same.
I had a look for covers, and I could only find silicone (?) or plastic sleeves and the 'handbag straps'. I think / suppose a lot of people just have their phone in their hand or on a table all the time, so why make it pocket sized?
"But no, Apple's phones just had to grow and grow like cancer ..."
Larger screens are better for advertising
Maybe there are more eyeballs on mobile than on larger form factors
Mobile OS are, with few exceptions, exclusively corporate-controlled. The corporations controlling the OS are enagaged in advertising services
Might make sense for them to try to increase mobile use for more tasks. Perhaps increasing screen size will help
I still have an old iPhone 4. Is it still possible to jailbreak and install some old software for experimentation. I'm not interested in using it to access Apple servers. All computers I own access the web through a TLS forward proxy. I see no advertising
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One of the subtext reasons is that women’s’ clothing lacks proper pockets for whatever sexist reason, so a pocket you wear on the outside can seem like a great idea.
Surely you're not suggesting that modern women's fashion is governed by some vestigial sexism and not actual desires and wants of consumers who are otherwise spoiled for choice when it comes to any other property of their garments, whether functionality, style, colouring, percent coverage of any and all body parts, etc.
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The current form factors are what people are buying. Even the Apple design team is surprised. I think even iPhone Air sales aren’t as good as they projected
Reading this on a first gen SE. Still works great.
Since it can’t get the lastest OS many apps don’t install, effectively making it the type of dumb phone I always wanted.
>that they failed to make phones that are convenient to carry.
It would appear people simply don't want them based on mini 13 and other sales.
I want a tiny phone.
But I have kids, and am less willing to compromise on camera quality than I am size.
I’d pay the same price for a smaller phone if the camera specs (and ideally battery life—go ahead and make it a little thicker, they’re too thin anyway) were the same as the larger phones, but they’re not.
I bet those kinds of differences are what do it for a lot of folks. They’re like me and would prefer smaller, all else being equal—but all else is typically not equal, even compared to standard iPhones and not the ultra-high-end ones.
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I've been yelling into the void for smaller phones for ~15 years now. I get that I'm not the audience... I use a PC all day. I only use my phone for text communication, talking with my parents, maps, weather, and maybe a bit of web surfing while I'm waiting in line somewhere.
I see a lot of similarities between big cars and big phones: i.e. They're not really well suited to their most-common applications and there is also not much of another choice. The average person seems to just gobble it up without much thought though. Very strange from my perspective.
When I had to buy an iPhone 13 because support for the 5s ended, my hands hurt from the big phone...
I too was expecting a small iPhone. But this giant sock is hilarious. What are they thinking.
It’s a fancy colostomy bag for all your digital shit
Why sell someone a small phone when you could sell them a large phone and a watch?
I'm surprised trouser pocket sizes have not adapted to the larger phones.
I'm surprised hand sizes haven't either. Er, Apple is, apparently.
iPhones have always fit in my pockets. Even in different types of pants and different brands. This is already the case and I don't understand how the iPhone isn't already pocket sized.
I share the frustration. But apparently small phones don't sell.
> small phones don't sell
It's all relative.
If Google sold five million iPhones Mini it would be considered a smash hit. But because it's Apple it's considered a flop because of the ridiculous sales numbers of their other models.
Apple sold 10-15 million of the minis each year, with a marketing budget of approximately zero.
The problem is that everyone believed Tim Cook when he claimed that this is a failure.
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opens cupboard
iPhone 3GS
Galaxy S3
Sony XZ1 Compact
iPhone SE 2016
iPhone SE 2020
iPhone SE 2022
Unihertz Atom
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I was hoping for a zfold
I remember there was the iphone12 mini but it failed as people didn't want it. It was quite good honestly.
In Soviet Russia, pocket fit phone.
> speaks to the bond between iPhone and its user
With this phrasing, does it feel like iPhone owns its user?
It's kind of hilarious to me when the tech world collides with the high-end fashion world. On the one hand, I get how absurd this seems from a tech perspective. On the other hand, dropping a couple hundred dollars on a fashion item that will be trendy for a season among a certain group... it's no different from any other high-end fashion accessory. It's just that the two worlds so rarely overlap.
You can see just from this thread how the tech world reacts to the fashion world.
The fashion world's biggest sellers are handbags and shoes, which are practical purchases and tend to feature pretty intricate design details. This is a Speedo for a phone, and it makes Apple's already over-the-top descriptions of its products sound even more absurd.
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HN commenter logic: 'if I don't understand it, this is clearly wrong'
'If someone doesn't spend money irrationally like I spend money irrationally its bad'
There is indeed a blind spot.
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I still firmly believe that it’s made for Chinese market, where it will sell really well.
It’s only being sold in one US store so your belief is not unfounded.
The Google Glass/DVF collaboration was a notable example of cringe in this area.
https://archive.nytimes.com/runway.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09...
Compare with this Prada smartphone bag for 1470USD I don't know how many they sell every year but there's an audience.
https://www.prada.com/us/en/p/prada-speedrock-re-nylon-and-l...
These always overlap in dumb ways. Had to microwave my $400 Ferragamo wallet to kill the NFC chip inside that kept making my phone buzz.
Apple has been a fashion brand for a few decades now.
Apple is a fashion company when you think about it
I’m so glad there are some people willing to pay over $200 for “a piece of cloth” which I assume is a translation issue but it sounds uninspired- who knew your inspiration for a bag could be the material that most bags are made of?
I especially like how it’s sized to fit almost any iPhone ever made. So not only are you getting a bag made of cloth, for over $200 it’s not even custom fitted!
Anyway, this product isn’t for me. I suppose enough other people will buy it.
Edit: I suppose the short version is under $200 but my sentiment hasn’t changed. Perhaps I’m even more cranky now that increasing the length of the strap costs $80. That’s the same level of rip-off that Apple charges for increased SSD storage on their Macs.
I bought my current phone for $94 brand new. It can communicate with other devices over the air through literal magic. It has 2.5 million tiny lights, each independently controlled to be any color I want. It knows where I am anywhere on the planet. Through it, I can access an essentially infinite pool of entertainment, hail life-saving emergency services, perform monetary transactions, acquire food, etc.
This piece of cloth is twice the price and it can't even make phone calls.
Literally not magic, but millions of patents and innovations that we understand down to the quantum level.
That's why the Romans could never make huge advances, they didn't understand the fundamentals. They knew using coal to make swords gave them better, harder edges, but they found it by raw accident, not knowing that the iron and carbon were combining atomically.
Green bubbles though
Surely you understand things like economies of scale, surplus inventories, etc.?
Not to mention, "number of lights" or "ability to communicate through the air" has no real bearing on its value, clearly.
This is like complaining about the $400 Hermès band. The "iPhone Pocket" is obviously a luxury item from a high end designer, of course it's going to be expensive.
That's all fine, the problem is the product looks cheap and dorky
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Oh, I think those are ridiculous too, but they aren’t quite the same thing. All of Apple’s Hermès bands have “Hermès” in the name: https://www.apple.com/shop/watch/bands/apple-watch-herm%C3%A...
With this you don’t even get the designer in the name.
Plus, I can see spending money for things that are nicer or specially designed. There is a huge quality difference between a Loungefly bag made out of synthetic material and a Coach bag of leather (or even Louis Vuitton, although that is a big step up in price). But this iPhone bag isn’t that- 3D knitting isn’t even that special, you could just as easily put a cheap Android phone in this bag, and I don’t think it’s going to be any more durable than a moderately priced crossbody or small purse.
Had to make sure it wasn't April 1st.
When I clicked the link, seeing it so high on the FP, I was 100% convinced they were finally re-releasing + rebranding the Mini.
Then I saw what it was, and was like “ah it’s an April Fools joke — but wait, it’s not April 1st”.
So now I can only assume people are upvoting it because it’s so ridiculous?
Are there people (on HN) that seriously think this is a good idea/are considering getting one of these hideous things?
You're literally describing my thought process, but I thought it was an older April 1st joke resurfacing.
Any tech focused social media site (or tech subcommunity on one) are having a fieldday poking fun and/or expressing how baffled they are.
In the tech world, this is a laughable proposition to most people even at $22.90 (though an order of magnitude more palatable at that price).
In the fast fashion world, this is pretty typical pricing for a seasonal trendy item with a "premium" brand/designer attached. Of course, that's predicated on the trend actually taking off, which isn't guaranteed. But all this social media activity around it in the tech circles is certainly boosting it's visibility to people in the fast fashion world that have iphones, which - going out on a limb here - wouldn't surprise me if it were a not-insignificant number.
Besides, at this price point vs what it is and what it costs to manufacture, even if it "flops" it's unlikely to be a big expense to write off.
Whether or not this tarnishes the Apple brand by shear ridiculousness of it remains to be seen, but Apple's general strategy in the post-Jobs era seems to be "Enshittify, just not as much/fast as everyone else and people wont want to leave even if they complain because we're still not as bas as everyone else"
At this point, you may as well get a powerpack for a mini and put it in one of these slings, you could have a crazy powerful machine in your "sock-et" sling thing here...
When the iPhone Air was just another huge phone...but thinner...smh. Apple should put up some page to check interest level in a smaller phone, and with enough interest, go manufacture it. If it is more expensive because economies of scale don't work out, but they create one that is small yet powerful, that's what I would buy at premium, because apparently compactness is a luxury.
> The design drew inspiration from the concept of “a piece of cloth”
I'm not convinced this wasn't an April Fools joke accidentally released early.
And they say you can “create your own personalized color combination”. This is just literally just the pairing of the phone color and whatever color you pick for the bag. Who calls this a customized color combination?!
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It's an out of season April fools joke.
Do you guys not have phones?
Checked the ULR twice
Suttle joke?
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I'm still not convinced it isn't.
Let's wait until black friday and re-assess
It reads like satire until you hit the part where it costs $229 and realize... nope, this is 100% real
Whenever in doubt about your product’s acceptance, just jack up the price and keep a straight face.
Its showing as $149 for me.
Which still feels outrageous for what is basically a knitted scarf.
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:o
Surely it's satire! looks around in amazement
lol, people on HN learning that fashion is a thing is always hilarious to watch.
this isn't fashion; this is status signaling.
i would hate to be you.
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I did the same. Nope, not a joke.
Hacker news is probably not Apple's core audience for this product.
I recently saw in Southeast Asia everybody had their phone with a strap going around their neck. Which is why Apple made a first party case recently that does this. Apple's making products to cater towards international trends. People paying a lot of money for a fabric product is not unheard of, simply take a walk around the nicer mall in your area with multi-thousand dollar handbags as a demonstration.
Apple is a tech company. Their last two tech products (Vision Pro and iPhone Air) were colossal and unexpected failures. The industry is holding it's breath.
We already know Apple can manufacture lifestyle products and market fashion to fashionable people - that's not the issue. We're starting to turn the corner on Apple's true desire to stop competing. They can't innovate like they used to with the iPad and the Apple Watch; the "new" Apple products today are expensive alternatives to superior products. Apple's most-lucrative investments are turning out to be the App Store and iCloud, software investments that have nothing to do with their hardware quality. So we're now in the awkward position of getting precisely zero innovative hardware and tons of useless and expensive bric-a-brak like iPhone Pockets and iPad laptop-cases to convince people the ecosystem doesn't need to compete to be fun.
On the one hand, yes, I am not the target audience for this in the same way I would ignore the Apple CPAP machine. On the other hand, this is setting a new low for Apple that hadn't been challenged since the polishing cloth debacle. Nothing here is innovative and it seems to confirm the industry's broader suspicion that Apple's business model is bankrupt.
Ah this year's "Apple is dOoMeD"~ get yours in while November lasts!
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Someone wasn't around for iPod socks!
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Precisely.
People don't need to carry wallets anymore. No cash, no physical plastic credit card. It's little surprise that the purse will trend smaller as people need to carry less and less inside it.
Apple is hitting a revenue growth plateau, which means the time has come to expand into adjacent categories. In a world where people put their phones into purses, why not the purse? And at a Apple-brand price point to match?
Yeah, most Americans don't understand how ubiquitous this is in Asia. I doubt this will catch on in America because of how unsafe the cities are. I would never wear this in New York but I definitely would in Tokyo
It gets really difficult to parody apple (and some of their customers) when they do things like this.
They themselves are the best at doing it, really.
A phone brand that rich people buy selling overpriced designer items?
I sincerely believe one day we'll get an official release of one of those Airpod straps: https://www.yahoo.com/news/hilarious-accessory-reminds-us-at...
Wow, that article is wild! Talk about "aged like milk." I'm not saying iPhone Pocket will be a hit as big as AirPods, but it goes to show how unimaginative early reactions can be.
Apple should experience the same surge of collective excitement everyone felt when they first saw the headline "iPhone Pocket," followed by the crushing disappointment of discovering it's just a grocery bag for your iPhone.
It might be dumb, but at least it's expensive.
This looks like it would make basic interaction with your phone highly cumbersome. It also looks like an easier target for thieves.
There will be tons of cheap clones in 3...2...1....
This was one of my first thoughts. Could have knock-offs made for probably $10 landed cost, and put them on Amazon for $99.
My mom knitted a bag for my niece's iphone in 2024, so there already was a trend.
I'm sure there will be, will be interested in how many people who want cheap clones want ... that.
I'm not sure there's a sure crossover of big numbers.
This makes me wonder how strong this thing is because on first sight it just asks for being cut by a random thug. Same goes for this strap thing they introduced.
I thought I won't be seeing anything else more ridiculous this decade regarding phones than people talking on speaker and holding them like piece of pie and here we are. There's no practicality whatsoever - I'd rather buy a strong case, probably that would cover both screen and cameras and a good urban backpack where I can put other stuff like physical wallet and a bottle of water, some charging cable.
It's more a gadget sold as a status symbol - bit like some cases had that small rounded window for apple logo.
The classic is two guys on a moped in Marseilles. The passenger cuts a pedestrian purse strap (or iPhone strap) and they vanish.
One could embed an invisible security cable, but then...
Give it a week and you will get all colors from aliexpress or shien for $5.
> It might be dumb, but at least it's expensive.
Just realizing that the reverse could be a selling point for a phone here: It might be expensive, but at least it's dumb.
Haha, before looking at the price, I joked "I'm not going to buy this if it's only $99 or less."
I sure didn't get disappointed.
I was out with my young coworkers and was absolutely baffled to see a bunch of them with slings for their phones. That was the only time I’d heard of such a thing until now. I kinda thought I’d drunkenly hallucinated it.
I was just talking to my wife about this, literally 5 minutes ago. I just moved from the 13 mini to the Air and am hating that it doesn't comfortably fit in my jeans, to the point where I might go return it today. My young cousin was wearing her iPhone on a cross body sling, and I was commenting that we've gotten to the point where the phones are so big that you need bags or extra things to carry it comfortably.
To a contemporary person their smartphone is probably the single most functionally important object they carry with them. People have always modified their clothes around common items, and then those modifications become subject to fashion trends and then eventually tradition themselves. Think like briefcases and wallets, but also japanese inro, european snuffboxes, decorative scabbards, etc.
This is more like an ancient and near universal practice being applied to a modern tool, rather than a totally new thing in itself.
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For the demographics whose mainstream clothing includes no or very small pockets, this has been true for many years.
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Reminds me of the iPod Socks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod_Socks
That was actually quite a nice product, though. And 6 for $29 was pretty good.
Note that it's $49 when adjusted for inflation
yeah, I loved them. Still have a couple of them with one of my iPods. Still going strong after all those years.
> The socks were jokingly presented by Apple CEO Steve Jobs as a "revolutionary new product"
People were home knitting them anyway at the time. Some still do.
I still use an iPod Sock with my current iPhone
I was hoping this would be the announcement of a mini iPhone.
Instead they’re selling larger pockets because normal pockets aren’t big enough for large phones.
You would think pants manufacturers would cotton on and start making decent phone pockets.
I wear jeans a lot and the back pockets are dangerous for phones, and the front pockets are uncomfortable when sitting if there's a phone in them. I want a phone pocket on the outside of the leg that's big enough for a phone but not too bulky/puffy.
For those surprised by the cost, this is an Issey Miyake product, and the price is in-line with that. It's no different than the $800+ Hermes leather Apple Watch straps.
Also made in Japan
I'm as big a weeb as anyone but this is a textbook example of:
>thing >:(
>thing, Japan :O
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> iPhone Pocket in the short strap design retails at $149.95 (U.S.), and the long strap design at $229.95 (U.S.).
My Nana doesn't charge nearly enough for her crocheting.
Nana's been lowkey running a luxury accessories brand this whole time
Honestly… was having a conversation with my aunt about this last week. Knitting, crocheting, and quilting are all high-skill activities and no one charges enough for it.
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Do they also sell Replacement Wool for $10/inch?
Only if you're an Apple authorized service provider.
Fashion statement. Plus it is a Limited edition release. Plus it is weird. Plus it is apple. Price seems right.
Ha, I bet the muggers/phone thieves will have a field day.
I find it interesting that anybody is that surprised. Remember, this is the company that overcharges for SSDs (no they're not magical super SSDs that only Apple can make)/extra ram.
They charged $1000 for a monitor stand that's pretty much just a thin block of aluminium.
I guess it works as a really expensive lasso/strangulation device.
I assume the sort of person who buys this walks from the chauffeured car door to the door, not down a regular high street.
Agree with the frustration at their SSD and RAM upgrade prices, but Apple doesn’t make the iPhone Pocket. It’s made by the Issey Miyake brand.
I'm still waiting for them to collaborate with Levi's to bring iPhone sized pockets to women's jeans.
Or maybe iPad-sized pockets: https://www.geeky-gadgets.com/igotabigasspocket-ipad-jeans-1...
On one hand, I want bigger pockets that fit my iPhone, and on the other hand, I want smaller iPhones that fit in one female-sized hand.
Honestly, that would be the most genuinely useful Apple fashion collab yet
And like this product, it has a Steve Jobs tie-in. His on-stage uniform was Issey Mikaye turtlenecks and Levi’s 501s.
> Inspired by the concept of “a piece of cloth”
Ugh
Its just a stiff translation of a marketing term. If you look up 一枚の布, you'll see a bunch of Miyake's clothes, where the whole gimmick is that they have no seams. A better translation probably would have been "inspired by the concept of seamless design"
That makes much more sense, even "a seamless piece of cloth" would have been much less ridiculous.
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That makes much more sense. Thank you.
Wait, it really does say that in the article. Wow.
Thats the point where I started double checking for april fools
Emphasizing a central concept/theme is common with Japanese brands, restaurants, events, etc. The translation is often slightly peculiar.
For example the Osaka Expo theme is "Designing Future Society for Our Lives". Or the retail store f.k.a. Tokyu Hands says, "Our concept is 'Create your own life in your own way with what is available within reach.'"
Looks like the swimsuit from Borat
Absolutely. They missed a great opportunity to call it the Apple CockSock.
I had to check the calendar to see if it was April 1. If Apple can sell a sock to put your iPhone in for 150 bucks… I wish I had the skills for that.
I just can't.
This is 150$ and probably cost 5 to 10$ to make.
You can ask a traditional crafts person in most the world to make you a custom one with traditional patterns and it would be significantly better. Then they can feed their family for a least a week.
Apple isn't the only one who can make a giant sock!
Apple wants to charge $150 for this sock. My premium fair-trade version, woven using traditional indigenous practices from sustainably-grown biodegradable materials, blessed via an aboriginal ritual, complete with an autographed certificate of authenticity from a rural craftsperson who subsequently follows you on social media, will cost $200. Joke's on Apple.
Apple selling this validates the idea. Those traditional crafts people now have a bigger market to sell their unique variations into.
I think the discussion is missing the real purpose of this (and which can't be achieved by other vendors) which is to normalize carrying your phone in a way that it's recording without your holding it in your hand to make it obvious that you're recording.
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But its like 3D! Totally worth it when other objects are totally not!
I feel like you’ve missed the forest for the trees here
Wait until you see what a bag from Coach costs.
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Rarely do items (and their prices) make sense in fashion - but people still buy it by the droves.
All it will take is some celebrity placements with the iPhone Pocket and people will lap it up.
It’s a very long sock though. And it’s, ahhh… “3D woven”
Am I the only one who feels that Mt. BS is getting way too high?
Hey, I don’t know about you, but that seems like a screaming deal for a design that drew inspiration from the concept of “a piece of cloth”
It’s just a small collab, who cares
They're hardly the only retailer that successfully markets overpriced accessories.
Apple releases a baffling knitted thing every 20 years. What wonders will 2045 bring?
The iPhone Pocket is not even the first baffling knitted thing (BKT) they released this year.
That award would go to the "Dual Knit Band"
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/10/apple-vision-pro-upgr...
Nah I'll give them credit for that one, the dual knit band is what the Vision Pro should have shipped with in the first place. The original designs were the baffling ones, you had to choose between a fancy knitted band without any top support, or a cheap band with top support, but now you get the best of both in one. Which you really want for such a heavy headset.
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The Genius Cap - the world's first knitted cap with built-in EEG electrodes and Neuralink inductors?
Neuralink injectors.
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Are you saying they released a knitted thing in 1984?
Yes, Apple released knitted shirts in 1984 with the launch of the Macintosh.
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Seeing all the nerd brains of HN implode trying to understand this. This is what happens when the tech and fashion worlds overlap for a moment.
No one can convince me a $229 sock to hold your phone is comprehensible to the average person, nerd brain be damned
my conclusion is that designer fashion is not for average people
see also apple watch hermes $500 watch straps (https://www.apple.com/shop/watch/bands/apple-watch-herm%C3%A...)
or (non-apple) LV purses, $5000+ https://us.louisvuitton.com/eng-us/women/handbags/all-handba...
or LV phone strap, "Contact Us" https://eu.louisvuitton.com/eng-e1/products/monogram-phone-s...
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A $10 fanny pack from Uniqlo or H&M looks better than this thing and is also more practical (can carry other stuff, keys, wallet, etc)
https://static.standard.co.uk/2023/01/19/10/uniqlo%20header....
I found the reddit ManyBaggers recently and there is a cottage industry of high-end bags that seem incredibly made for the price that are in no way luxury products.
You mean 99% of the world who scoffs at wasting money on this? Maybe it’s the fashion world at odds with literally anyone else
No, I am not trying to "understand this". I don't give Apple enough credit to try to understand it.
This thing is just a "Balenciaga": trash disguised as luxury.
It sucks that most people don’t see the pocket as the perfect overlap between fashion and tech. It’s the ideal Issey Miyake bag, it’s just something tech people won’t get.
That and the design misattributions. Even going in blind, if you actually read the Newsroom post and find the Store page, you can figure out that this isn’t even an Apple product. It’s an ISSEY MIYAKE product. If you end up finding any of the Vogue articles, it says right in the article that this was a design project initiated by and done within ISSEY MIYAKE by an ISSEY MIYAKE team, with some input from Apple employees they (proactively) approached and talked to.
I’m sure a lot of people get it, but “this is kinda neat” makes for less of a HN comment than [insert an elaborate rant on how ridiculous it is to charge markups for fashion stuff]
Correct. It's acceptable to not like it, but 200 or whatever for an Issey Miyake piece is pretty par for course.
It sucks that most people don't see that Apple totally stole this (iPhone Pocket) after it became trendy. I bought it as a gift last year. It was very trendy then. I forgot the store's name. Just like apps, Apple steals fashion ideas.
Back when Steve Jobs was at Next, Apple released the Duo Dock. Instead of plugging your laptop into a docking station, you put it in a slot like a giant 3.5" floppy. It was different, sure, but I still don't know what design problem it solved.
This is today's Duo Dock, isn't it?
> I still don't know what design problem it solved.
It supported a CRT so you could have your laptop under your display without needing to spend desktop space for a laptop off to the side.
I’d love to out my laptop into a slit and take it out later ? This “bag” though seems like an insult considered I still liked the smaller iPhones.
Except that Apple didn’t make this. It’s made by the Issey Miyake brand.
Apple is still embracing it: they posted a press release about it, and are selling it on their own site, though.
I always have a little chuckle when I see people holding a tiny delicate smartphone in a massive fat case to protect it from the damage it will inevitably take in normal use. I always think that it would have been better if they had just made the phone itself a little tougher!
Cases are an ablative layer of protection, you can’t get the same thing by making larger phone of some uniform material.
Young kids can go through multiple cases each of which look like they have been run over, but it’s relatively common for adults to replace a case.
I'm not a native speaker, I tried googling and translating and still did not get what "ablative" means. Do you mind explaining like I'm 5 what does it mean please..
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It's good to have a choice. I know I'm going to drop my phone from time to time, and sometimes it will be onto a hard surface, so I always get a case. I once managed to shatter the back glass while it was in a case, not sure how I managed that. Other people may be less clumsy, or more tolerant of living with damage, or more willing to pay for insurance or replacements.
It's also nice to be able to choose a texture. In my latest iteration, I got Apple's techwoven case, and I really like the feel compared to the usual silicone stuff, or bare metal. The texture also makes it easier to grip so maybe I'll drop it less. I can hope.
The phones are incredibly tough, I have never used a case and I've only cracked my screen once and that was like 8 years ago.
And then worry about what colour they are going to buy while not a single picometre of that colour is visible in many cases.
funny thing - every 2 years gorilla glass creates a tougher one. and the phone makers then make the glass thinner, thus erasing the durability gain
I haven't had a screen break in almost a decade now. I do buy flagship phones. So I don't think we need to make glass anymore thicker. But I also use screen protectors, and I had maybe 1 break in the last 10 years.
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I legit had to do a double take and ensure this wasn’t an old April fool’s post. The concept… odd but whatever. The price…
Wasn‘t Borat wearing one of those like 20years ago?
Wait this thing is like $150? It's got all of like $2 worth of yarn and plastic.
A sucker is born every minute, clearly.
And an iPhone is just made out of stuff dug up from the ground.
I've seen the leaked BOMs, it might as well be with the margins they command.
> the long strap design at $229.95 (U.S.
Their level of innovation is inspiring. I knew my grandmother was ahead of her time. Apple just proves it.
> iPhone Pocket features a singular 3D-knitted construction
What does that mean? What would be an example of 2D knitted construction ?
Imagine being the copywriters tasked with making this sound cool.
Nerd question: what are the in-wear physics of this item?
It looks like a mass on a spring: the phone is a relatively heavy weight, and the wool pocket and strap are naturally springy.
So during everyday wear, does this thing bounce around? It seems like it would be impractical.
> Material: Nylon (14%), Polyester (85%), Polyurethane (1%)
Its crazy they didnt even use any expensive materials to maybe somewhat justify the price.
Just the cheapest stuff you can get away with.
It shouldn't be legal to sell products under the name of a dead person (at the very least in cases where there's a strong chance buyers are given the impression that the person had something to do with production of the product).
> a collaboration between ISSEY MIYAKE and Apple
Issey Miyake died 3 years ago. He has not participated in this "collaboration".
Can we also not have Levi's? Ford cars? Jack Daniel's? All of their namesakes died a very long time ago.
I added a qualifier because these exist (see also pretty much every Japanese company), though if such a hypothetical law were implemented I'd honestly see no major moral gain in protecting the creation of new names like those either. If Strauss had decided to name his company something other than his own name it wouldn't have altered the quality of the product.
But no, those aren't comparable here because people today don't believe Henry designed the latest F150
Not for me.
But my partner is a fashion designer and was just this morning working through studying 3D knitting technique.
So I wonder if this will lead to more 3D knitted products.
Drug dealers are going to be as upset at their style being stolen by hipsters as sailors were when hipsters decided that tattoo's were cool.
This is the best idea since having a charging port on the bottom of a mouse. Finally, a product we can source from the US completely.
Almost no one who actually uses one has ever been bothered by the charging port on the bottom.
If for some reason they ignore the low battery warning that occurs days before it runs out of power and it actually dies, 2 minutes on the charger will provide enough charge to get through the rest of their day.
Every Mac user I know complains about this regularly.
I don't own one, so I genuinely don't know, but when are you supposed to charge it then? I turn my laptop on when I start working, and I turn it off and slip it in my bag when I stop. My coworkers all seem to do the same. There is no time where the computer is on but I don't want to use the mouse. I have never charged my Logitech trackball while not also using it.
Yet it still continually comes up. You ever wonder why? It's because "Almost no one who actually uses one" is incredibly dismissive of the people who do have a problem with it. It's like being disabled, like blind people or wheelchair users, or foreign language support. In this case, it's neurodivergent people. It's "you're holding it wrong", it's Apple shuffling things under the bed and pretending they don't exist, just buy their shiny new thing and your problems go away. And consumers supporting them in that while Tim Cook laughs all the way to the bank.
Yeah, no one you know has that problem. For the people for whom it's a problem, it's a problem! You can dismiss them and say well they shouldn't be like that, or that they're being crazy, but at the end of the day, even after you've called them crazy and don't care about them, they're still them, and they still have to deal with a mouse that doesn't work for them. They still have to deal with the problem. Severe untreated ADHD means poor time management, low executive function, and zero impulse control. This means waiting until right when the project is due to start working on it, this means emotionally the user is panicking, so having to sit still and let it charge is physically painful.
Yes, neurotypicals don't have this issue. Good for them! Apple isn't the problem user's therapist, that user can't access healthcare anyway, and it's their problem, not yours.
The charging point on the bottom of the mouse is fine.
Phone thefts where I live (London, UK) are at an all time high. If ever a product was needed to self identify as a target this has to be it. "See this expensive iPod Sock? It's holding my expensive iPhone"...
[1] [Issey Miyake] was also inspired by fashion designer Madeleine Vionnet's use of geometric calculations and "a single piece of beautiful cloth".
The apple release chose some poor wording / translation in it's description 'Inspired by the concept of “a piece of cloth”', but that part actually makes _some_ sense in the context of Miyake's designs. I make no such claim about the product as a whole...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Issey_Miyake
Miyake has a line called A-POC which makes clothing out of a single piece of cloth. So it's a product line at IM.
The people shocked by this are the same people who still believe Apple can sell a normal sized phone but isn’t doing so possibly just to piss us off. The thing is there are millions and millions of suckers out there who will suck these Sock™s and Pocket™s up in possibly dozens - some for the colours and some for the mere satisfaction of getting to pay Apple. If you venture across iForums and iSubs you will slowly start seeing comments about these fabric things are already curing haemorrhoids and insomnia, in anticipation (even before shipping starts).
If this seems like an odd accessory to you, consider that women’s clothing often does not have pockets.
Oh my... I'm just left wondering if Apple releasing a giant sock for your phone equals to the proverbial moment of your taxi driver giving you advice on stocks to buy.
The problem is not that ordinary clothes pockets aren't "designed to fit any iPhone". The problem is many iPhones no longer fit inside many pockets.
For now at least, Apple is still selling to people who wear clothes, and their devices are becoming less compatible with those clothes. This is what a "workaround" or "kludge" looks like in the non-software world, and the consumer gets to pay for it to boot.
Well at least it's multithreaded. :D
I clicked hoping they’re making a small iPhone again like the SE was.
I look around at people with the smaller phone and wish we had a newer model. Whatever happened to this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Af0gtsjfy7E
The small iPhone is like the Cadillac Ciel. So many would buy it if they could, but they can’t so they won’t.
I take the pants that have insufficient pockets to a tailor, and ask them to extend the depth of the phone pocket. You can even ask them to do the extension in phone size if you want to restrict its movement in your pocket. On average I've needed about a 3" extension which both restricts lateral phone movement, and also carries it low enough on my thigh that the phone doesn't pinch into my hip when I sit down.
$30 or so later you'll have an integrated Pholster and don't have to carry another thing around with you. For $200 you should be able to update all the pants you have that lack a proper pocket. This is also an incredibly easy thing to sew yourself, by hand, while you watch TV. $30 for a tailor to do the first pair to give you a template to follow, $50 at a craft store will get you some decent scissors, needle, thread, and a yard of whatever material you like. You'll butcher the first pair of pants, but the second, will be better and the third will be perfect.
Finally, Apple have invented the bag.
No, Apple has never had to be the first to invent. They wait, and they don't release until they get it right. /s
"3D-knitted"
Do others knit in the 2-dimensional space?
Should have said 4D, because it exists in the space-time continuum.
Did anyone else think/hope it was a new actually tiny iPhone?
I built some of the first apps on the App Store. Top twenty navigation app. Won an ADA.
Still, my pocket is my iPhone pocket.
Until they release something the size of the X or smaller, I’m sticking with my iPhone 13 Mini or eventually going for a Razr style Android.
Every year they release something, I go check it out. My love for Apple dies a bit more.
>3d knitted construction
This genuinely has to be a gag.
This does look like a gag to me too, but 3D knitting technology is interesting. I have a pair of carbon-plate marathon race shoes made with 3D knitting. They're very light and very comfortable, with stretch in some axes and stiffness in others as needed, no seams but form-fit around my foot in compound curves.
Instead of making the thing out of 2D pieces of fabric, even stretchy knit fabric, and sewing those planar shapes together into something 3D, they made this as one continuous knit object that adds and drops stitches to give it shape without seams. The machines and programs that manipulate the yarn and partial garments, tying knots at crazy speeds to create something 3-dimensional out of something 1-dimensional, are just astonishing. Equally astonishing is the fact that with two sticks and their hands, it's not that challenging for a human knitter to do the same. I think that "knit a sock" is one of the most challenging tasks to give a humanoid robot.
They bought a bunch of 3D knitting machines to make Vision Pro headstraps, and since that isn't selling I guess they're using the excess capacity to make iPhone socks.
You can briefly see them in this ad: https://x.com/tim_cook/status/1748337010191077462
The iPhone Pocket is not made by Apple. It’s made by the Issey Miyake brand.
It certainly has that dual use.
I don't want to kink shame anyone, but I'd be concerned about getting all of that fuzzy caught in someone's throat. Unless I missed the version made of silk.
> Inspired by the concept of “a piece of cloth”.
no https://us.isseymiyake.com/collections/pleatsplease
no, it's a whole garment knitting technique
haha who came here because expecting a mini/small iPhone like the SE? :-D
Pairs well with pieces from the Apple collection https://archive.org/details/apple-collection-1986-1987/page/...
I do not use Apple products so I do not have an opinion about them.
One thing I know is that they are z making beast. The fact that they could sell a monitor stand for ~1000 € and wheels for something I do not remember for I think 200 €, and now this, means that they are genuises.
I never thought this will be a reality but here we are https://scoopertino.com/apple-blasts-into-supermarkets-with-...
"Who is going to buy this?"
I assume the same people who bought the $700 wheels for their computer case.
How about making phone that fits into a normal pocket?
The next product Apple will unveil will be an iPhone case made of human fingernails from those who have tried to climb this K-shaped economic ladder and failed. It'll be a steal at only $500 a pop.
Issey Miyake was the most interesting high end clothing designer, many of his high fashion designs didn’t sync with any trends from other fashion designers, they were instead highly sculptural and informed by art rather than design.
He was interested in fashion enabled by technology, and there is the long standing connection between him and Steve Jobs.
It is okay to dismiss high fashion brands that don’t suit your needs, this is a niche thing that doesn’t appeal to everyone. It makes sense as a part of the Apple product portfolio that is fashion conscious.
Notably: <Inspired by the concept of “a piece of cloth">
FWIW, the designer behind these also created Job's turtlenecks.
Were those also made mostly out of polyester?
Could this be some sort of joint venture? In other words, is Apple being paid to promote this in some way?
I realize this is a “limited edition” item but it seems to me as being way off brand.
apple x designer fashion has been around a while https://www.apple.com/apple-watch-hermes/
The answer to your question is in the article :)
It feels like a relic from the iPod Nano era
So iPod Socks[0], but with a strap?
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod_Socks
Every knitter on the planet is simultaneously thinking, "$150 for a rib stitch tube with a slit that I could make a clone of in one sitting? Dang."
This pattern repeats itself in "high" fashion quite a lot. Simple, ridiculous things that are relatively trivial to make, yet massively expensive due to hype/brand/fomo. I guess it wouldn't exist if people didn't pay for it, but it also shows how people don't value craftsmanship so much as status symbols.
Show them two identical products, one from Apple, one from Auntie down the street, and they'll pick Apple and tell you the other is inferior.
I'm sure theirs is better than anything I could make myself in all sorts of little ways. I'm just not sure it would be $140 better.
On the other hand, if I did make one for myself (which I won't - one purse is enough) it would probably have a 2-color brioche stitch or something like that for more visual interest.
I bought iPod socks back in the day and loved them. I used them for more than just my iPod, like my Palm pilot and my digital camera :)
Btw Issey Miyake (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Issey_Miyake) died in 2022.
This piece of trash likely has nothing to do with the guy, somebody's likely just milking the brand/name as long as it still has some relevance.
Really poor taste from Apple.
This costs almost as much as my Android phone, which (unlike an iPhone) fits easily in the pockets of all of my clothes.
Which phone do you have that's smaller than an iPhone?
Unihertz Jelly Star; 3" display 116 grams.
Same company makes a Jelly Max, which is a larger volume than an iPhone, but about 2cm shorter in height and 1cm shorter in width than what I think is the smallest-screen iPhone currently for sale (16e).
This might be smart. A few thoughts:
1. It gets the camera out of your pocket, which could give your ai assistant more context about what you're doing.
2. The high price tag helps get the word out (e.g. this thread) and invites third parties to compete with cheaper and more practical versions. This makes sense if Apple's goal is #1
Best storage design out of Apple since the iRack:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcjLEwZqcQI
I wonder if it fits an iBrator:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sP9Ef_KQTTI
Its all good for Apple cause the more people talk about this and not Apple intelligence, the better for them.
Hey, any of y'all want one in hand-spun, natural-colored wool (as in, as it was shorn from the sheep) yarn?
They could make a small iphone if they wanted to:
https://www.phonearena.com/phones/size/Apple-iPhone-Air,Appl...
Pretty much every other Apple product has appeal to every demographic: young, older, professional, student, all walks of life - as long as you can afford it.
This product has a very narrow and limited target customer base.
I’m not going to walk into the office with my fuchsia Apple sock around my shoulders.
One of the most innovative companies in the world......supposedly.....and they come out with this.
"Users can create their own personalized color combinations with iPhone Pocket and iPhone."
You don't think that's innovative?
Wait it’s not April?
You're not familiar with the internationally recognized Day of the Joker every 11/11?
Amazing that Apple would prominently highlight a product made with 3D knitting, as I’ve just gotten in to machine knitting as a hobby after buying an old Brother KH-910 on eBay and modding with with an AYAB (all yarns are beautiful)[1] open hardware/software knitting machine board from the AYAB discord. I just got a second needle bed for my knitting machine (KR-850 ribber) so I can do double bed jacquard knitting and other more advanced stuff.
But this has also led me down the rabbit hole learning about industrial machine knitting and 3d “wholegarment” knitting, invented by Masahiro Shima first in the 1960’s for autonomous glove knitting and later for entire full size garments in the 1990’s. [2,3,4] That’s what Apple is using in this product (now two companies offer 3D knitting machines according to Wikipedia). In traditional machine knitting you still have to make multiple flat sections and stitch them together, but in 3D Wholegarment knitting the machine is capable of knitting an entire complex garment, bag, utility item, whatever all in one go fully autonomously. Shima Seiki invented a new kind of knitting needle and expanded the system from two needle beds to four to enable the most advanced form of Wholegarment knitting. What I find fascinating about this technology is that it makes it possible to run a garment manufacturing business which is almost fully autonomous, eliminating the need for often poorly treated overseas labor [5], and potentially simplifying business operations dramatically.
The piece linked in [2] talks to an Italian knitting company that was able to keep manufacturing domestic thanks to these machines, and this helps explain how Apple can offer these bags as made in Japan in these volumes. I daydream about getting a used Mach2x and parking it somewhere to make it run 24/7 to make warm garments for the homeless around the Bay Area, perhaps with a low volume boutique fashion brand which helps pay for it. Anyway they’re really neat machines and this has been my little autistic hyperfocus lately, I thought I would share!
[1] https://www.ayab-knitting.com/
[2] https://youtu.be/kZE8rvPYbII
[3] https://www.shimaseiki.com/ire/about/history.html
[4] https://youtu.be/y6wHl0Xtxfw
[5] https://youtu.be/PxFwA-jw3X4
For everyone who is upset about the price tag: this is a wealth-signaling product. Like a Hermès handbag.
Apple is not a luxury brand but it's close enough with some of its products that it can get away with a price like this on a product like that.
I think apple is short on some cash and they are trying to get some quick money. The issue is now you will see this ugly looking “case” all over the streets and especially among women, it might be the next Stanley cup all over again.
First thought this was a parody, joke or something.
Then saw the domain apple.com, can't believe it!
The thrill I had clicking on this link, thinking I was about to see the next evolution of the iPhone mini, an even smaller, minimalist iPhone, only to discover it's just a completely useless novelty product.
I should have known better.
Does it fit an android phone or is it immediately ejected from the pocket with gusto?
Ejecting with gusto would be gouache. The Android phone is simply shamed into dropping out of the sleeve.
Do you perhaps mean gauche, as in socially awkward verging on unacceptable or is there a connection to art supplies I'm missing here?
EDIT: or perhaps your phone "helpfully" autocorrected something wrong, as mine did.
The bag will turn blue
this voids the warranty
The is the ultimate Rincewind accessory - you can put a half-brick in it and wallop people, without having to take off one of your socks. In a pinch you can even just wallop people with your phone, if no bricks are to hand.
You can achieve similar results by throwing your iPhone inside a £1 trail sock...
If only they spent these resources on bringing “slide over” back to iPad in its original form.. :(
This looks kinda lame. I already have a pocket for my phone, it’s my.. pocket. Or I can throw it in any other pouch if I don’t have pockets.
> I already have a pocket for my phone, it’s my.. pocket.
As Steve Jobs intended.
(Like, really. I think the original "one more thing" presentation was also so powerful became he could just casually pull some next-gen tech out of his pocket)
On the bright side, it looks as if you could also use it as a decent slingshot.
Bwuh, I thought they had a new name for a smaller iPhone, but it’s just a bag.
250$ for a sock…
Yes, it's designer sock with a famous fashion designer's name on it.
The pricing is insane. I could see $30-50 for premium materials and design.
Is this an early April 1 post? 150 bucks for an ugly, impractical sock?
>designed to fit any iPhone
given Apple's track record in the past, this is the first indicator that there will soon be an annual line of iPhones that will not fit in these slings
This is gonna launch first in Taipei (among other stores) and looks a lot like the bags people use to carry their boba tea in here. It's a bit expensive for a drink bag though.
If this is released on April Fools' I would just gig and skip it as a joke. If it is not then I would just think Apple is a stupid money grabbing machine just like EA
I thought it was a parody! Is this really what Apple can do?
I do wish they sold a double-side magsafe that you can put on your shirt/jacket so I can just clip my iPhone on my chest. Pro Max is too big for my pockets.
Aww. I was hoping for a super mini flip or foldable low-power minimalist iPhone, but it's another weird Apple hipster fashion accessory. Very disappointing.
> beautiful way to wear and carry
I strongly disagree with that statement.
They expect me to walk around with my phone in a long sock? A fannypack even looks more appealing.. also, isn’t this a sign that phones are getting too big?
I don't think selling a useless product for ridiculous amount is a problem for Apple. I do think that selling an ugly product is a problem for Apple.
Might just have my mum knit me a custom one.
True story: when I got the iPhone 5 the first case i used was a home made fabric slip. Fashion really does come and go in cycles.
Do your iphones hang low Can you swing them to and fro...
Could this be apple's attempt at testing out the waters on whether their customer base would be interested on a new wearable piece of hardware?
"The design of iPhone Pocket speaks to the bond between iPhone and its user"
I have so much to say about that sentence that I cannot seem to say anything.
Lol it feels like this is their solution to the "phone too big" problem. Anyways, when's the next iPhone Mini???
I do not mean to be crass, but some of the ones that are carrying an iPhone bear more than a passing resemblance to a human vagina.
So phones have gotten so big they nessecitate a whole new type of clothing to carry around.
Maybe, just maybe, the solution is a smaller phone?
Is this a better thing to announce instead of the iPhone Air? I personally think so :) the Air should never have been green lit
here i am replying from my iphone air. My favorite iphone to date, by far. I “downgraded” from a 16 pro. Phone feels like a feather. Fits so nicely into my cross body bag as well!
Battery life has been better than expected.
I think this should be called the iPhone Borat.
A smaller phone just means you'll spend less time on it. That's not a desirable outcome for anyone except the customer.
They're telling us that iPhones are going to be getting so big, we're going to have to buy it its own custom pocket.
Saw this earlier today and legitimately thought it was satire, especially when I heard the price. Turns out it's real?
I was hoping iPhone Pocket was a new iPhone mini which fits into any pocket, even the ones women have on their clothes.
I'll propose a name for products that are like this, visibly, trash disguised as luxury.
We should call them "balenciaga".
Worst of all is that it's polyester, basically a piece of plastic. I hope this product fails just because of that.
Apple's been heading down the toilet since Cook took over, now they've morphed into a parody of themselves.
This will make theft so much easier as compared to normal trouser pocket. It's more of a style thing I guess.
Instead of redesigning the "pocket" they should just make phones that fit inside regular pockets.
What in the Teenage Engineering is this?
That’s a nice piece of cloth. I would worry about it getting damaged. I wonder if they will sell a case for it.
I wonder if it supports the $19 Polishing Cloth (https://www.apple.com/shop/product/mw693am/a/polishing-cloth).
I actually thought this was an iPhone that fits in my pocket or something sleek, iPod style. This is worse
This feels like a step backwards and if it were released on April 1st would be indistinguishable from a prank.
Well this is a head scratcher for sure.
I would prefer if we flipped it, "Pocket iPhone", and got an iPhone that fit in a normal pocket.
> Inspired by the concept of “a piece of cloth”
I thought this was an April fools joke.
At least they put Hong Kong to the top to clarify if it is included or excluded from Greater Chinɑ.
I thought it's a joke and someone made a satire website or something.
The ridiculous part is, people will buy this.
Formerly known as a "purse".
Stylistically it looks like something that goes with a very specific style of clothing and only that.
It’s a thneed!
Saw the link and was looking forward to an iPhone that could actually fit in one hand again, welp.
Reminds me of the thong Borat wears.
Wow, it's not even a parody. The iPhones are so huge and heavy now it needs its own purse.
I was kinda hoping for new HomePods today, if rumors are to be believed, but instead I get this.
> Inspired by the concept of “a piece of cloth,”
Had to triple-check that this wasn't a parody website.
hilarious seeing so many folk here turning their nose up at spending so much on an accessory from a well known designer brand. Apple devices could be considered by many (particularly outside of Californian circles) as of the same ilk.
My iPhone 12 mini is my iPhone Pocket. Still using it and holding onto it as long as I can.
They could just make a device that fits in a regular pocket. Most phones are too big now.
You'd be better off wearing a cross-body bag that a lot of Japanese men use.
I am looking forward to this being available on taobao/temu for around $5 !
Products like these wouldn't need to exist if we just let women have pockets.
Who is “we?” Why are you preventing women from having pockets? I’m certainly not.
And yet, they lack pockets.
Mysteries abound.
if women actually bought clothes with pockets, vendors would sell them. there is no secret conspiracy against pockets for women
I invite you to talk to literally any woman.
Mental note...be sure to see the final design before I sign the contract.
Wish they would make a modern iPhone that still fit into a pocket, as well.
My prediction this will fail, it's like a target for people to steal
I thought this satire at first.
Steve would have fired everyone involved in this stupidity.
Steve was a noted fan of Issey Miyake
I don't doubt they will sell millions but it looks so absurd
Reminder to self: don't buy fashion items from an IT company.
My god, for that price...
Imagine the cost if it was a pair of pants! Apple pants™
Doubles as the sock outfit for the next Red Hot Chili Peppers tour.
A slingshot, A blind fold, A pocket -- Steve Jobs never said that.
Phone tote bag that goes hard with world's thinnest phone.
Just search them on Taobao, you can get tons of these staff.
Is it usable as a sling? To throw the iPhone in self-defense?
Like many, I was disappointed this wasn't a new iPhone mini.
$30 for a pack of six iPod socks always seemed like a horrible value to me in the mid-2000s. I'm not denying they were fun and whimsical, but as cases, they didn't protect your iPod or allow you to use it while inside them. It felt like a rip-off two decades ago, and these are 30-46 times more expensive per-sock.
I know Apple does things like this to position themselves as a luxury brand and as a shareholder I still do not buy the idea stunts like these are what's best for the company. At best, a small segment of the target demographic will see this as a curiosity at the cost of further damage to Apple's reputation. People will see this as further proof Apple is more concerned with products and services which rip off their customers and developers, as opposed to providing real value.
I will be the first to welcome Apple bringing back some semblance of fun and whimsy into their product line-up, and this is not the way to do it.
iPhones are hefty these days, so it could double as a weapon.
This is actually Apple doing this? What is going on there?
When I saw this I thought it was April 1st for a moment.
Is it April already!?
Is this intended as a serious product? Can’t quite tell
The long strap version is too short on that model. Purse straps hang to hip level for a reason. Hanging at the hip makes reaching in substantially more ergonomic.
Also lmao at the photo of the little bag strapped to the other larger bag. Yo dawg, I heard you like bags.
Also they're super ugly. But I guess that's "subjective".
Immediately reminded me of Borat's Mankini.
Oh! I so wish this was an actual pocket iphone.
Two hundred and thirty American dollars for this?
If you listen closely, you can hear Taps playing.
I can see Apple releasing a pro version at $499
This just screams that Apple has jumped the shark to me. First of all, they're selling a knitted scarf for putting your phone in, which... what?
> Inspired by the concept of “a piece of cloth”
Groundbreaking.
> iPhone Pocket in the short strap design retails at $149.95 (U.S.), and the long strap design at $229.95 (U.S.).
Just... good luck, guys.
It's a high-end fashion partnership, like the Hermès watches.
You could probably argue that high-end fashion is in a constant state of jumping the shark.
But the Hermes watch was at least an Apple watch with some Hermes branding and accessories. This is just... a sock.
2 replies →
"A piece of cloth" is referring to Miyake's preexisting fashion line of clothes without seams, 一枚の布.
I’m not concerned; we’ve been here before with iPod Socks [1].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod_Socks
Well, I stand corrected.
Dammit, Ali Express doesn't have any yet.
$150 for a sock? Is Apple completely joking?
this reminds me of the little man bags poker players use (a lot of casinos ban full sized backpacks) and not in a good way
From the company that gave us the iPod socks
I hope they release a pro version at $599.
More accurate to call it the iPhone Purse.
Meanwhile, can I have multi-message selection back in (iPad) Mail? Whoever decided to axe that feature apparently has a spam-free inbox.
This company has become such a joke. Maybe Apple should start being concerned about building computers that Just Work well again rather than continuing to flounder after Cook's obsession with bad fashion.
I suppose the underlying message here is that, if you can no longer innovate, shill overpriced purses instead.
I may be missing what you’re after for ipad mail but isnt it under the “...” then “select” to select multiple messages?
Hey guys, you could like just not buy it.
… that’s a sock… Apple made an iSuck!?
From the designers of the $20 deo stick.
It's inspired by a piece of cloth!
Nothing like a $150 or $230 phone bag.
Literally just looks like a cut sock.
Sweet! Pocket and sling - two in one!
wow, that's seriously hilarious
it's so ugly that it shows their desperation, who would ever need this?
I respect Apple.
It takes a lot of skill, talent and dedication to pull out a massive rip-off bullshit like this and have millions of fools buying it.
And the ghost of Steve Jobs Wept...
IPhone 8 Xamsexiis2023gmail.com
I thought this was an april fools.
150 USD for a piece of cloth !
Talk about greedy !
Who is the target group for this?
Sold all my apple shares today
Y'all remember iPod Socks?
April fools came early for 2026
Did a pickpocket design this?
iPhones are now so big we need a special carrying device for it.
Please bring back the mini :’(
XD Who even buy these things
Officially jumped the shark?
April fools? $150 and $230?
Quote: “ Inspired by the concept of ‘a piece of cloth.’” Is this some kind of joke? If it were April 1st I’d assume the whole article is meant for comedic effect.
</NotTheOnion>!
$5 on Aliexpress next week
Wait, Tim is not excited?
I can make a better phone
This is an iPhone Thneed.
This is yet another sign of the K Shaped economy. While I am homeless through no fault of my own, people can buy a $200 sweater pocket for their iphone.
This is an old story, and it does not end well.
I genuinely find it hilarious that everyone has such a strong opinion about a random accessory. Seriously, who cares? Why is it that any company could make any random thing an everyone shrugs their shoulders and either likes it or ignores it but when apple makes something everyone’s knickers get in a twist?
Why do y’all care so much about something you’d just walk past and ignore in literally any other scenario?
Hope. For better or worse tech nerds (me included) maintain a hopeful optimism that Apple will make good products.
For the longest time they were the only tech company that really cared about design, and most people don't encounter good or thoughtful design or ever really see behind the scenes or think about design and designers.
Jony Ive and Steve Jobs really glorified design I think rightly in many ways, and elevated what industrial design could be in technology and engineering companies that historically had treated design as something you paid an external agency to do.
Most people don't know Dieter Rams or Donald Norman, tech people maybe know Edward Tufte. Loads of people know Jony Ive.
Unfortunately the only good ideas Apple have had this decade are the M-series processors, which are fantastic. Their software and hardware are otherwise lacking, across all categories.
So, when Apple releases _anything_ people hope it's (a return to) good, of all the consumer product makers I think Apple has the highest level of goodwill, people are excited and hopeful that the next thing they release will be great, and are disappointed when it isn't.
This predisposes that people are currently on average disappointed with apple products - which is just so far from the truth I don’t know where to start. Sure, a small percentage of tech nerds like us might be, but we are so far from the norm.
> Why do y’all care so much
My pension. When "jokes" like this hit the frontpage of HN, I am reminded that every dollar I put into my 401k will never see the light of day. The FTC should be mauling Apple for resting on anticompetitive laurels, but instead they're letting them grow fat and become a high-risk business. If you're not filing for retirement tomorrow, you should be considering the consequences this will have when you turn 65. Letting Apple fuck off and manufacture high-margin designer is terrible for America in the long-term.
The economy is not as simple as "don't buy the product then" at Apple's scale. Look at how John Deere transitioned from a blue-chip brand to an Oracle-level scourge on humanity. I don't want Apple to head down that same road, but we might be too late to save them at this point.
I’m sorry but you can’t expect me to take you seriously if your position is a small collab with a Japanese design studio to make an iphone accessory is a sign of them tanking the economy…
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Makes me think og Borat.
Apple Mankini by Borat.
Early April Fools joke?
Is it April 1st today?
"Wear an iPhone"... It's increasingly difficult to love this company.
what stops me buying one and using with my Samsung Galaxy?
It’s an iPhone Socket!
Will be a hit in Asia
I’m not trying to be glib here, but this genuinely looks like something a satirical blog might post.
I’m not a product or UI/UX designer but when you have to design a new, ridiculous way to carry a phone your company’s manufacturing and selling, I’d have thought that’s your sign to focus on making it less awkward to carry. “Think different”, indeed.
It's satire.
Wow did they really make it so you can't just pick-up and use the screen?
There are thousands of sub 10$ case strap-attachments which make it easy to both use and not drop your phone while wearing it around your neck.
Imagine milking your phone out of this every time there is a notification... What a joke
[dead]
Top of the market
Apple is cooked
> iPhone Pocket in the short strap design retails at $149.95 (U.S.), and the long strap design at $229.95 (U.S.).
Really? Lot's of value there...
Like a new OnePlus Nord N30 5G is around $250, and Samsung Galaxy A16 approximately at $200. And Samsung Galaxy A14 5G is between $120 to $160.
An Apple Thneed
Shark jumped.
It’s a sock.
Cringe.
"Crafted in Japan, iPhone Pocket features a singular 3D-knitted construction that is the result of research and development carried out at ISSEY MIYAKE."
How would a 2d knitted construction look like? Lmfao.
hoping for game boy pocket...
Short AAPL
Ew. For some reason it looks absolutely disgusting to me.
Worth $5
OMG
$229.95
is it april-1st already ?
Didn't we turn the clocks back recently? Maybe someone just gave it too big a push... oh god, so it's only April 2025? I don't want to go through all that again.
As silly a product as this is, the fact that it made it to the front page of Hacker News makes it a bigger deal than it actually is.
It's not like it's sitting on Apple's frontpage. It's not some major product announcement. To get to the `/newsroom` page where the product was listed, you have to literally scroll to the bottom of https://apple.com and click a tiny link.
I will however comment on the price and utter lack of functionality. This product is utter garbage--a total niche for art goblins (said lovingly).
Correct. The fact this made it o the front page is because the economy in the US is horribly K shaped.
I don't follow
dear god, this is stupid…
welcome back, iPod socks.
``` Apple Canton Road, Hong Kong
Apple Ginza, Tokyo
Apple Jing’an, Shanghai
Apple Marché Saint-Germain, Paris
Apple Myeongdong, Seoul
Apple Orchard Road, Singapore
Apple Piazza Liberty, Milan
Apple Regent Street, London
Apple SoHo, New York City
Apple Xinyi A13, Taipei ```
Couldn't hack it in Apple Plaza, Kansas City, huh?
For a second, I believed they were launching an iPhone small enough to reasonably fit into a pocket. That might make me switch to iPhone.
Nope
I had to check the address a few times to make sure this isn't a satire page, and I'm still not convinced it isn't
I clicked hoping for a smaller iPhone and I’m very disappointed that it’s just a sock to stuff my current oversized one into
I thought it was an april fools joke. Looking at the price I had to double check. Is this serious? It is ludicrous
The iPhone Pocket is a pocket for your iPhone and not a pocket-sized iPhone??? Unbelievable. So disappointing.
"Inspired by the concept of “a piece of cloth,”"
I had to check that if wasn't April 1st
edit: holy shit, $150 for an iphone sock
Make. A. Smaller. Phone.
Clicked the link hoping it would be a new attempt at something like the iPhone mini. Sadly disappointed!
What a terrible name and the only reason I know it’s not an aprils fool is because it’s November.
Unironically utterly brilliant.
I don't have an iPhone and will not get one at least until Google kills ReVanced, nor would I ever get a sock for my phone but wow, I fully expect this to be hit. Not only in this collaboration, it will spawn a thousand copies as well.
Everything about this is perfect. The Japanese origin, the idea, high tech manufacturing (single cloth, 3d knitted, whatever), the cheap material, the timing... I am in awe. The kind of shock and awe that militaries aim to deliver.
Apple has ingested a million tiny current trends of craftsmanship, story telling, accessorizing, ground them into this magnificent triumph of corporate capitalism. This is why commies never even stood a chance.
iPhonegina
iSock
Pffff... No AI? Who need it? Even my shower gel is AI already.
Please tell me this is an out of season April fools joke...
> Inspired by the concept of “a piece of cloth,”
This is satire, right?
And yet apple is still priced like a growth company.
> Inspired by the concept of “a piece of cloth,”
Is this satire?
Is this a joke or are they serious with this?
Reminded me of the IKEA floor mat knit lol
Checks date… nope, not April
Apple doing Balenciaga shit
That was my first though. After "wait, it's not April 1st yet".
Balenciaga would be an oversized black latex condom.
They literally sell a $400 Hermes apple watch band
Or a 2000 euro Hermes Apple Watch with bracelet, but it comes with special wallpaper you don’t get if you just buy the strap or 1000 euro bracelet separately
The strap and bracelet are both really nice though, do recommend if you aren’t very price sensitive.
The CookSleeve™
...
I thought this was a joke
Then i was navigated to news.apple.com
Wow.
its literally a pussy to stick your phone in lmao
I honestly thought this was satire at first, maybe April 1st? A joke for sure. Nope, they've given us a pocket.
Is this a joke?
lol 230$ for a sock ..
I was excited when I saw the headline -- I thought Apple had finally brought back a smaller iPhone, like the Mini.
But nope. It's just an ugly phone purse.
Look, it's bad enough that the much-hyped Vision Pro didn't take off (1), and the much-hyped iPhone Air didn't take off (2), and default Apple apps will soon have ads (3), and the latest MacOS is full of issues that would have been caught if they did any QA on it before release (4)... but Tim Apple is also throwing bribes at Trump every chance he gets (5)...
Time for some new leadership at Apple.
(1) https://applemagazine.com/us-vision-pro-sales-expected-to-de...
(2) https://nypost.com/2025/11/11/business/apple-pulls-plug-on-i...
(3) https://www.tuaw.com/2025/10/27/apple-maps-to-introduce-ads-...
(4) https://osxdaily.com/2025/09/19/why-im-holding-off-on-upgrad...
(5) https://www.thedailybeast.com/billionaire-apple-ceo-tim-cook...
> "Greater China"
Irredentist pro-war language, Tim Cook? I am so done with Apple. They knew what they did when they chose the words; they certainly spent thousands of hours deliberating them.
This is Lebensraum with Chinese Characteristics.
> "The term is often used to avoid invoking sensitivities over the political status of Taiwan.[16] Contrastingly, it has been used in reference to Chinese irredentism in nationalist contexts, such as the notion that China should reclaim its "lost territories" to create a Greater China.[17][18]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_China
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
With respect, this topic is of immense interest and significance to a large number of us on HN. The many engaged and enthusiastic responses attest to that.
Is it off-topic to talk about the adversarial role of tech companies in a potential war, one that would be devastating to many of us? About the entanglements of their supply chains? Have I truly, in your judgement, derailed this thread away from curious discussion? Because, this subthread looks to me comparatively thoughtful (if mildly heated), while the more narrowly-construed topic of discussion is a polyester fashion accessory.
To paraphrase Anakin Skywalker: "from my point of view, it's the iPhone Pocket that's generic and uncurious".
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I think it's a common term used to loosely describe the geographical region. It's used by many other companies like Microsoft [1] and Google [2]
[1] https://careers.microsoft.com/v2/global/en/locations/gcr.htm...
[2] https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/intl/en-apac/collections/gre...
It's a large step up from "it's used for job postings in (or closely working with) mainland China", to "it's featured in Apple product announcements targeting a global audience of millions".
Has it been used in an Apple product announcement before? My search is imperfect, but I actually can't find an example (on their /newsroom subdomain).
As recently as two months ago, with the Airphone announcement, they weren't doing this:
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/09/introducing-iphone-ai... ("Introducing iPhone Air, a powerful new iPhone with a breakthrough design")
> "The 40W Dynamic Power Adapter with 60W Max will be available in Canada, China mainland, Japan, Mexico, Taiwan, the Philippines, and the U.S."
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It's not a "loose geographical region". It's usually denotes precisely the PRC (People's Republic of China, including mainland China and the special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macao) together with the ROC (Republic of China, usually known as Taiwan).
Greater China is never used to describe a region. It means China, Tibet, Macao, Hong Kong and Taiwan according to Apple.
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Just like how they removed all the gay dating apps in China yesterday (by request of the government of course).
So sad to watch a gay CEO just sit comfortably and allow his company quietly destroy his own “community”. Don’t get me started on SA either…
> Just like how they removed all the gay dating apps in China yesterday (by request of the government of course).
Those apps have always been illegal in China. Of course, one could say Apple should not operate in China (and this is perhaps true), but they cannot both operate there and break the law.
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You can’t fight City Hall.
The iPhone is a Chinese product. China ultimately controls whether or not the iPhone exists. No place else on earth can manufacture 20,000 iPhones an hour, 24/7/365.
Making two hundred million devices of the iPhone’s complexity and quality is not a trivial matter, and takes tens of thousands of skilled (and experienced) workers. Almost all of those people are Chinese, in China, subject to Chinese law. Apple cannot meaningfully fight Chinese law.
“sit comfortably” is a big stretch here. I imagine it must upset him as much or perhaps more than it does you and I. We, after all, can speak publicly about how upsetting it is. He cannot.
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He did give a tour of Apple HQ to MBS. But maybe they think they can do more good than harm by selling products in Saudi.
This is why, as a gay man, I give people a look when they ask why I still rant about gay rights "even though you guys have marriage and stuff now".
It's 2025, almost 2026 and we're still doing this shit. I don't care if you think I'm icky, I think other people are icky sometimes but I don't try to stop them from existing for it. People are entitled to be who they are.
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I didn't know that tim cook was gay and here is one message from wikipedia I want to quote
> In June 2014, Cook attended San Francisco's gay pride parade along with a delegation of Apple staff.[85] On October 30, Cook publicly came out as gay in an editorial for Bloomberg Business, saying, "I'm proud to be gay, and I consider being gay among the greatest gifts God has given me."[86] While it had been reported in early 2011 that Cook was gay,[87][88] at the time, Cook tried to keep his personal life private
I feel like Tim Cook should be a man of his words and try to actually help the community he is proud to be in but I am sure that investors might not be happy but that just goes on to show that maybe even some CEO's could be puppets of shareholders and can be forced to do things solely for profit where their heart might not lie.
I think that another point is that shareholders can also be puppets of CEO's in the case of Elon musk 1 Trillion $ deal shows that imo
I feel like we live in the times where morality can be side-lined for profit and be celebrated. The whole idea why even people can be puppets of each other could be because they get profits and power and influence because of it (basically money most of the times)
But what power do those CEO's have if they can't stand for what they think is right or educate themselves on these matters.
Food for thought.
> virtue was not convenient at the time
Maybe we live just in such times.
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> So sad to watch a gay CEO just sit comfortably and allow his company quietly destroy his own “community”
His community are elites and money.
Not engaging in political fights outside your circle of influence is actually good for business and responsible leadership.
There is no middle ground. Mentioning "Greater China" isn't neutral. It's precisely the idea of considering "Greater China" as neutral that is de facto siding with the PRC.
No, this is Apple being confident that the USA will drop Taiwan and that this and that siding with China is the "responsible" thing to do.
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"Good for business" is not the highest goal a human can achieve. Not even close.
Start with "do the right thing" and progress from there.
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Apple is the third most valuable company in the world. Not a mom and pop grocery store.
Apple CEO meets with the US president.
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Nothing pro war about it. Read history books instead of making assumptions. It is referring to the mainland, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau as a whole. It became popular with the rise of China. Try any business newspaper in the 90s. It is less relevant now as Hong Kong and Macau are now part of China.
It isn’t unlike Benelux, or Scandinavia, or Iberian, or Balkan, or Gulf countries.
>It isn’t unlike Benelux, or Scandinavia, or Iberian, or Balkan, or Gulf countries.
Greater Israel, Greater Italy, Greater Germanic Reich oh wait I lost the point, I guess any connections to irredentism are purely coincidental.
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The CCP has Apple hostage. Their products are (effectively) all made there.
China has more control over Apple than the US does, at present. They are, of course, in crash override priority mode trying to change that, but nowhere else on earth can manufacture (on average) 20,000 iPhones per hour, 24/7/365. (TBH it’s probably closer to 50k per hour in the months up to release day.)
The iPhone is a Chinese product, made by tens of thousands of Chinese people, on machines in China, subject to Chinese jurisdiction and law. That’s an uncomfortable fact for the US economy.
If Apple doesn’t do exactly what China wants them to do, the iPhone does not exist, and Apple as we know it today does not exist.
US government has FAR more control over Apple as a company. China only has control of the Chinese operations. The president is personally beefing with companies and buying stakes in them. The tariffs alone could have severely hurt Apple, but Apple bent over backwards to appease the president. The US government can simply request an app be removed and Apple and Google will do it worldwide.
China does not have that power over Apple. China can threaten Apple but they have already diversified their manufacturing to other countries so China does not have a strangle hold on the supply line.
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"Pro-war" seems like an odd assertion here. They're recognizing the status quo in a reasonably neutral way, which seems anti-war to me.
It seems like you're advocating for Western powers to take a position, using either soft or hard power, on a war that already ended many decades ago. Sounds quite a bit like imperialism to me, and pretty far from being anti-war.
An anti-war position, at least from the perspective of a Westerner and Western companies, is more like, you guys lost, suck it up and stop asking us to intervene on your behalf.
The recognition of any "status quo" is political.
Push back, as in this thread, can change which hierarchies are accepted and which aren't.
In particular, the use of "Greater China" normalizes corporate acquiescence to Beijing's explicitly revisionist policy preferences.
Taiwan is an independent nation. It isn't lost. And all free nations should intervene whenever the right to self-determination of another is threatened.
Say hi to the chairman for me.
I don't really see how "Greater China" is more neutral than "Mainland China and Taiwan" which is the phrasing they previously used.
They've been using this term for years. It's nothing new and nothing unique to Apple.
Don't forget that the "we are the only legitimate Chinese government and we own it all" attitude is shared by both Chinese governments. The PRC claims Taiwan, but Taiwan claims all of China as well.
Taiwan claimed Mongolia until 2002!
Friend, this criticism has been relevant since 1998.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-criticised-for-dumping-t...
It is unfortunate that iPhones cannot be made anywhere else in the world. No other country has the right tooling, workforce, or skill set, at that volume.
China made a strategic decision to go deep there, and the rest of the world decided it was post-industrial
Taiwan still claims the rest of mainland China so maybe it's a reference to that.
of the 193 members of the UN, only 12 (6%) recognize Taiwan as a country.
the Kuomintang lost the war. its effectively the same as if the confederacy retreated to the Florida keys and China maintained a policy of deliberate ambiguity.
Why is UN recognition the metric here and not, like, idk the fact that Taiwan is a liberal democracy with the rule of law and freedom of speech and not a hypercapitalist dictatorship that disappears dissidents?
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The population of Taiwan is 23 million. The population of Florida Keys is 82000. Not the same.
Today I heard the word "Irredentist" for the first time as I'm about to turn 42.
Me too. I've always just heard that kind of thing called "imperialist". But "irredentist" seems more precise.
Thanks for pointing this out.
History shows without exception that authoritarianism and commerce are bedfellows.
I’m unaware of any for profit business interest over all of known history that hasn’t bent the knee to the desires of an authoritarian government
Since 2021, Tim Cook has repeatedly quoted the old IBM CEO's line "world peace through world trade."
This was the same line IBM used to protect their huge business with... wait for it... Nazi Germany
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Your comment is the actual prowar propaganda though in my europeean eyes.
The US is worse than China in many aspects, from forever wars to climate over colonialism to fascism and support for an ongoing extremely violent genocide on over a hundred thousand civilians, - where is China geonociding hundreds a week right now? Yeah nowhere, but the US is doing that every decade.
Incredible to see this angle that 'the good guys' are bowing down to bad China in this context when you have so much poverty, political repression and lack of gay rights, abortion etc in many right wing states to straight up hyper right wing terrorism targeting vulnerable populations every year.
I feel like in geo-politics. No country can be good.
Personally, I feel like america still has (had) hope with zohran mamdani but after the recent american shutdown, I would consider democratic party to be an extension of republican party or not doing anything radical except bernie,aoc, zohran and some other people.
I feel like America could have a hope to swing whereas china doesn't imo.
although, I feel like what is happening is that people made (short term?) decisions earlier generations earlier which lead us to where we are today where any country over-all needs a radical change as both europe and america and a lot of other countries need to radicalize what they are doing to give hope to the youngsters
Personally I feel like we shouldn't care much about US or chinese products but rather the ideologies of the product creators if we are worried about things and I think this is one of the reasons I love open source so much.
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>The US is worse than China in many aspects, from forever wars to climate over colonialism to fascism and support for an ongoing extremely violent genocide on over a hundred thousand civilians.
My man, the US and China are more or less the exact same here with the exception of forever wars.
Climate? China pollutes like crazy, and so does the US. Colonialism? Maybe not in the same vein but China does engage in actions to other nations, such as Macau, Hong Kong, and Taiwan that could be classified as colonialism. Fascism? Well yeah both countries are pretty much openly fascist right now. Support for an ongoing extremely violent genocide of over a hundred thousand people? Yeah the US and China are both complicit there. In fact, in China, you're speaking about the regime itself, with context to the ongoing genocide of Uyghur people.
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>where is China geonociding hundreds a week right now?
Xinjiang. They put people in camps and take extensive efforts to prevent births, to eliminate the Uighur population over time.
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Looks like you almost have this habit of explaining/talking about things 'as a European', particularly when bringing up USA in the context of international relations like now...
I guess it's OK — I'm European too, for example — but it does seem like you're doing it to imply that your views are somehow (at least relatively more) popular among, or representative of, well, Europeans. But now that we're making such massive generalisations, I'd claim that well-educated English-speaking Europeans are often likelier to be more familiar with the views and internal debates among Americans than those of many of their fellow Europeans, and that you're probably no exception.
As for your comment, had you not addressed it to 'you Americans', I'd be hard-pressed to tell it apart from a pretty standard-issue American Left (or 'Progressive') rant, perhaps somewhere from the younger and more identitarian part of that crowd, for example (despite some of the quasi-tankie undertones). While I'll admit that scoffing at things like pro-life policies and/or American poverty is certainly easier and more common throughout the political spectra in (Western) Europe, I'd say your cringe-inducing bothsidesism with USA and China falls closer to the crackpot left camp in Europe as well.
Europe contains multitudes, and undoubtedly for some but not all, up until now at least, it has been a bit too easy to comfortably observe and judge things for so long as a world-political bystander from under the US nuclear umbrella, typically further from the Russian border too — whether you were an insular French with casual contempt for all things 'Yankee', a German atomic-phobic pacifist (or worse, a far-right, Pro-Putin knuckle dragger) from that 'European powerhouse' heated with Russian non-renewables, or even a Swede from the world's leading moral superpower, or something like that, anyway... ;)
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I sometimes wonder what the comments will look like here when China invades/blockades Taiwan, and I suspect they will look a lot like this. Lots of US whataboutism. Note that the OP doesn’t mention the US at all.
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I can put my phone on "do not disturb" for free
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Wow, that's a little tone deaf. I was hoping for a small iPhone, They're so big now we make dedicated bags... F
EAZZY MISTAKE /s
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Even I can see this is AI: "neat/interesting/fresh/nice."
How about no.
Wow Apple is innovative! lmao
LOL. Sorry. really. LOL.