“Gary Ian Reich remembers his first time in lurid detail: The struggle to get home, how he fumbled with the outer layers, his delight with what was concealed, the many lingering caresses in the ecstatic aftermath,” Pete Mortensen writes for Wired News. “Seven years later, it’s hard to describe the 34-year-old photographer from Annapolis, Maryland, as anything but an addict.”
“OK, you could call him a geek, too. Since that first primal moment, Reich has had many more ‘packaging experiences.’ He’s one of the legions of Macintosh and iPod users for whom the elegance of the user interface begins with the bold graphics and sleek texture of the box the new machine comes in. It’s in the smell and the way the box logically reveals each new component just as the user needs it. And, like the famously long-lived Apple Computer products they carry, these aesthetic outer wrappings have a habit of sticking around,” Mortensen writes.
“Legions of Mac users take pictures. Apple users have a particular fascination with online photo galleries of other users unwrapping the latest company products, often with a smiling model performing the geek striptease one USB cable at a time,” Mortensen writes. “Such galleries occasionally pop up for other tech products, but with less staying power. Photos of an iBook opening, on the other hand, can circulate on the net for years.”
Full article here.
Uh, oh. We just glanced around our palatial headquarters and see several boxes that are what could only really be termed “on display.” There are multiple boxes for multiple versions on Mac OS X, of course, many Apple software boxes, at least three iPod boxes for various models, a couple of Mighty Mouse boxes (why we need duplicates is beyond us, but we do – and, no, we’re not throwing them out), Airport Base Stations, Apple displays, and boxes for Power Macs, iMacs, and PowerBooks, to name just a sample. Curiously, the packaging for the likes of Samsung monitors, Epson scanners, HP printers, Belkin USB hubs, etc. are nowhere to be found. Yikes! Do you have an Apple packaging fetish, too?