DJ Leonardo Roa unboxing a music mixer. Two hands removing an electronic device from a box.
15 July 2022
I’ve been aware of the existence of unboxing videos for some time but had always dismissed them as a weird fascination of some people, a kind of non-sexual fetish (at least for most people; I’m sure that someone out there somewhere is getting their kink on watching these). But having started to watch YouTube videos on astrophotography and seen people online unbox new telescopes and cameras, I have come to appreciate the appeal.
The verb to unbox dates to at least the seventeenth century. It appears in a definition in Guy Miege’s 1679 Dictionary of Barbarous French (great title):
Desboisté, Desboité, unboxed; put out of joynt.
But here unboxed is being used in what appears to be a slang sense, meaning out of sorts, discombobulated. Desboisté literally means deforested, obviously a French slang usage of the era, while desboité literally means dislocated.
A century later, in 1775, it appears with its literal definition in a monolingual English dictionary, John Ash’s New and Complete Dictionary of the English Language:
Unbo´x (v. t. from un, and box) To take out of a box.
Unbox´ed (p. from unbox) Taken out of a box.
Unbox´ing (p.a. from unbox) Taking out of a box.
Unbox´ing (s. from the part.) The act of taking out of a box.
The word has been around for centuries, but the internet phenomenon took off in the mid 2000s. The first use of unboxing that I’m aware of in the internet context is in a post on the site joystiq.com from 17 December 2005 with the title “Unpacking the Xbox 360; hot unboxing action.”
Unboxing pops up again in a 21 February 2006 blog post by Matthew Ingram, a writer for Toronto’s Globe and Mail. In the post, Ingram refers to an older post on ZDNet, but that does not seem to be available online anymore:
Wow—look at that packaging!: I'm as excited as the next guy about the introduction of Apple computers running on Intel chips, if only because it raises the possibility that I could someday have a PC that runs both Windows and Mac OS. And I know that the new MacBook laptops are supposed to be ultra-sweet—but does that mean we have to bow down and worship even the box that the new laptops arrive in? A recent post at tech site ZDNet does exactly that, in an entry that is entitled "Exclusive: MacBook Pro unboxing pics," in the kind of breathless tone that tabloids reserve for photos of Brad and Angelina on a beach somewhere.
What the post gives you is 28—yes, 28—close-up shots of the box with the MacBook Pro inside it, then a shot of the box after it has been opened, and then a shot of the styrofoam insert that protects the MacBook, and so on. After the picture of the styrofoam insert, there is a caption that says "The Styrofoam inside the case has a cool circular cutout pattern." (Note: I am not making this up). In order to see the coolness of the styrofoam up close, there is a second shot from a different angle. Then there are shots of the MacBook in its anti-static bag, then another foam insert, then shots of the power supply (up close) and so on. And they're not the only ones.
And in June 2006, the websites unboxing.com and unbox.it launched, or at least, that’s as far back as the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine has a record of them.
And by the end of that year, unboxing videos were being discussed on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. From a 7 December 2006 article:
A video posted on the Internet that shows a man opening a box has been seen more than 71,000 times since it was posted Nov. 11.
It was not just any box. It contained the new Sony PlayStation 3 videogame console.
The PS3 has sold out across the U.S. So, for many people, watching somebody else taking a PS3 out of its carton is the next best thing to owning one.
That video is part of a larger phenomenon on the Web called “unboxing.” Dozens of videos showing people unwrapping products like the new Palm Treo 680 smartphone, Microsoft Zune digital media player and the Nintendo Wii game player are appearing on YouTube, on blogs and popular technology sites. The videos are drawing thousands of viewers.
I may be slow to catch on to the cultural zeitgeist, but I get there eventually.
Sources:
Ash, John. The New and Complete Dictionary of the English Language, vol. 2 of 2. London: Edward and Charles Dilly, and R. Baldwin, 1775. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Cole, V. “Unpacking the Xbox 360; Hot Unboxing Action.” Joystiq.com (now Engadget.com), 17 November 2005. l
Dictionary.com, 29 November 2018, s.v. unboxing.
Ingram, Matthew. “Ingram Blog” (21 February 2006). The Globe and Mail (Toronto), 24 February 2006).
Internet Archive Wayback Machine, s.v. unboxing.com, unbox.it, accessed 13 June 2022.
Miege, Guy. A Dictionary of Barbarous French. London: J.C. for Thomas Basset, 1679. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. unbox, v.
Steel, Emily. “At New Video Sites, Opening Up the Box Is a Ritual to Savor.” Wall Street Journal, 7 December 2006, A1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
Photo credit: Audiotecna, 2013. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.