Snippet: The New FineWoven iPhone Cases are Very Bad ☇

Allison Johnson for The Verge:

Folks, what you’ve heard so far is true. Apple’s new FineWoven iPhone cases and accessories are bad. Like, really bad. I’ve been puzzling over them for the past week, looking at them from different angles. Picking them up, setting them down, petting them. Seven days later, I still can’t make sense of them and have no other choice but to say it out loud: FineWoven is very bad. […]

If I’m putting one of these cases on my phone, I’m inevitably going to scratch it on accident with a jagged fingernail edge, or it’s going to come into contact with my car keys. And when you scratch FineWoven, the results are seemingly permanent. When we first inspected the cases after picking them up at Apple Park, Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel picked one up and ran his fingernails across it five times — and that was all it took to leave a trail of indelible scuffs on the fabric. The scratches are still there a week later, no matter how many times I’ve tried “buffing” it out by rubbing my finger over it.

I think Apple needs to be called out for these, not because some folks preferred leather, but because these cases aren’t going to hold up. I ordered one alongside a new iPhone and the case arrived Monday. While I kind of liked the feel of it, just removing it from the box led to a permanent scratch on the inside from the cardboard. I initiated the return process almost immediately, giving that the record of the shortest time I had an Apple product in my possession. While they’ll probably protect the phone from bumps and scrapes, it seems that they’re going to wear extremely fast and in a bad way. A case shouldn’t be more fragile than the phone it’s holding.