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Comment by adrusi | Hacker News Reader

I can't say I know much about the range of subgenres that exist withing the unboxing universe, but at least in tech unboxing videos, I've always assumed that the primary appeal was the first-impressions review that comes with the unboxing. After a user takes their new thinkpad out of the box, they might remark about how great the travel is on the keyboard, or about its weigh or build-sturdiness. They're the next best thing to trying a product in person (and real reviews are harder to come by than dime-a-dozen unboxings).

Maybe I'm totally misjudging and the primary attraction that they instill the same reaction as getting a shiny new gadget does.

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I'm aware of two major subgenres:

1) the "first impressions review". Descriptions of how sturdy or flimsy or smooth something feels, how it disappoints or delights compared to the picture on the box, whether it works as expected immediately. This actually seems really useful to me as a supplement to written reviews.

2) the "revel in the thing itself" unboxing. My preschool-aged nephew loves these videos. He seems to have as much fun watching people play with new toys as he does actually playing with new toys, or more. In a sense, this sort of video actually shields him from disappointment -- if the toy sucks, he can just move on to the next video, or he might not even notice since the person on screen is probably having fun anyway.

Some things are attractively packaged. So seeing someone show off that packaging can be quite nice in itself.

Sometimes unboxing can give you valuable and otherwise hard to find information, e.g. how big the transformer is and how it looks. That stuff is typically nowhere to be found, not on the website of whoever made the thing (even if you search for the manual) and often not in reviews (at least if the transformer isn’t extremely enormous or extremely ugly or otherwise noteworthy).

First impressions tend to be pretty useless in my opinion since it’s not very thought out and all very subjective. Maybe sometimes something useful is said, but it’s mostly useless.

It’s also good for getting a non-product-photo look at the product. For some things there just aren’t any video reviews and photos often just don’t cut it. It’s always good to get more than one look at a product.

I just did an unboxing video (of the Bitbox https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDuMKHX91Mk) and part of my motivation had to do with the packaging.

Not the Bitbox's packaging, but the postal wrapper which came from France. As an American, I've felt a small bit of fear as I've watched our financial resources diminish. When I saw the multi-colored postal package, with its delicate rose-colored gradient, I had the distinct cognition "Hey, there's a country and a people unafraid to spend some resources on making their postal packages look good."

We should get our national shit together.

See the recent redesign for USPS

http://grand-army.com/work/projects/project.php?project=usps...

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