iPhone Pocket

5 hours ago (apple.com)

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.

  • 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?

  • 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 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)

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.

    • 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.

    • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

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.

  • > 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.

Had to make sure it wasn't April 1st.

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.

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.

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.

> iPhone Pocket in the short strap design retails at $149.95 (U.S.), and the long strap design at $229.95 (U.S.).

> 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"

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.

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…

I'm still waiting for them to collaborate with Levi's to bring iPhone sized pockets to women's jeans.

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.

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 crying in unacceptable or is there a connection to art supplies I'm missing here?

This feels like a step backwards and if it were released on April 1st would be indistinguishable from a prank.

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.

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.

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.

Hey, any of y'all want one in hand-spun, natural-colored wool (as in, as it was shorn from the sheep) yarn?

"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.

>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.

  • 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.

On the bright side, it looks as if you could also use it as a decent slingshot.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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".

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.

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?

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

``` 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?

> 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.

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?

"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

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.