Welcome to the real world. How much paper and cardboard does it take to ship one tiny little dongle for the gorgeous new Retina MacBook Pro? Though Apple gets the grief in this particular case, one expects that many companies are equally guilty of the same level of profligacy.
The appropriately named blog, One Foot Tsunami, has published a fun and enlightening series of photos showing the ridiculously wasteful amount of packaging and documentation Apple delivers when it ships a simple, little (image above) MagSafe to MagSafe 2 adapter to the customer. Of course, if you want to use your existing MagSafe power adapter with a 2012 MacBook Air, 2012 MacBook Pro or all-new Retina MacBook Pro.
For the sake of completeness, this is the MagSafe to MagSafe 2 adapter attached to a piece of card stock, along with the box it came in, the booklets of information which accompanied it, the piece of cardboard to which that box was attached (and to which a packing slip is still attached), the box in which all that arrived, and the not-one-but-two missed delivery slips.
Yup, that’s a lot of waste and Apple is being rightly excoriated for it. However, Apple and pretty much every other company puts out this much crap for perfectly reasonable reasons — legal documentation requirements, FCC rules, shipping efficiency (i.e. cost), etc.
Can Apple and its peers be reasonably expected to change?
via Cult of Mac