‘Steve and I spend a lot of time on the packaging […] I love the process of unpacking something. You design a ritual of unpacking to make the product feel special. Packaging can be theater, it can create a story.’
– Jonathan Ives, Apple lead designer
About six months ago, I bought an iPad through the online Apple Store. Some three or four business days later, a DHL guy appeared at my door and presented me with a rectangular package. I signed for it and carried it into the kitchen, where I selected from the cutlery drawer a knife sufficiently sharp and sturdy for the job of slicing open the formidable carapace of packaging. I removed the white plastic DHL bag, then made my way through the outer husk of plain cardboard to the compact tabernacle of the Apple packaging proper. As I did so, I became aware of a voice in my head. This voice was briskly self-assured, astringently American; it spoke not to me, but through me, and the words it spoke were these: Okay, let’s go ahead and unbox this sucker.
I wasn’t unsettled by the sudden interjection of this cockily demotic voice, because I knew where it came from. Before purchasing the iPad, I had done quite a bit of research: the usual perusal of user-reviews and product specs undertaken to persuade yourself that you’re not throwing your money away. At some point during this period of consumer research, I had discovered a curious category of YouTube video that occupies a generic no-man’s-land between the user-generated product review and the shopping channel talk-through. The ‘unboxing’ video offers the viewer the vicarious experience of removing a newly purchased product (usually an electronic device of some sort) from its packaging. It is a visual document of the consummation of the purchaser–product relationship, that apex of possibility and anticipation right before the start of the slow, inevitable decline into disappointment and neglect.
I couldn’t really begin to say why, but in the process of working myself up to buying an iPad I became slightly addicted to these strange, homemade videos, with their mildly intoxicating mixture of smugness and exhilaration. I started off watching iPad unboxings, and then worked my way haphazardly outward toward the fringes of the technological orbit: to webcam footage of people unboxing leatherette iPhone cases, Kindle reading lights, limited-edition Nintendo DS replacement styluses. I saw a well-heeled New Jerseyite named Lance Linton unbox a Dualit brushed-steel toaster; I saw a nervous and bespectacled Irish schoolboy unbox a Russell Hobbs Glass Touch cordless kettle; I saw a tracksuited and baseball-capped East Londoner unbox a Gamucci Micro V2 Electronic Cigarette starter kit; I saw a pallid old Texan unbox something called a Medtronic Carelink Monitor, a modem-linked device whereby cardiac patients can send data from their pacemakers to their doctors; I saw a young American kid loquaciously unpacking first a stapler (‘contoured for handheld use’), then, in a companion-piece video, the separately-sold staples with which he intended to load it. I saw every conceivable consumer durable unsheathed and admired, I saw the broken labyrinth of the Internet itself, and I saw the face of the free market, saw my face and my viscera reflected back in it, saw your face, and I felt dizzy. Mostly, though, I just saw a lot of Apple products and Sony games consoles being taken out of their boxes and exhaustively talked about by young American men.
To those who have never seen an unboxing video – a category to which I’d imagine most readers of this essay belong – it is easy to describe what they’re like, but difficult to account for their appeal. On some level, they’re all essentially the same: a guy telling you he’s bought some gizmo online (or, more rarely, spent hours queueing at a midnight launch down at the local Apple store) and that he’s going to do a quick unboxing for the folks at home. Next, he’ll provide a fetishistically painstaking exegesis of the process of removing the gizmo from its packaging and then, usually, of the physical properties of the gizmo itself (its array of buttons, its control pads, its as-standard allotment of USB ports and SD slots). The thing itself – and this is an important feature of the genre – is rarely actually turned on. Unboxing is mainly about packaging and its removal. It focuses on the first sensuous encounter with the object of consumer desire.
by Mark O'Connell, The Dublin Review | Read more:
Photo: Endgadget
