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Apple Hardware

Is the Era of Stickers In Apple Boxes Coming To an End? (9to5mac.com) 57

Citing a memo distributed to Apple Store employees, 9to5Mac reports that the new iPad Pro and iPad Air lineups will not include Apple stickers in the box -- "a key piece of memorabilia" that dates back as far as 1977's Apple II, notes Ars Technica. While the company says that this is part of its environmental goals to completely remove plastic from its packaging, it begs the question: is the era of stickers in Apple boxes coming to an end? 9to5Mac reports: The M3 MacBook Air that launched in March includes stickers in the box, but Apple Vision Pro (which launched in February) does not. Will the iPhone 16 include stickers in the box? Only time will tell. Ars' Andrew Cunningham writes about the origins of the Apple stickers: Apple has included stickers with its products at least as far back as the Apple II in 1977 when the stickers still said "Apple Computer" on them in the company's then-favored Motter Tektura typeface (I couldn't track down a vintage Apple II unboxing, but I did find some fun photos of Apple enthusiast Dan Budiac opening a sealed-in-box mid-'80s-era Apple IIc, complete with rainbow pack-in stickers). I myself became familiar with them during the height of the iPod in the early to mid-2000s when Apple was still firmly a tech underdog, and people would stick white Apple logo stickers to their cars to show off their non-conformist cred and/or Apple brand loyalty.

As Apple's products became more colorful in the 2010s, the Apple logo stickers would sometimes be color-matched to the device you had just bought, a cute bit of attention to detail that has carried over into present-day MagSafe cables and color-matched iMac keyboards and trackpads.
The report notes that you can still request an Apple sticker at Apple Stores at the time of your purchase; however, Amazon, Best Buy, and other retailers don't appear to have them available.
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Is the Era of Stickers In Apple Boxes Coming To an End?

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  • by Anonymous Coward

    look at me! i thought of a question and then i wrote about it! everyone hurry up and come look!

    The report notes that you can still request an Apple sticker at Apple Stores at the time of your purchase; however, Amazon, Best Buy, and other retailers don't appear to have them available.

    because those are not Apple Stores. duh.

  • What!! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ACForever ( 6277156 ) on Thursday May 09, 2024 @03:10PM (#64460517)
    how will you let the world know you dont know anything about tech without your apple sticker
    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by tgeek ( 941867 )
      You could call up the customer care center to bitch about dropped calls when you switch on airplane mode.
    • When I was a grad student I used to collect the stickers and put them on the lab trash cans.

    • Or I can say that I have 30 years IT experience as a sysadmin/scripter/integration expert with VAX/VMS through SunOS through HP/UX, AIX, Solaris, into the era of Linux from Ygdrisil to RedHat on physical hardware, virtual servers, and "cloud" computing, and have always been a Mac user. As are most of my sysadmin associates. MacOS IS BSD unix you know. It's the single best OS to manage servers of any flavor. So, yeah, I'll proudly display my sticker. I have a real trouble understanding what you think "k

      • there is a whole class of computer user that is rabidly anti-Apple-anything... One can't reason with them. Me, I just try to ignore them these days... life is too short.
  • by pz ( 113803 ) on Thursday May 09, 2024 @03:33PM (#64460575) Journal

    I fail to see the importance of this story.

    • by HtR ( 240250 ) on Thursday May 09, 2024 @03:38PM (#64460593)
      Didn't you read the headline? Apparently a whole era is ending!
    • I fail to see the importance of this story.

      News does not have to be important. It just has to be ... new, which this objectively is, for the first time in 40 years something happened.

    • by Bongo ( 13261 )

      It's about the misuse of "begs the question".

  • They didn't ship stickers with the Vision Pro, if that didn't get stickers then I assumed stickers were just done for all new products.

    • They didn't ship stickers with the Vision Pro...

      Doesn't that just automagically splat a virtual sticker on all iProducts?

  • If you think this is bad, you should see that ad where they crush all that stuff to make an iPad. Man, that makes me angry!
    • If you think this is bad, you should see that ad where they crush all that stuff to make an iPad. Man, that makes me angry!

      Way more perplexing is that they just crushed everything flat. How'd all that then get pushed together down to the LxW of that iPad? Makes no sense. :-)

  • by tphb ( 181551 ) on Thursday May 09, 2024 @03:40PM (#64460597)

    They were pointless. Last thing I need after spending thousands on some hardware is a sticker to advertise that I spent thousands on the hardware.

    • Eh, it is cheap advertising, granted more fitting of a scrappy little upstart than a corporate behemoth. I have tons of stickers from everything from racing parts manufacturers to record labels. .Question is why now? Is this Apple coming to terms with its increased stature in the business world or is this a boneheaded cost-cutting measure that although not significant on its own, is another sign of degradation?

      Even odds on either one.

  • by awwshit ( 6214476 ) on Thursday May 09, 2024 @04:00PM (#64460643)

    Guess how much new material and bleach is used to make those pure white boxes? Cardboard is renewable and biodegradable, but bleaching it is unnecessary.

    Would you still buy an iphone in a brown box? Of course you would, the box is not changing your mind.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      They tried brown boxes for a while. It didn't last long.

      I suspect there was some consumer backlash.

      • by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        They tried brown boxes for a while. It didn't last long.

        I suspect there was some consumer backlash.

        Here's a question - the 90s were flush with unbleached fully recycled printer paper. I know, because my high school used them.

        You don't see them anymore. They sucked - the contrast was low on printed materials and consumers rejected them, so it's all back to bleached paper.

        And honestly, any printed material you use will be on bleached paper - even those fancy all-black boxes you find products in. It's going to

      • Macs came in unbleached, recycled cardboard boxes in the mid '90s. I liked that packaging. But Jobs put a stop to it when he returned. He always had a thing for shiny things.

    • by antdude ( 79039 )

      Or better, don't use any boxes. ;)

    • If you get a replacement or something, you indeed get a small brown box.
    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Sony has been using recycled paper and plastic for its packaging and even the bodies of some of its products like headphones and earbuds.

      The plastic has a speckled look. I'm not sure how they do it, but it looks like the plastic was shredded and then reformed, with a bit of colour matching.

      If you look at a lot of modern Japanese product packages you realize that most of it can be cardboard, folded origami style. It's as much of an art as a science.

    • Guess how much new material and bleach is used to make those pure white boxes?

      Given I buy a new phone every 3-5 years, negligible amounts. There's more bleached paper from unwanted credit card solicitations in my house. By a lot.

      Personally, I'd trade all the stickers from all the iDevices for a single set of headphones. I don't think anyone from my entire family has ever put an iSticker on anything.

      • Yeah, I turned off those credit card offers and almost all junk (where its possible to stop it). I get very little junk mail, mostly from local companies using Every Door Delivery that I cannot opt-out of.

      • I got a free set of headphones once as a 'consolation prize' because they took too long to send me back an idevice that I had repaired. Literally (under warranty) I called them up the day after it was supposed to be back in my hands and complained to an iPerson so they then sent me a free set of Beats (the $149 set at the time). Then the iPerson tracked down my repaired idevice and had it fedexed to me the next day.
  • by MacMann ( 7518492 ) on Thursday May 09, 2024 @04:16PM (#64460697)

    The stickers don't have to be plastic. Make them out of something recyclable like aluminum. The backing that covers the adhesive on the aluminum sticker could be wax paper or something equally recyclable, biodegradable, or whatever. Maybe losing the sticker is to look a bit more "grown up" as well as reducing costs and dispensing with something that inevitably becomes plastic waste. If this was just about plastic waste then there's ways around that and still have the stickers. If it's more than that then I guess there's no saving them.

  • ... they wound up in the trash.

  • ...sticking MS-Bob stickers over them. I've since mellowed. ..mostly.

  • The Apple logo has been wrong since 1999. It needs the rainbow back to show off the color capabilities of the PC's, laptops, and Iphones.
    • Jobs complained bitterly about the printing alignment problems Apple had with the rainbow logo, and had the NeXT logo designed to have the colors surrounded by black to solve those issues. The rainbow logo isn't coming back.

      Even NeXT had stickers.

  • An old dresser at my parent's cottage still has the rainbow Apple sticker I stuck on it some 35 years ago, at kid-me height. I don't particularly care if Apple is phasing out the stickers, but I'd be lying if I said it didn't hit me with a twinge of nostalgia.

    • I get the nostalgia thing, it's all "spaceblack", "midnight", "starlight", "spacegray", etc. That old logo is so colorful and fun. I actually searched for one, and ended up with a rainbow Swift sticker (Swift as in the programming language),.
  • And the free advertisement in every box isn't profitable anymore.
  • My 2 last macbooks air didn't have any stickers in the box, the oldest being 4 years old. I guess only some countries still have them.

  • This reminds me of the story about American Airlines in the 1980s concluding that three-quarters of their passengers were not eating the olive that came with their dinner salad. They cut it, saved $40,000 in a year, and concluded that it lost not a single passenger.

    I suspect the lack of Apple sticker in the box of your shiny new iDevice is pretty much the same thing.

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