Hello! I hope you’re doing fine on this fine Friday. You know what’s not fine? My Apple FineWoven iPhone case. More on the challenge to fine find the perfect smartphone case in this week’s Big Thing. Then news! So much news! Apple’s got a new Sports app, Nvidia’s just printing money and AT&T’s experiencing service issues. Then, a new blazing fast chatbot you can try right now. And a throwback to AOL’s free frisbees coasters install CDs.
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PHOTO ILLUSTRATION: RACHEL MENDELSON, JOANNA STERN / THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
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There it is, everyone. My iPhone 15 Pro Max’s FineWoven case after five months of use. The edges are peeling, the fabric is scratched up like an old CD and it’s browning like a rotten banana. I’ve been waiting for the CDC to show up at my house to declare it a biomedical concern.
Some of you will say: “JOANNA! How gross are you?” Others—those who bought this case for $59 when it came out in September—will likely say: “Yep. Same issues here.”
Apple made a big eco-friendly deal about the FineWoven case when it was announced alongside the iPhone 15 models in the fall. Replacing the company’s leather cases, Apple said this FineWoven material was “an elegant and durable new textile” and that it was made from 68% “post-consumer recycled content.” Admirable. Except nothing has been fine about the FineWoven case.
Early on, tech news sites like The Verge complained about scratches in the fabric. At online retailers, the people who gave the case one or two stars all point out the same issues—peeling edges, scratches, proclivity to get dirty. On Best Buy, many say they’ll never buy an Apple case again and that it’s the worst product Apple’s ever made. Same on Amazon.
An Apple spokesman said that the company’s cases are engineered at the highest standard to protect iPhones and that the FineWoven case’s durable microtwill will protect an iPhone for years.
The company does provide advice for cleaning the FineWoven material with laundry detergent and water. It did help but the thing is still scratched and peeling.
This wasn’t intended to be a rant about Apple’s expiring case—or at least not entirely. After nearly two decades of smartphone innovation, we’re still covering our precious rectangular slabs in protective garb. Despite improvements to the durability of phones, I’m still petrified to go caseless. But thanks to the FineWoven, I now have some new case buying rules:
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Nothing over $40
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I understand the case for an expensive case. Why not protect your $1K+ investment with something equally premium? Not anymore. I’m currently testing a $25 case from Smartish that I bought on Amazon. It’s comfortable and soft. Also, at the suggestion of my colleague Dalvin Brown, I’m also trying out Case-Mate’s Clear Blox case. Its cool squared-off edges remind me of the Nokia Lumia 920. In a good way!
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MagSafe required
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You don’t need to buy Apple cases to get MagSafe, the company’s magnetic wireless-charging and accessory-attachment system. Those two cases I mentioned above support MagSafe, which means I can still wirelessly charge through them and can click my new MagSafe wallet to the back of them.
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Camera and screen protection
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One thing I did like about the FineWoven case was that there’s a lip around the cameras. When you put the phone on the table, the lenses aren’t touching the surface. You want to look for the same protection surrounding the screen. Also, you don’t want any slippery materials that could easily slide out of your pocket or hand.
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In the end, there’s no perfect smartphone case out there. These others may not be FineWoven, but they’re just fine.
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Nvidia’s Big Quarter 💸🤑
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I don’t typically pay close attention to chipmaker earnings reports but, man, you’ve got to pay attention to Nvidia right now. In the company’s fourth quarter, sales tripled from a year ago to $22 billion, and data-center revenue was $18.4 billion—more than 5X a year ago. Why the crazy growth? AI, AI, AI. The company is supplying the back-end hardware needed to power the AI systems from Microsoft, Google, OpenAI and others. Once known for graphics cards that make videogames run faster, Nvidia has capitalized on the AI boom and controls 80% of that industry’s market share.
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AT&T’s Big Outage ⛔️📞
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Many AT&T customers on Thursday woke up without cellular service. No 4G. No 5G. Just a big ol’ SOS indicator. The company worked throughout the day to restore the service. An AT&T spokesman said the outage resulted from “an incorrect process used as we were expanding our network,” adding that it wasn’t the result of a cyberattack. There’s no doubt the disruption was a huge pain in the 🍑 for AT&T customers. I heard from a lot of them. But as I said in our quick column on it, if there’s any good news, it’s that over the past few years, phone makers and cell carriers have built strong
backstops. There are now lots of ways to make calls and send texts over Wi-Fi.
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Apple’s Big Sports Bet 🏒🏀
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If you’re a sports fanatic (I’m not), you’ll want to check out Apple’s new Sports app. The free app for iPhones running iOS 17.2 or later lets you mark your favorite leagues and team then get real-time info including scores, stats—even betting odds. There’s the NBA, NHL, MLB, MLS and more. Noticeably absent? The NFL. Apple says that’s coming when the season starts again—which I think means…September? (Here’s the full list of leagues.)
Apple also released iOS 17.4 to beta testers this week. It’s got new emojis (head-shaking smileys!) and the option for EU users to download apps outside the App Store.
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CREDIT: JOANNA STERN/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
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If you’ve used ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Copilot or really any chatbot, you know the bot can take some time—maybe 30 to 60 seconds—to answer.
But not with Groq Prompter. No, I’m not talking about Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot. This super-speedy bot is from a Silicon Valley-based AI chip company called Groq.
You don’t need an account to try it. Visit groq.com, enter your prompt and watch the answer shoot right back back at you. Answering a prompt (“Write a story about cellular outages in the voice of Joanna Stern”) took about three seconds. ChatGPT took 42 seconds for the same query. Groq’s lead sentence was pretty corny and a play on those old “Can You Hear Me Now?” Verizon commercials. So, yeah, something I’d probably write. [Editor’s note: GROAN.]
The demo uses Meta’s open-source Llama large-language model and runs on Groq's specialized chips, rather than Nvidia’s more all-purpose chips.
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CREDIT: JOANNA STERN/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
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Just because Groq is faster doesn’t necessarily mean it’s smarter. Like other chatbots, it still struggled with some math problems when I tested it out. Sure, 2 + 2 = 4, but -60 x 184 doesn’t equal -10,740. Or -10,744, which was its second try. (The correct answer is -11,040!)
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PHOTO: PETE BEDA
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Pete Beda from Whiting, Ind.
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I had AOL prior to receiving this CD. I used the service for email and web surfing, but with a 14.4 kbps dial-up modem, it was like pulling teeth. It says “700 hours free for a month” on this disc. I definitely never hit that amount of time since that would have meant using the service 23.33 hours a day for 30 days! I remember getting a lot of these discs in the mail. Most went in the garbage, but I guess I thought this one might be useful one day. Twenty-four years later, it is!
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📷 Got an idea for a throwback? Reply to this email with a photo of your old tech and tell us why you loved—or hated—it. 📷
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Reply to this email and share your feedback and suggestions.
Reader-submitted content has been edited for clarity and length. This week’s newsletter was curated and written by Joanna Stern and Cordilia James.
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