Apple removes another item from the iPhone box this year
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Do you recall what Apple included in the box for the first-generation iPhone? Well, there was the first-generation iPhone of course. Also in the box was the iPhone stereo headset which you could squeeze to control calls, music, and video playback. The iconic 30-pin to USB-A cable was in the box along with a charging brick and there was a dock. Yes, Virginia, the OG iPhone came with a rather cheap charging dock, some stickers, and a cleaning cloth.
Before the iPhone 12 was unveiled in 2020, TF International's well-known Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo made a shocking forecast. He said that Apple would drop the EarPods and the charging brick from the box. Leaving it up to the customer to source those two accessories reportedly helped Apple save $6.5 billion by March 2022. And now Apple has done it again. It is no longer putting the iPhone in an iPhone box. No! Just kidding!! Imagine if you will, though, all the money Apple could save if it were to do this.
Back in May Jon Gruber found that most consumers were okay with the idea of Apple dropping the stickers from new product boxes. | Image credit-X
Actually, there isn't much left for Apple to remove from the iPhone box but when Apple released the new M4-powered iPad Pro models earlier this year along with the M2-powered iPad Air tablets, missing from the boxes of those products were the Apple stickers that usually accompany Apple devices in their crisp unopened boxes. At the time, there was some talk speculating that Apple would no longer include stickers inside an iPhone box. As we said, this was a practice dating back to the first iPhone model released in 2007.
Don't expect to see any stickers inside an iPhone 16 series box. | Image credit-AnotherApple_
Now, an internal message sent to Apple Store personnel and read by 9to5Mac reveals that the stickers, like the EarPods and the charging bricks before them, are gone. But there is some good news. If you can muster up the ability to ask for the stickers without getting embarrassed, you can request them from Apple. Most likely, iPhone 16 buyers will most likely just drop the whole thing and do without new iPhone stickers.
This past May John Gruber posted a poll on "X" to see what the public thought about the impending end to finding stickers in the iPhone box. 62.5% agreed with Apple that it was time to stop wasting the materials needed to make the stickers while 37.5% disagreed. When you just spent $800-$1,200 on a new phone, who cares about a sticker that probably cost Apple less than 5 cents to include in the box? I'd rather see Apple put the charging brick back in the box instead of leaving me with a sticker or two.
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