When good Apple box design goes bad
Apple’s often been praised for its packaging. A lot of thought goes into the boxes that house Macs and other Apple kit, ensuring your first experience with a product is a pleasurable one—before you’ve even turned it on.
I today set up a new AirPort Extreme after my old one abruptly died (and, no, I’m not looking forward to the Genius Bar appointment, trying to explain UK consumer law to someone saying “but it’s more than a year old, so there’s nothing we can do”). Like a lot of other Apple kit, it comes in a two-part card case. The base houses the unit, and you slide off a sturdy card sleeve, which is typically very snug indeed.
For the iPhone, which sits flat on a base, this works fine. But the AirPort Extreme is a narrow, tall unit, and the box is therefore tall and narrow. You’d think Apple would have made allowances for this in its box design, right? Nope.
On the left you can see the box’s base and on the right the unit itself. On pulling the card sleeve free, my unit unceremoniously went CLUNK on to the desk, fortunately only from a few centimetres. I’m grateful I wasn’t opening this box above our wooden floor, or I’d be down two AirPort Extremes for the week, not just one.
You might argue that it’s only a box, but this design showcases a lack of attention to detail and usability. The box still looks great, but it’s form over function—it works poorly in practice and also when taking into account expectations, namely that your new purchase won’t end up sailing through the air as you attempt to free it from its packaging.
With the iPhone the box works better, but it’s still pretty easy to drop it on the floor. All it takes is someone to open it with too much force or not holding the box the right way.
I just bought a retina macbook and one thing that really bothered me about the box is how there’s no space in it for someone to put the finger/hand and pull the mac off the box. The plastic that wraps the laptop has a little sleeve that you can pull it, alright. But the plastic is transparent! So you don’t notice the little sleeve, you’re eager to get it off the box… so you end up turning the box upside down just to get the thing out of the box. Really.
It puzzles me how can Apple make such silly usability mistakes here and there.
I know what you mean about the Sale of Goods Act discussion. I had a Genius Bar appointment last week as my iPhone 5 camera had stopped working. The ‘Genius’ gave the usual spiel about it being less than a year old so they would be able to help. Out of annoyance at this I cited the SoG, to be told that it doesn’t apply unless the customer pays for a ‘report from an independent specialist; and try finding one of those!’
I sighed rather than arguing, but it’s sadly typical of the quasi-legal obfuscation I’ve come across a few times when dealing with SoG issues with Apple.
Sadly I don’t think the average consumer is either savvy or confident enough to prevent Apple from denying them their consumer rights.
That’s not accurate regarding SoGA, but it is something Apple tends to cite. I’d just have a tendency to sit in the store and argue until I got my way—or got thrown out.
I’ve been a Mac user since 1998, and although I’ve not had bad failure rates in any particular hardware I’ve had call to use SoGA rights three or four times. Each time my rights have been honoured after some ‘discussion’ ie. me confidently and politely asserting those rights. Usually, when they do agree to repair or replace they’ll say it’s a ‘gesture of goodwill’. At which point I’ll continue to pedantically tell them that it’s not, and that they’re simply complying with the law.
I intervened on another customer’s behalf at Covent Garden once when I heard them being shamelessly fobbed off with a ‘just out of warranty’ line on an iPad hardware failure. I wasn’t quite ejected from the store, but it was uncomfortable.
With the iPhone 5 I was so hacked off at having to drive 90 miles to the Apple Store to have it replaced for the second time for different hardware failures that I simply didn’t have the energy to argue.
The way that Apple staff seem to be trained to actively dissemble and deflect in this area is depressing.
Oh – my favourite Apple packaging was the iPod 3rd Gen. I bought it at the Apple Expo in Islington, and opened the hinged cube on the train back to Dorset. Magical.