Not my car.
Starting with the new iPads, Apple has finally stopped including stickers, and that's a relief.
Okay, partly this is a relief only for me, because I have papyrophobia — I'm a writer who is afraid of paper. It's almost OCD and I'm fine with US Letter or A4 scripts. If they break or you give me a sticker, I'm in trouble.
Consequently, every time I bought a new Mac, or iPhone, or iPad, I had a moment of disgust when I put the stickers back in the box. But I also never had the slightest desire to stick any kind of sticker on anything — and especially not a device I just spent at least a thousand on.
I mean, I'm not Justin Trudeau. I don't need you to somehow think I'm cool or at odds with kids for using a Mac when in fact I just borrowed the computer.
This is not Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's MacBook Pro. But then it's not someone's MacBook Pro, it's an HP laptop with Windows
There is an opinion that this is all fantastic marketing by Apple, and free of charge, since users place the Apple logo on their devices. or their bags. If I somehow needed, really needed, you to know that I was using an Apple device if I really thought you might care, then I would wave the device in your face.
And if I want to tell the world that I have an expensive iPad in this deliberately tatty bag, of course, yes, I will put a sticker in there.
Stickers serve as advertising for Apple, and obviously they should work for us too, because they serve as a way to personalize the devices we buy. They don't personalize them, they tarnish them.
When you see a MacBook Pro on a TV show and it has a huge, unassuming sticker on the back, that's not personalization, you know it's a TV company that doesn't want to advertise for free for Apple. In true Streisand effect fashion, they draw attention to this thing that only someone buying a Mac would notice anyway.
Or when you see a computer on TV — no, in fact, when you see a computer anywhere, you see stickers. I can't type on a computer that has the “Intel Inside” stickers because they are always right on the palm rest and I can't touch them without shaking.
That's why I had a little fear in the 2000s when Apple announced it was switching to Intel processors. At the time, every computer was required to have an “Intel Inside” sticker on its case, just as they were all required to play Intel music with four ringers in every television commercial.
Obviously, it would not be useful for a user to have a sticker reminding him every day that he bought a computer with an Intel processor, and this does not mean that he needs any guarantee that could give him . And apparently no PC user has ever voluntarily slapped an Intel sticker on anything, unlike Apple users.
So, “Intel Inside” is a contractual insult to computer industrial design, and it exists only so that the next time you buy a PC, everyone expects to see Intel tarnishing it.
What the first Intel-based MacBook Pro might look like
Under contract, computer manufacturers everywhere had this Intel Inside sticker, so everyone expected to see the same thing on Mac as soon as the transition to Intel is announced. Ken Segall, who worked in Apple's marketing department at the time, even feared this.
“I came to [Steve Jobs] with the greatest concern,” Segall wrote about it on his blog in 2017. “Please tell me we won't have to put the Intel Inside logo on our Macs.”
“With a big smile,” Segall continued in the blog, “Steve looked me in the eyes and said, “Trust me, I made sure it was in the contract.”
So we can thank Steve Jobs for not. MacBook Pro palm rests have ever been stained with stickers.
Still, we'll probably have to blame him for the fact that every MacBook Pro — and every Mac, every iPhone, every iPad — there were stickers. Typically two of them, printed in colors that match the color of whatever device they come with.
It's a good bet that Apple has probably sold over 100 million Macs since the original came out, and every Mac had two stickers. In 2021, AppleInsider reported that Apple sold two billion iPhones.
So there are now at least 2.1 billion Apple devices, just Macs and iPhones, each of which comes with two stickers.
I find it difficult to look at this image, let alone take a photo
It is true that the number of people suffering from papyrophobia is quite small, but out of more than two billions of stickers sent, not everyone else sticks them on their devices. Therefore, as much as I may be alone in thinking that stickers contaminate devices, while I'm certainly almost alone in my paper phobia, I can't be alone in realizing what an incredible waste those unused, unnecessary stickers are.
Obviously, this is what changed Apple's mind. In addition to eliminating all plastic packaging by the end of 2024, Apple has decided not to include stickers in the boxes for the new iPad Air and iPad Pro models it just announced.
As first noted by 9to5Mac, Apple informed Apple Store employees of the change, but said it would be sending a limited number of stickers to hand out on demand.
Yes, let me hurry.
Apple came first for our Lightning connector, and we shrugged. Then they came for our headphone jack and we got worried for a bit. They're finally here for those measly stickers, which is a relief.
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