Andrew Cunningham
As a noted sticker enthusiast, I’m always on the lookout for news at the intersection of stickers and technology. Which is why this report from 9to5Mac caught my eye: Apple is apparently starting to wind down its decades-long practice of including Apple logo stickers in the box with all of its products.
If you buy a new iPad Air or iPad Pro, you’ll be able to get some stickers if you ask the people at the Apple Store to include them (stores will get a “limited quantity” of stickers they can distribute on request). But the little sticker insert that has come with Macs, iPods, iPhones, iPads, and other devices and accessories for as long as I can remember will stop being one of the default pack-ins.
Apple is apparently cutting down on its sticker distribution to help meet its environmental goals. The stickers are some of the last bits of plastic included in most modern Apple packaging; in recent years, even the plastic backing layer for the stickers has been replaced with wax paper instead. This happened around the same time that the inner layer of packaging wrapped around new Apple devices also shifted from plastic to paper and when plastic-sealed boxes gave way to tear-away paper adhesive strips.
As 9to5Mac points out, the Vision Pro was actually the first of Apple’s new product launches this year to come without logo stickers. But the M3 MacBook Airs still came with them a couple of months ago, so it wasn’t clear at the time whether the lack of stickers with a $3,500 headset was a one-off change or the start of a trend. The Apple Store memo about the new iPads strongly suggests that stickers-upon-request will become the new normal.
Apple has included stickers with its products at least as far back as the Apple II in 1977 when the stickers still said “Apple Computer” on them in the company’s then-favored Motter Tektura typeface (I couldn’t track down a vintage Apple II unboxing, but I did find some fun photos of Apple enthusiast Dan Budiac opening a sealed-in-box mid-’80s-era Apple IIc, complete with rainbow pack-in stickers). I myself became familiar with them during the height of the iPod in the early to mid-2000s when Apple was still firmly a tech underdog, and people would stick white Apple logo stickers to their cars to show off their non-conformist cred and/or Apple brand loyalty.
As Apple’s products became more colorful in the 2010s, the Apple logo stickers would sometimes be color-matched to the device you had just bought, a cute bit of attention to detail that has carried over into present-day MagSafe cables and color-matched iMac keyboards and trackpads.
Although including less plastic in its devices’ packaging is environmentally laudable, I wish that the company would also express its green-ness by making more repairable and/or upgradeable products that didn’t break compatibility with existing accessories on a recurring basis (looking at you, new iPads with similar-but-entirely-incompatible Magic Keyboards and Apple Pencils). But the stickers are probably lower-hanging fruit (pun intended), and the company is slowly making strides in the direction of more repairable products.