(Author’s Note: While the rest of the world oohs and ahhs over the thinness of Apple’s new keyboards. I cannot really add more than a spiteful (and curmudgeonly) yawn, so I think I’ll review the bloody packaging instead… and why the hell not?)
Apple has gone a long way to improve its packaging. The inner box has vertical compression bumpers made from folds in the cardboard box itself. Its a very thin gauge cardboard (probably for lightness-to ship en-masse rather than for eco-reasons) while the single-ply (non corrugated) shipping mailer comes with lateral compression bumpers Mine actually arrived unsigned for in the mail and fits within the Royal Mail’s Large Letter size allocation. The package relies on the stiffness of the keyboard to give the whole package rigidity for “normal” mail.
While his holiness St. Jobs talks-up Apple’s use of Alu and Glass as “desirable” from a recycling perspective, I’d say almost all of the packaging here can be paper-recycled or re-used — which is better. Its nice to note that the pointless plastic end-caps on the USB connector of the previous generation keyboards has been dropped and the contact-plastic film-wrap has been done away with as well.
Mine is UK English (naturally) and arrived in absolutely minimal packaging, I’ve seen some mega packaging from a US flickr member so maybe postage policies vary from country to country. Mine arrived in an inner card box and an outer brown cardboard box — all is recyclable and/or reusable.
Aside from the keyboard and (unnecessary to me) USB extension lead this is all you get folks. Now, if Apple wanted to improve things a bit more maybe they could do away with the plastic wallet containing the paperwork and FCC cert (which could be printed on the inside of the box).
Still its obvious Apple is consciously streamlining its packaging — but I expect for appropriate weight/size/cost considerations — (compare the 1/3 width of the MacBook box to the heavier iBook or the 1G iMac to the latest super-light iMac for shipping weight comparisons) Heavy things take very specialist packaging — as IBM noted to its cost via a forklift delivery to U.S. Patent and Trademark Office) so any eco-reasons for Apple I expect are a spinnable side-benefit — but its a good two-fer — for example the cardboard Nano 1G CD-alike packaging was excellent both from a materials and conceptual perspective — but the plastic Nano 2G box was far less so — albeit lighter and smaller in volume. It will be interesting to see how things progress (or regress) now the fanboys are getting September 5th’s announcement out of their systems.
And as for the keyboard? Yeah its fine. It’ll do.
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