February 18th, 2006 by Jemaleddin Cole

When people talk about switch­ing to Apple prod­ucts, one of the points that gen­er­ally gets ignored by Win­dows users (includ­ing me) is the con­cept of “user experience.” The dif­fer­ence between the iPod and other MP3 play­ers has been pretty well dis­cussed else­where, so I’m going to focus on an often over­looked part of any pur­chase: packaging.

I recently pur­chased a new mon­i­tor at Cir­cuit City. I don’t usu­ally shop at Cir­cuit City (because, not sur­pris­ingly, they offer a lousy shop­ping expe­ri­ence), but I was bummed out and look­ing to make myself happy by putting some­thing I didn’t really need on credit, and there they were. I didn’t want to get any­thing smaller than the CRT I was replac­ing, and I’m using a KVM switch that only works with VGA cables, so I wanted some­thing that would work with my cur­rent setup and in the future when I’ve pur­chased a DVI graph­ics card for my PC and a DVI capa­ble KVM switch. I also wanted the high­est con­trast and most can­dles I could get with­out going over­board. And I wanted some­thing kinda pretty, so I pur­chased a Sony SDM-HS95P/S. Here it is:

Pretty, no? For com­par­i­son, we’ll also be look­ing at my daughter’s iMac G5 17” with iSight:

Also pretty. (And not just because my pretty girl is on the desktop.)

We’re not here to dis­cuss the rel­a­tive aes­thet­ics of the prod­ucts, but I think we can all agree that they’re both attrac­tive in their own way.

So here’s where things get ugly. The iMac came in this box:

The Sony came like this:

Sim­i­lar boxes con­tain­ing sim­i­lar prod­ucts. Same han­dles on the top, and the same basic con­struc­tion. But one is glossy, pretty, and has full color pic­tures on all four sides of the prod­uct, and the other is cheap cor­ru­gated card­board with a two color print job. Not exactly stun­ning. Let’s do a side-​by-​side:

And a nice stag­gered boy-​band-​style lineup:

But that’s just the out­side of the box. So let’s see how these com­pa­nies chose to pro­tect this expen­sive mer­chan­dise. Apple first:

And the Sony:

So Apple chose to use molded sty­ro­foam¹ that not only keeps the iMac in place but also has spots to hold all of the cables and acces­sories. Sony chose the same mate­r­ial they make McDonald’s cup car­ri­ers out of, and just smashed the cables on top and taped down the lid. Nice.

Let’s just say that after open­ing a few Apple boxes (3 iPods, two iMacs and a mac mini), the Sony was a big let­down. You might think that this is a pretty small factor in choos­ing a prod­uct that will be opened and out of the box in sec­onds and sit on a desk for years. But that’s only if you haven’t ever smelled that new Apple smell. Let’s put it this way: the Apple expe­ri­ence was so much better that I felt com­pelled to blog about it. At 3 in the morning.

Sony is, or at least tries to be, more of an upscale brand than the other con­sumer elec­tron­ics com­pa­nies out there, but they haven’t got the total expe­ri­ence down. Apple really is the BMW of com­puter com­pa­nies. And did you know that they’re prices are as good as Dell’s?

What’s really sad is that as nice as the mon­i­tor is, it doesn’t seem as nice as the ones built into the iMacs. It’s a little brighter, but doesn’t have the con­trast ratio. Oh well. Next time I’ll go with a 30-inch Cinema Dis­play. I wonder what kind of box it comes in.

¹ We’re talk­ing about expe­ri­ence, not envi­ron­men­tal­ism – and it’s not that much foam².

² And don’t bring up the chem­i­cals used in treat­ing and print­ing images on the card­board. Cause that’s not why we’re here.

Comments are closed. me by email.