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Comment by somedude895 | Hacker News Reader

I love the visual design of Apple packaging, and I do also keep the boxes. Although mainly for possible resale in the future, or at least that's what I tell myself.

I do absolutely hate opening iPhone boxes though, where a sort of vacuum builds up inside as you're trying to jiggle the bottom part out of the top. Maybe I'm opening them wrong (are you supposed to squeeze the lid somewhere or something?), but I do not find that part satisfying at all.

Maybe they could add some invisible air holes in the top somewhere. Just enough to make the separation go exactly the right speed.

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In my experience the vacuum holds the bottom half immovably in place, and I have to pry it out. It looks nice in that gif but in practice I think they need to test a little more. Perhaps it’s a humidity thing?

I think they removed plastic so they decided to make the self seal very strong.

It wouldn’t surprise me if humidity were a piece of it–here in the US northeast I’ve always found the iPhone boxes to be aggravatingly sticky. I wind up jiggling it all around and prying at it with my fingernails.

It’s no longer the case, but for a long time my iPhones were pretty bad about reconnecting to the cell network when emerging from the NYC subway, which always struck me as a little bit of evidence of its California roots–given the polish of the device overall, it surely would never have been so janky in that situation if a majority of their employees experienced it each day on their way to work!

> pretty bad about reconnecting to the cell network when emerging from the NYC subway

Unrelated to your overall to point, but maybe this helps a fellow reader.

Most stations have cell signal now, you just need to toggle airplane mode once you are fully out of the tunnel.

I think Apple or Qualcomm must have done something about that exact use case in one of the last updates: It’s been a while since I’ve had to do that. My iPhone now finds the network in the station pretty consistently.

I wouldn’t even be surprised if they did something like using the accelerometer as an input to the baseband for triggering a quick network scan after a rapid deceleration when on a train without signal.

Or maybe newer networks are just more predictable for phones to reconnect to quickly without draining the battery?

I have long found this annoying, but it seems like this has improved with the latest box.

I don’t know, but I imagine there is some effort into balancing staying-closed and falling-open within the constraints of the machinery used to produce and assemble these things. Seems like it’s something likely to be somewhat variable.

Apple boxes open really well without visible air holes, imo. In fact, it's a little mysterious how well it opens given the in-box vacuum, especially compared to other boxes.

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