SFGate.com has a great article about Apple and their packaging.
And you open the gorgeous black box and lift the white cardboard inside flap, itself adorned with clean offset typeface declaring "Designed by Apple in California," and you are confronted with what is quite possible the most thoughtfully designed and pleasing packaging you've ever seen, not like you care about this stuff and hey it's all just Styrofoam and garbage anyway, but still.
Cables wrapped in elegant tight slots on the sides. Small manual and paperwork in the center. All clean and clear and meant for optimum visual and tactile experience. Lift out the top half of the foam and there's the computer itself, solo, centered, encased in beautiful eminently touchable sleek aluminum, a subtle tech-fetish object par excellence, wrapped in delicate foam padding and not cluttered with crap and not requiring you to do anything but lift it out and peel back the sheath and stroke the silver metal and turn it on.
And there it is. The welcome screen. An exquisite downtempo chill soundtrack and the world "Welcome" swimming over the monitor in a number of different languages and you think, what the hell is this? Where's the pain? Where's the hassle and the misaligned factory molding and the broken keyboard and the 3,000 setup steps and the sense that I'm drowning in a sea of programmer jargon and plastic waste and ubergeek hell? [SFGate.com]
This is one of the first things I noticed when I bought my first TiBook. Everything was perfect. The packaging was beautiful. Everything was right there when I needed it. It really was great to set up for the first time. This is definitely one of the reasons Apple stuff costs a bit more. But I think I prefer it. Opening up the box to my iPod was definitely more cool than trying to cut open a blisterpack wrapped walkman (when will someone realize that everyone HATES that type of packaging). With Apple it boils down to attention to detail. They think of the little details that are so often missed. It's hard to not become one of those Apple fanatics after using one for a while.
