lol. I can't describe the contempt I have for these articles.
Sorry Barry; I know we've had our differences in the past. I think you're a great writer, but the article
genre you have going here is just painful.
It's 5 pages of moaning and groaning, kind of like a comic skit gone awry: something by which you might laugh at first, but gets dragged out and you just want to end it all half-way-through.
The packaging is meant to be theft deterrent, and yup, like DRM, they took it WAY too far. Keep in mind that the easy-to-open package of cloth is a package of cloth, and not a 2GB memory stick.
People don't return products because they can't open them: that's like admitting you stuck your finger in your nose when you get a nose-bleed. They moan and groan and forget all about it when they use their shiny new product. Thieves, on the other hand, are more likely to swipe the 30mm2 USB memory key from the easy-to-open case while their buddy distracts the salesman/loss-prevention than they are to try and stuff an 30in2 injection-molded case into their shirt.
If it's easy to open, it's easy to steal. Theft drives up cost. In essense, easy-to-open packaging will drive up the cost of the products.
It would be nice if this article at least mentioned the reasons why the packaging is designed the way it is. There is a reason for it. Instead it just provides one perspective (which is, I think, what irks me the most about this series). And c'mon. Seriously. You have trouble opening a Fed-Ex package? C'mon... I mean really. That's just lazy. Why don't they make it less sturdy so the contents fall out during transit, or hell, increase the quality so that the price of the packaging exceeds the cost of the contents? If you're going to complain about stuff, at least put some rhyme or reason to why things are the way they are. The world isn't run by morons.
If I don't like the series so much, well, why do I read it? Because I like Barry's writing, but I don't like the articles. These are glorified forums posts, where the forum is the front page of THG. Rants like these are a dime-a-dozen, and honestly don't deserve the front-page space of THG. I could be the only one that finds these posts as/more annoying than their topics, but hell, I feel compelled to be heard. Please: put this in a blog. Give barry his own forum. Perhaps even http

/crappystuff.tomshardware.com. There's enough ranting out there to keep the bored populous occupied. Let's stick to technology and reviews, and keep the ranting in the blogs,
please?