Innovation Cored, Diced, Cooked and Served As a Granny Scarf
November 11, 2025
Another short essay from a real and still-alive dinobaby. If you see an image, we used AI. The dinobaby is not an artist like Grandma Moses.
I do not pay much attention to Vogue, once a giant, fat fashion magazine. However, my trusty newsfeed presented this story to me this morning at 626 am US Eastern: “Apple and Issey Miyake Unite for the iPhone Pocket. It’s a Moment of Connecting the Dots.” I had not idea what an Issey Miyake was. I navigated to Yandex.com (a more reliable search service than Google which is going to bail out the sinking Apple AI rowboat) and learned:
Issey Miyake … the brand name under which designer clothing, shoes, accessories and perfumes are produced.
Okay, a Japanese brand selling collections of clothes, women’s clothes with pleating, watches, perfumes, and a limited edition of an Evian mineral water in bottles designed by someone somewhere, probably Southeast Asia.
But here’s the word that jarred me: Moment. A moment?
The Vogue write up explains:
It’s a moment of connecting the dots.
Moment? Huh.
Upon further investigation, the innovation is a granny scarf; that is, a knitted garment with a pocket for an iPhone. I poked around and here’s what the “moment” looks like:
Source: Engadget, November 2025
I don’t recall my great grandmother (my father’s mother had a mother. This person was called “Granny” or “Gussy”, and I know she was alive in 1958. She died at the age of 102 or 103. She knitted and tatted scarfs, odd little white cloths called antimacassars and small circular or square items called doilies (singular “doily”).
Apple and the Japanese fashion icon have inadvertently emulated some of the outputs of my great grandmother “Granny” or “Gussy.” Were she, my grandmother, and my father alive, one or all of them would have taken legal action. But time makes us fools, and “the spirits of the wise sit in the clouds and mock” scarfs with pouches like an NBA bound baby kangaroo.
But the innovation which may be either Miyake’s, Apple’s, or a combo brainstorm of Miyake and Apple comes in short and long sizes. My Granny cranked out her knit confections like a laborer in a woolen mill in Ipswich in the 19th century. She gave her outputs away.
You can acquire this pinnacle of innovation for US $150 or US $230.
Several observations:
- Apple’s skinny phone flopped; Apple’s AI flopped. Therefore, Apple is into knitted scarfs to revivify its reputation for product innovation. Yeah, innovative.
- Next to Apple’s renaming Apple iTV as Apple TV, one may ask, “Exactly what is going on in Cupertino other than demanding that I log into an old iPhone I use to listen to podcasts?” Desperation gives off an interesting vibe. I feel it. Do you?
- Apple does good hardware. It does not do soft goods with the same élan. Has its leadership lost the thread?
Smell that desperation yet? Publicity hunger, the need to be fashionable and with it, and taking the hard edges off a discount Mac laptop.
Net net: I like the weird pink version, but why didn’t the geniuses behind the Genius Bar do the zippy orange of the new candy bar but otherwise indistinguishable mobile device rolled out a short time ago? Orange? Not in the scarf palate.
Granny’s white did not make the cut.
Stephen E Arnold, November 11, 2025
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