By John Moltz

September 22, 2023 2:16 PM PT

This Week in Apple: Money talks, FineWoven walks

Apple won’t let you gamble on the iPhone, but it seriously considered letting you do the next worst thing. The iPhone 15 Pro Max seems to be selling well but that FineWoven case… eesh.

Taking stock

You loved Apple Cash, you raved about the Apple Card and you adore the Apple Savings Account. But how would you have felt about Apple Stock Trading?

“Apple and Goldman Sachs Planned to Launch iPhone Stock Trading Feature Last Year”:

One ability apparently pitched by executives was the ability to invest in Apple shares using spare cash.

Trader, can you spare a dime?

Was this just an elaborate scheme to get people to actually use the Stocks app? Alas, we may never know as this plan was shelved.

When markets worsened last year, Apple and Goldman Sachs shelved the project due to fears over backlash if users lost money in the stock market, and refocused attention on a high-interest savings account for ‌Apple Card‌ users.

Shocking breaking news: sometimes people lose money on the stock market. More on this as information unfolds.

You know, uh, we had a whole Great Depression over that, as I recall. It’s probably a good thing Apple’s plan has been mothballed. You’re not going to have any money to invest after buying an iPhone 15 Pro Max anyway.

Trickle down cameranomics

What an age we live in that we can know how well the iPhone 15 Pro is selling before anyone even gets one. Can you believe we used to have to wait sometimes months to hear how well a particular device was selling? Progress is really amazing.

“Kuo: iPhone 15 Pro Max Seeing ‘Robust’ Demand, Shipping Estimates Extending Into November”

But it seems the iPhone 15 Pro Max is selling quite well. The economy, it turns out, runs on cameras. Who knew?

Well, Apple knew, apparently. And no one blinked at the fact that you couldn’t get the iPhone 15 Pro Max with 128 GB of storage. I mean, if you’re buying a $1200 smartphone, you’re probably going to want the extra storage anyway. Also, Apple puts the Pro line first on its iPhone web page, so probably a lot of people are just clicking the first thing they see and plopping down $1200, thinking that’s just what iPhones cost these days.

“It’s one iPhone, Michael, how much could it cost?”

The rest of us will just have to wait for that camera.

“iPhone 15 Pro Max’s 5x Optical Zoom Lens Rumored to Expand to Both iPhone 16 Pro Models”

But, really, isn’t the anticipation the best part?

No. It’s not. I know that. I’m just tryin’ here.

CloserToFineWoven

The reviews of the iPhone 15 Pro may be rave but the reviews of Apple’s new FineWoven cases are… not fine.

“The new FineWoven iPhone cases are very bad”

OK, bad. They’re bad.

The Verge’s first look at FineWoven doesn’t go so far as to say “Please go back to killing cows” but it definitely lets you know FineWoven is no leather. It does call several cows “real jerks”, though.

OK, not really, but that would have been funny if they had.

Apparently FineWoven cases are more prone to scratches than leather, and here we had all thought we lived in a post-scratch society. It’s a real disappointment. Given that Apple charges a fair amount for these cases, you might want to consider other options if you’re a case person. It will still protect the phone and isn’t that the real point of a case? To take the damage you don’t want the phone to get? You don’t want scratches on the phone, you don’t want scratches on the case, what do you want scratches on?

Let us consider that maybe FineWoven is like early attempts to replace the hamburger. If you were looking for a hamburger in the ‘80s, you were definitely going to be disappointed by a Gardenburger. It took years to create more passable alternatives, like the Beyond Burger and the Impossible Burger and just eating a regular hamburger and then buying some carbon offsets.

Sorry, I wasn’t supposed to type that last one out loud.

Hopefully Apple is able to keep improving the material, because despite what The Verge didn’t actually say, most cows are good people.

[John Moltz is a Six Colors contributor. You can find him on Mastodon at Mastodon.social/@moltz and he sells items with references you might get on Cotton Bureau.]