tal

Eh, I mean, I wouldn't buy it, but then I wouldn't buy Apple products in general, as they're all gonna carry a premium. They sell into kinda a low-end luxury market. I dunno how many people remember back when Apple introduced the white earbuds with the iPod and had a marketing campaign focusing on their color, at a time when headphones were pretty universally a more-subtle black, to make it very obvious that what someone had in their pocket was an iPod.

For some luxury goods, the point is to visibly show the item to others, to demonstrate that you can afford the item, engage in conspicious consumption. Then you get Veblen goods:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good

A Veblen good is a type of luxury good, named after American economist Thorstein Veblen, for which the demand increases as the price increases, in apparent contradiction of the law of demand, resulting in an upward-sloping demand curve.

The higher prices of Veblen goods may make them desirable as a status symbol in the practices of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure. A product may be a Veblen good because it is a positional good, something few others can own.

So people can prefer a higher-priced item, specifically because it lets them show off that they can afford it.

And if you figure that the closest thing to the "phone pocket" is women's purses, well...that's historically been a product category that sees a fair number of members that are Veblen goods, a lot of pricey items designed to show that their wearer can afford them. Like, a designer handbag isn't really any more functional than a far-less-expensive equivalent, yet lots of people buy them.

https://www.hermes.com/us/en/category/women/bags-and-small-leather-goods/bags-and-clutches/

Those are pretty hefty prices for the functionality you're getting.

If you figure that a phone pocket probably fills more-or-less the same fashion role, then I wouldn't be surprised if the potential to sell luxury phone pockets is comparable to that to selling luxury handbags.

Apple already kinda sells towards a low-end luxury market, so I expect that Apple's probably making a not-unreasonable move in trying to feel out whether there's potential for that among their customer base.

I wouldn't pay much for a luxury container for a phone, but that's me. My pockets fit my phone just fine, so I'm not even in the market in the first place. But...doesn't mean that Apple isn't making the right move from a business standpoint for them, I think.

EDIT: A quick kagi later, it sounds like the proper industry term is "affordable luxury" rather than "low-end luxury":

https://themetropolitan.metrostate.edu/iphone-17-apple-transforms-smartphones-into-symbols-of-affordable-luxury/

The iPhone 17 was launched in September 2025, during Apple’s traditional event in Cupertino, California. Tim Cook, in turn, emphasized that the model reinforces the company’s strategy of transforming smartphones into symbols of affordable luxury in the global market. Although the price is high for most people, the iPhone 17 is still priced lower than other traditional luxury goods, including designer handbags, sports cars, and Swiss watches.

Since 2007, Apple has established its brand as a benchmark for innovation and prestige. However, in September 2025, the company once again reinforced the idea that the iPhone is the “cheapest rich-people’s item” available on the market. According to Bloomberg, the device has therefore become a gateway for consumers looking to flaunt a globally recognized status item. Thus, it has come to be seen as an affordable alternative to prestige.

I mean, I like the Lara Croft thigh holster route, but that might chafe.

And if you're wearing it the way the male model is, you can probably add an outer shirt or jacket and wear it like an underarm money belt in less-secure environments. I have one of those that I repurposed for carrying a tablet. Looks very similar to this, though not the same brand or type of fabric:

https://www.amazon.com/Multi-Purpose-Anti-Thief-Security-Underarm-Messenger/dp/B077GD5C27

Kind of like a very thin purse with a padded, short strap that's intended to optionally hide under one's clothes.

You don't need something that large to carry a phone, though. The sort of smaller thing that they're doing here is big enough for that.

I've commented on here before how women's clothing generally doesn't have large-enough pockets for smartphones. A lot of modern women's clothing is form-fitting, and has small pockets.

So either you revise the clothing or add some kind of wearable bag/pocket.

Used to be that women wore dresses, had slits in the skirts that they could reach through, and then had sorta wearable pockets on beneath them. But full skirts are pretty dead now, so:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pocket

By the 17th century, pockets were sewn into men's clothing, while women's remained as separate tie-on pouches hidden beneath skirts.[5][6]

In the 17th to 19th centuries, women's tie-on pockets—mentioned in the rhyme Lucy Locket—often carried everyday tools like scissors, pins, needles, and keys.[7][8]: 113 

In modern fashion, men's clothing usually includes pockets, whereas women's clothing often has smaller or even fake ones, sometimes called Potemkin pockets after the concept of a Potemkin village. A 2018 study by the Pudding found that fewer than half of women's front pockets could fit a thin wallet, let alone a phone or keys.[9]

When I first ran into this, I thought "well, put the phone in your purse then, dammit, you're already carrying that for feminine hygiene products". Problem is that women don't haul (bulky) purses everywhere

walk into the office, say, set down the purse at the desk, and it's mostly staying at the desk. I don't know any women who wear their purses around the house. But they do want to keep the phone available all the time.

And the smartphone is a pretty ubiquitous item to want to carry around now.

So unless women's clothing changes to have large pockets and somehow deals with not messing up the body's silhouette or whatever makes that a problem or the smartphone form factor changes ("big smartwatch?"), I expect that people have to wind up with some kind of mini, wearable container. Like this.

One of the worst spills occurred off Sri Lanka in 2021 when thousands of tonnes of plastic pellets were lost from a stricken cargo ship.

Nurdles coated an 80-kilometre (50-mile) stretch of beach on the island's western coast, and fishing was prohibited for months.

Huh. I hadn't followed that when it happened.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Press_Pearl

According to a 2021 United Nations report, it was the largest recorded plastic spill, releasing about 70–75 billion nurdles that take centuries to degrade.[11]

https://www.shippingandfreightresource.com/the-carriage-of-nurdles-by-sea-packaging-requirements-to-be-regulated/

Sure, but they did.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disumbrationism

Disumbrationism was a hoax masquerading as an art movement that was launched in 1924 by Paul Jordan-Smith, a novelist, Latin scholar, and authority on Robert Burton from Los Angeles, California.

Annoyed at the cold reception his wife Sarah Bixby Smith's realistic still lifes had received from an art exhibition jury, Jordan-Smith sought revenge by styling himself as "Pavel Jerdanowitch" (Cyrillic: Па́вел Жердaнович), a variation on his own name. Never having picked up a paint brush in his life, he then painted Yes, we have no bananas, a blurry, badly painted picture of a Pacific islander woman holding a banana over her head, having just killed a man and putting his skull on a stick. In 1925, Smith entered the banana picture under a new title of Exaltation in New York's "Exhibition" of the Independents at the Waldorf-Astoria. He made a suitably dark and brooding photograph of himself as Jerdanowitch, and submitted the work to the same group of critics as representative of the new school "Disumbrationism". He explained Exaltation as a symbol of "breaking the shackles of womanhood".[1] To his amusement, if not to his surprise, the Disumbrationist daub won praise from the critics who had belittled his wife's realistic painting.

More Disumbrationist paintings followed: a composition of zig-zag lines and eyeballs he called Illumination; a garish picture of a black woman doing laundry that he called Aspiration, and which a critic praised as "a delightful jumble of Gauguin, Pop Hart and Negro minstrelsy, with a lot of Jerdanowitch individuality";[2]: 111  Gination, an ugly, lopsided portrait; and a painting named Adoration, of a woman worshipping an immense phallic idol, which was exhibited in 1927.

https://hoaxes.org/archive/permalink/the_disumbrationist_school_of_art/

Jordan-Smith did too, though, and his work doesn't qualify. I think that one has to both do and maintain a straight face for the rest of one's life.

the passing grade is 43/50,

They might just be randomly guessing and hoping that they'll eventually get it, and thinking that their chances are better than they are.

I think that that'd be...let's see. Say there are four possible answers for each question. So he's got a 75% chance of failing any individual question.

$ maxima -q
(%i1) load("distrib")$
(%i2) cdf_binomial(7, 50, .75);
(%o2)                       1.8188415357867314E-19

That should give the probability of failing at most 7 answers out of 50 if there's a 75% chance of failing any one.

So he's got something like a 0.000000000000000018188% chance of passing the test by randomly guessing.

His chance of failing a single instance of that test:

(%i3) 1-cdf_binomial(7, 50, .75);

(%o3)                                 1.0

Ah. He has such a ludicrously small chance of passing that Maxima can't represent it with the current floating point precision.

kagis a bit to figure out how to do this

Okay, apparently Maxima has bigfloats, but they default to only 16 digits of precision; not enough for this. This should give us 200 digits of floating point precision with bigfloats.

(%i4) fpprec:200;

(%o4)                                 200
(%i5) 1-bfloat(cdf_binomial(7, 50, .75));

(%o5) 9.999999999999999998181158464213268688894671703526026636336767389444876177016785501194817697978578507900238037109375b-1

Okay, so now chance of failing 128 tests in a row by randomly guessing:

(%i6) (1-bfloat(cdf_binomial(7, 50, .75)))^128;

(%o6) 9.9999999999999997671882834192983948674103659072385593201782461674117226992783470289641501110105148249790638571335177402867593272110042747272666144926576839664587182158166580514670324207313719393913737b-1

So then his chance of managing to get at least one success out of 128 tests in a row by randomly guessing:

(%i7) 1-(1-bfloat(cdf_binomial(7, 50, .75)))^128;

(%o7) 2.328117165807016051325896340927614406798217538325882773007216529710358498889894851750209361428664822597132406727889957252727333855073423160335412817841833419485329675792686280606086263120236298536839b-17

So he's got about a 0.0000000000000023% chance of passing at least once in a 128 random-guess-based series of test attempts (assuming, again, that each question has four multiple choice answers). That is, he could keep doing this for the rest of his life and he's virtually certain not to pass.

With regard to the chancellor's age – Merz turns 70 on Tuesday – 52% said it would be better if he were younger.

Merz also felt that it would be better if he were younger.

Strong words for a man who travels by personal aircraft even when he's not President and whose priority in holding patterns is up to the discretion of air traffic controllers.

thirsty crops in the wrong places,

kagis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_Iran

Wheat, rice, and barley are the country's major crops.

Rice: Iran's total rice production stands at 2.2 million tons per annum whereas annual consumption is about three million tons (2008)...Rice is mostly produced in northern Iran.

I can't find a rice production map for Iran, but I'm assuming that that's around Tehran, which is in northern Iran.

Yeah, rice paddies seem like a bad idea unless you're a pretty wet place. That being said, we grow some in California, which is also pretty dry. But we also aren't that short.

Water levels below 3% in dam reservoirs for Iran’s second city, say reports

Honestly, I think that if a reservoir is that low, I'd have started that before this point.

I'm kind of sympathetic to the idea that there should be some sort of fine associated with petty vandalism, but I've also seen a number of comments here and elsewhere that it's unlikely that whatever she did actually required causing this much damage to remove it, and that if it did, the sculpture was poorly designed in the first place. One user on Reddit asked whether, if the city had decided to use dynamite to remove the eyes, she should be liable for all the damage caused by the dynamite. I think that that's probably a fair point to make. The blame doesn't need to be entirely on any one party here.

I could see fining her for whatever one might reasonably expect a competent removal to run from a properly-designed artwork, but not dumping costs on her from failures in those other areas.