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Apple Roasted Over New $230 iPhone Pocket ‘Sock’

The price tag for the tech giant’s low-tech accessory has been met with a mixture of bemusement and scorn.

Long at the cutting edge of innovation in personal communications, Apple has left consumers confused with its latest product. The iPhone Pocket, which comes with a hefty price tag of up to $230, basically acts as a kind of sling holder for the tech giant’s iconic phone and is intended to be worn around the user’s body. While the company’s vice president of industrial design, Molly Anderson, might have described it as “a design approach that celebrates craftsmanship, simplicity and delight,” social media users have somewhat less generously described it as a “glorified” and “insanely expensive sock.” The Pocket is apparently the brainchild of Japanese fashion designer Issey Miyake, himself one of Apple founder’s favorite fashion designers, though it’s unclear whether Miyake’s intention was for the neon-green iteration of the product, as some critics have pointed out, to resemble the mankini made famous by Sacha Baron Cohen. “Same vibe,” one person wrote on X, accompanied by a picture of the comedian’s character Borat sporting the swimwear.