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Comment by tomxor | Hacker News Reader

> 4-color, double-walled, matte boxes + HD foam inserts [...] the most expensive line item on your BOM [...] And then they get thrown away.

I hate this whenever I buy a consumer product, I look at the box and think, that's a £10er I'm just sticking in the bin.

I like functional brutalist packaging, not only is it cheaper but usually also more durable and reusable due to not being specifically shaped. Whenever I buy a piece of gear that comes in such a box It makes me happy that more of my money went into the actual device, or at least funding the company to invest more in developing the device, rather than a pretty piece of cardboard.

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Packaging is like insurance, because it’s usually not needed but it’s required to be used 100% in order to mitigate infrequent events like dropping a package. Most packaging is close to optimized for cost and protection of the contents relative to their value, think Pringles cans. An iPhone or MacBook is a $1000-3000 computer, $10-100 in packaging is normal for that sort of product. If I buy a heavy machine from Europe it’s going to cost 10% of that machine just to crate it and another 10-15% for shipping oversea. I don’t complain about that cost because I know it keeps my investment intact during transit or storage.

This is a gross overestimate of packaging costs, even for a MacBook Pro. iPhone packaging is about $1 all-in.

While Apple still produces the nicest looking boxes, I think the box my 2020 MacBook Air M1 came in used less cardboard and less plastic than the box my 2004 iPod 3rd Gen came in.

I’d gladly buy all my tech in the ugliest refurbished bare cardboard boxes, but few companies package their goods as efficiently as Apple these days.

Apple has done a lot of work to create packaging that is mostly paper, eliminating most of the plastic and foam. Even the little doohickeys to keep the cables neatly coiled are made of paper now.

They have also shrunk the overall size of the boxes. A 2023 14” MacBook Pro is about the same size as a white plastic iBook G4 from 2005, but the box is about half the volume. This also lowers the per-machine shipping costs because they can fit more of them in the plane.

Many Sony products have zero plastic, 100% recycled paper packaging. It works really well too with some clever package design.

WF-1000MX4 and WH-1000MX5 products come to mind

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