By causing unecessary waste. Apple signed a deal with China in 2016 and made a big deal in the US about standing up to the feds. Apple isnt setting an standards.. all they are are glorified snakeoil salesmen. Slimiest, worthless slime of a company
"Yet even something as superficially simple but environmentally beneficial as removing the plastic shrink-wrap from an iPhone box induces a paroxysm of self-examination within the team. How can the unboxing experience be maintained? Can it be made more accessible? The problem was mulled over, pulled apart and ultimately solved with an elegant paper tab mechanism. The change will save around 600 metric tonnes of plastic over the life of the product."
You just removed some packaging that you initially thought should've been there, move on. It's almost as good as Apple engineering a bag and it getting a standing ovation
This is just armchair design criticism. If you have ever bought a new iPhone you probably remember the experience of unpacking it.
The packaging is very carefully designed both to protect the contents and to provide for that experience. Obviously there is much more to removing the shrink wrap than just no longer including it. You can trust them that if the packaging worked equally as well without replacing the plastic with something else they would have never included it in the first time.
Remember how Apple caught all the flak when they stopped including adapters because everyone has more than enough already? And then all the other manufacturers quietly stopped including them as well.
>The packaging is very carefully designed both to protect the contents and to provide for that experience
I actually think it's funny how many years ago when they first introduced their packaging design it felt so premium with the slow open cradle box. But nowadays it sorta feels tacky because every cheap product coming out of china now ships like that because they've successfully cloned it.
So now weirdly unboxing Apple products feels the same as unboxing a cheap vape pen.
No, I don't think designers themselves have a big influence on tech. And when I say tech I mean the whole industry and the underlying technologies, not the consumer products that follow after that.
Even just considering the final consumer products, I'd say engineers and decision makers have a much bigger influence than designers.
Edit:
To elaborate on this, what do you think had a bigger influence on the new MBPs? The team behind the M1 or the designers?
This definitely feels like shaping tech to me. The amount of thought and scale that is happening here is absolutely mindblowing. I don't think all of tech has to be space, bio, etc, frontiers. More people interact with what these people do than almost any other tech product in the world.
I just want to be the audio design guy that fucks around on that mod synth with a wealth of patch cables, and then turns around to the synthesizer and makes whatever noise my phone does that annoys me into waking up. That’s all I ask.
