Apple’s Using A Lot Of Excess Cardboard To Ship Their Lightning-To-30-Pin Adapter

By

That's a lot of cardboard.
That's a lot of cardboard.

The new Lightning-to-30-pin adapter is a tiny thing, just a little dongle that routes signals from your old iPhone dock or connector to the appropriate pins in the new Lightning adapter. It’s smaller than the size of a matchbook.

Despite this, however, reader Doug P. emailed us with an image of how much packaging the adapter comes in: not only is Apple’s retail packaging for the adapter six times bigger than the adapter itself, but the shipping box it comes in looks like could easily hold up to thirty adapters without their packaging.

To be fair to Apple, there’s a minimum size a package shipped through the mail can be to make sure it doesn’t get lost in transit. Likewise, the Lightning-to-30-pin adapter needs to be in a box of a certain size just to fit the documentation and make it visible on store shelves. Even so, though, it’s funny that as Apple goes to awesome, incredible new lengths to make their packaging environmentally friendly, they still have to butcher this much tree to ship their smaller products to consumers.

Thanks: Doug P.

Newsletters

Daily round-ups or a weekly refresher, straight from Cult of Mac to your inbox.

  • The Weekender

    The week's best Apple news, reviews and how-tos from Cult of Mac, every Saturday morning. Our readers say: "Thank you guys for always posting cool stuff" -- Vaughn Nevins. "Very informative" -- Kenly Xavier.