Comment by bborud

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"

I came here to say, how I wish it was an article from The Onion.

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.

Except microplastics rub off and penetrate the skin barrier.

When you put it like that I can find no fault with your argument :-)

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.

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.

Reminds me of waterproof phone pouches.