Refined doesn't necessarily mean expensive. This reminds me of my favorite love-to-hate restaurant, the Crave chain (dunno if they're national or regional). The

Refined doesn't necessarily mean expensive. This reminds me of my favorite love-to-hate restaurant, the Crave chain (dunno if they're national or regional). They're the masters of putting expensive-sounding, fancy ingredients into truly bland, pedestrian food. The marketing goal is to make people with no taste think they're eating more upscale than they actually are. Meanwhile, my town is filled with little ethnic restaurants that don't serve bragworthy ingredients, but instead conjure magical flavors through their exquisite attention to detail. So yeah, a company could package very simply, in an environmentally sound manner, and still make the unwrapping itself a positive aesthetic experience, rather than just an inconvenience on the way to using the product. Apple could do that as well. They probably will do that, if they start seeing a more positive RoI in simple rather than elaborate packaging. But they'll still do it with the same obvious attention to detail. So I should have been more clear... it's not non-luxury packaging that makes me distrust a maker. It's careless packaging, or packaging where the attention to detail is clearly focused on reducing cost (or worse, theft) rather than my experience as a consumer. The packaging has a customer. Who's the customer? The end user, or the accountants?