Comment Boxes can be complicated (Score 3, Insightful) 639
Packaging can be weird to understand. Some of the simplest-looking boxes are often hard to manufacture and use to package a product on a assembly line.
Remember that customer experience while unpacking is perhaps the most transient, short-lived event in the life of a product. Other factors such as safety while transport, shelf-appearance and the quality of the product itself is far far more important. And lets not get started about environmental costs of packaging.
It is easy to get all of it if you have a profit margin like Apple does - about 50%. The Nexus has a profit margin of barely 5-7%. So yes, they may cut corners on the box.
But something tells me people who want a Nexus get that the packaging is irrelevant enough as to be worthless within 2 minutes of the customer having finished it. Unboxing is where the function of packaging finishes.