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.
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
