A thief in Arizona smashed his way into a tech company office and left with a stack of Apple boxes, and the punchline is that every single box was empty. The Mac Mini computers sat untouched on the desks in plain view while the burglar shoved dozens of display boxes out a broken window and carried them off. Staff reviewed the security footage the next morning and could not stop laughing.
The break-in happened around 2 a.m. on Sunday, October 4, at an office in a business park near University Drive and State Route 143 in Tempe. A man in a plaid shirt and black baseball cap shattered a glass window and never even fully entered the building. The security clip caught him wedging half his body through the blinds and shoving box after box out onto the ground, a detail documented by Fox 10 Phoenix.
Employee Curran Rose found the smashed window the next morning and reviewed the footage with his coworkers. “Our computers were right there in front of them the whole time, and they just steal the boxes instead. Really low IQ,” he told Fox 10. Each Mac Mini runs between $900 and $1,900, so the actual machines would have made the risk worth something. What the man carried off instead was a pile of cardboard with no resale value at all.
The quotes traveled fast once the story went public. “They stole empty boxes. Everyone was laughing about it,” Rose said, though he was quick to add that he felt relieved nobody was hurt in the break-in. The humor only stretches so far for the staff, given that his boss remains spooked about somebody breaking into their workplace. OK! Magazine laid out the full timeline, and Dexerto’s writeup pushed the tale to the gaming and tech crowd, where the replies turned the “low IQ” line into a running joke.
This is far from the first theft to fall apart in the execution. Hypefresh has tracked a rapper accused of armed robbery during what police say was a fake video shoot, and readers followed the Chilean crew that stole $1 million in jewelry from Ja Morant’s home. Next to those, the Tempe burglar’s cardboard haul is the friendliest failure on the list, and Brandon Aiyuk’s traffic stop over a mistaken stolen-car report at least ended with everyone laughing too.
Tempe police have the footage and the scene, though no arrest has been announced. The company replaced the window and kept the humor. For a burglar who did the hard part by breaking in, missing the computers sitting in front of him will follow him longer than any charge would have.
