Among the great ineffable mysteries of life that have exercised the minds of theologians and philosophers over the centuries, few have been so perplexing as the question of why, when Mac users buy new Macs, they feel compelled to post box-opening pictures. It’s not that the boxes aren’t nice, as boxes go. Apple make good boxes. Well-designed boxes to put their well-designed computers in. And certainly Mac users are disproportionately interested in good design, otherwise we wouldn’t be paying that extra bit for our computers or taking all those HCI courses at university. But this doesn’t go the full distance to providing a full explanation for why we feel compelled to post those box-opening pictures.
All I can say is that the compulsion is strong.
This is the box my new PowerBook came in. It is a fine, sturdy box with a helpful carrying-handle. I picked it up from the Campus IT shop on Monday, having specifically taken a train ride into the city that morning so that I wouldn’t have to carry it home on my bike, because while it is a lovely box, it wouldn’t be completely convenient for…
… you know what? I’m just going to get on with the rest of the pictures. The compulsion doesn’t say anything about having to write a lot of explanatory text.
When you open a PowerBook box, you get nice little sections with cables and such, and manuals in the middle, like this.
As if the cables weren’t enough, there’s a second layer with a laptop in it. It’s like a box of chocolates, in that just when you think you’ve seen it all, there turns out to be another tray underneath. Granted, the presence of a laptop in the box is rendered somewhat less surprising by the fact that the box has several pictures of the laptop on the outside. But otherwise, I think the tray of chocolates analogy is a good one.
When you remove the PowerBook from its protective wrapper, it looks like this.
With the lid open, it looks like this. It has a special piece of plasticy stuff to go between the keyboard and the screen.
The plasticy thing is removable.
After a short period, a cat will come and sit beside it. Even before it is turned on. That’s how good it is.
Here it is on my desk, with the power plugged in so that the battery can charge.
Here I am about to turn it on for the first time. Exciting!
That’s enough photos. The compulsion is satisfied, and I get to send away for another Mac-user merit badge.
I’m very pleased with the PowerBook. It’s a modest step up from my desktop iMac in most areas of performance and capacity, but I can take it with me. I was particularly impressed by the Migration Assistant, which copied my whole user environment directly from the iMac via a FireWire cable, with no noticeable fuss and very little in the way of detectable muss.