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To state the obvious, the box reflects and symbolizes the unboxing experience.

Where you know when you open it there will be a neat phone sticking out and the visual of that is "emblemized" on the front.

It is quite elegant but the fact that people are reacting to it and making fun of it is a criticism to its design already from a self aware perspective. We get they are trying to be fancy and our reaction is to that awareness of that, not to the actual design presentation.

A better design would have been one where it didn't cause a sir and instead was a unanimous compliment.

The concept is not perfect but its also making us react so its still interesting I guess.
 
There was a theory that they did it so they could use one box for all colors, but when I got my wife's gold in the mail, the Apple logo and iPhone word on the side was in gold. Unless they're all in gold writing. I won't know until my black one comes int he mail. :)

i just checked, the iPhone name is gray.. unless its because mines is space gray?

its definitely a departure from the previous boxes.. completely different ever since the introduction of the iphone.
 
This is Apple trying to be too cute. They had said that the iPhone is their vision of what a phone should be. So that's why they barely tweak things year to year. Same goes for boxes. If they felt that their box and packaging was good last year and the ideal vision for a box, they should leave it . They changed just for the sake of change and the box looks very cheap and unfinished.
 
Apple feels even the packaging should be a "timeless" design, and this does it perfectly. If it had a picture of the phone and a screenshot it would probably be out of date as soon as iOS 8.1 comes out.

This reminds me of an old video about a theoretical redesign of the original iPod packaging done by Microsoft: http://vimeo.com/65449742
 
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