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
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.