| HN Mirror

I have a lot of hardware, so I have spent a lot of time doing precisely that.

Cutting off twist ties, removing those pointless little white HDPE condoms they put on the blades of the AC plug, plastic bags, more plastic bags, the sticky superthin protection plastic film that almost every china manufacturing plant puts on any shiny plastic flat surface, peeling keyboard stickers, carefully applying goo gone to remove the glue, then glass cleaner to remove the goo gone, cutting the stupid labels off of AC cords (being careful not to damage the cord in the process), et c.

You also have to be careful not to scratch the case with the metallic wrist rest stickers when removing them, as well, because the corners are sharp and the glue is serious so you have to pry them up with a tool. The large, ugly stickers on the bottom have important things like serial on them, so you can't remove those if you ever want your warranty to work (Apple, of course, laser etches the serial into the aluminum case in small type).

Why was any of that useless shit shipped to me in the first place, on a high end computer?

It's not about the hang tag, it's about a fundamental lack of empathy for the customer and their experience. That's the root cause, and it manifests itself as everything from building relatively decent computers and then shipping them with ugly accessories, to using plastic trackpads, to not pushing back against Intel's ugly marketing case sticker demands, et c et c et c ad nauseam.

It's like buying an $80k car and on delivery suddenly finding out it doesn't have keyless entry, or that the brand new key fob is shipped in one of those hand-slicingly-difficult wraparound plastic blister containers.

Come to think of it, the key fobs on high end cars shouldn't be made out of cheap plastic, either. A replacement one for my car cost me over $400 which I'm sure is all margin. Step up, hardware makers.