Apple packaging

TidBITS Talk
1

I’ve always been enamored of Apple packaging, going back to the unboxing of my Apple //c in 1984. And although I applaud their recycling efforts, I definitely don’t applaud the way they are now shipping laptops.

I could always reuse the outer cardboard shipping box for storage or if I decided to sell the item that came in it later on; now, that’s pretty impossible to do. When I purchased an M2 MacBook Air last year (which I did not keep), I had to totally destroy the outer carton to get to the product; there was no way at all to preserve it after opening. I hated disposing of it even for recycling because I could have continued to use it in some capacity. They need to bring back the reusability of the shipping packaging!

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I suppose the question is, what was the relative impact on the environment of the previous (presumably larger and less efficient) packaging versus some percentage of the population reusing it in some way. Given that recycling cardboard is generally a pretty good process for the environment, reducing the need for harvesting trees and using significantly less energy than creating new cardboard, my guess is that the lifecycle impact came down on the side of the new approach.