MANILA, Philippines – Some say that it might be practical, but it doesn’t have the usual Apple style.

Apple’s release of a Smart Battery Case for the iPhone 6 and 6S on Wednesday, December 9, casued a stir online.

Users criticized the humped shape of the design, and the rather low capacity of the battery case, at an increase of only “up to 25 hours” of talk time, or Internet use of “up to 18 hours on LTE.”

Worse still, the fact that Apple made a case of this sort led some to say that the iPhone 6 had too small a battery to begin with.

In a talk with Mashable, Apple head honcho Tim Cook dismissed some of the concerns by offering a different view of how the Smart Battery Case is meant to be used. 

“If you’re charging your phone every day, you probably don’t need this at all. But if you’re out hiking and you go on overnight trips… it’s kind of nice to have,” Cook said.

Talking about the case design, Cook noted that the issue with third-party cases is that they’re too rigid, requiring more out of a user to put them on or take them off.

“If you make this solid all the way across,” Cook said, pointing to spots where the embedded battery stops and you have only the casing, “in order to get it on, you’d find it very difficult to get it on and off.”

In response to this, “the guys had this great insight to put the bend in along with making it a smart case,” Cook went on to say.

As for what users are calling the hump of the Smart Battery Case, Cook simply acknowledged the comments, saying, “You know, I probably wouldn’t call it ‘the hump.'”

Throughout the lighthearted banter, Cheryl Thomas, Apple’s vice president of software engineering, chimed in with one insight that makes for a snappy slogan for the case: “When you need it, you need it.” – Rappler.com