When it comes to love - it - or - detest - it products out of Cupertino , few offering can fit the Power Mac G4 Cube for getting people to choose sides . Even a decennary after its first appearance — Steve Jobs unveiled the Cube at the July 2000 Macworld Expoin New York and the desktop shipped a month by and by — the Cube still stirs passionate debate between its disparager and defender .
To the anti - Cube crowd , the machine represented the superlative of what Apple detractors at the fourth dimension decried as the company ’s greatest fault : putting kind over mapping and mode over force . devotee of the Cube were equally as intransigent that the simple machine was superb and its innovation beautiful . Even today , a healthy segment of Mac substance abuser deliberate the Cube to be a craze classic that was simply ahead of its time . ( Indeed , we ’ll look at the waysthe G4 Cube was a conception triumphin another article on Macworld.com . )
What is n’t a matter of a debate is the Cube ’s commercial success — or more accurately , its lack thereof . The G4 Cube was a flop at the cash register . In January 2001 , Apple conceded thatit had sell only one third as many regular hexahedron as it had ask . It sold 29,000 Cubes between October and December 2000 , compare to 308,000 Macs during that same tail . And in the very next fourth part , Cube sales fell to 12,000 units . Apple cease product of the Cube in July 2001 , one year after its introduction .
Why did n’t mass bribe the G4 Cube ? With 10 year ’s worth of perspective at our disposal , I can recall of four cardinal reasons the Cube never take off .
Weirdness
How do you sell a reckoner that does n’t bet like a computer ? Who do you point ? That was the boastful trouble Apple face when launching the Cube — a figurer so far out there in a terra firma of generic beige boxes that it might as well have been an alien monolith perched on a crystal throne .
foreigner looked at the Cube and saw dissimilar things : an underpowered , over - expensive toy or — in contrast with the anthropomorphized everyman ’s iMac — an emotionally inaccessible , ultra - geometric gray box suspend in an unprocurable glass prison .
Sure , there are the unresolved - tending among us who can bet past conventional figure and appreciate something truly singular . A computer does n’t take a grinning face to be beautiful . But those people are few and far between — they’re not only a minuscule subset of the population at large , but a subset of the Mac client base itself . The Cube ’s unexpended conception limited its likely market from the outset .
Even if you opted for a Cube and brought it home , you ’d have to treat it gingerly to observe its sodding appearance . The problem with making something intentionally perfect is that it wo n’t stay that way with employment . Apple has a habit of make water gadget that are beautiful only as long as you never touch them , and the Cube is high on that list . Unfortunately for Apple , many consumer chose never to reach a G4 Cube at all .
High price
Even if you wanted to get your script on a Cube , the lowest - price model cost $ 1799 in July 2000 ( about $ 2,279 in 2010 dollars ) . That role model shipped with a 450MHz G4 CPU , 64 MB of RAM , a 20 GB hard drive , a DVD - ROM thrust , and an home 56 kbps modem . It was fanless and humble . Meanwhile , a Power Mac G4 tower with almost selfsame specs but a 400 MHz processor cost $ 200 less . It was obvious from the beginning that likely customers would have to pay a premium for the Cube ’s unequalled invention , not for its performance .
Apple intended the G4 Cube for a mid - cooking stove market place — one pace up from the iMac and one below the most hefty Power Mac G4s — but it did n’t turn out that elbow room . Only a few months after launch , industry analysts revealed that high - goal Mac user were commonly the ones springing for the Cube . It seems that more wealthy Mac fans were most willing to take a peril on an expensive , unconventional machine with special configuration and upgrade option . If people wanted a dispirited - cost G4 , the practical customers among them without money to burn could just corrupt the $ 200 - lower G4 tower and configure it however they wanted without limitation .
And blank out wooing switchers . At the time , common Windows PCs were capable of 1GHz CPU clock speed and sold for far less . Apple agitate an rising battle in consumer percept to show that its lower - clocked G4 processor could perform just as well for a premium Mary Leontyne Price . The Cube also establish in the pre - OS X and pre - iPod era , and we have a go at it now that both were essential product that made PC users reconsider the Mac weapons platform in posterior years .
Cosmetic flaws
Shortly after the Cube ’s launching , reports of decorative defect in the Cube ’s transparent polycarbonate shell began to appear on the net from disgruntled customers . Some people brought home their shiny unexampled Macs only to find what they called “ crack ” on the corners and the top of the Cube ’s showcase .
by nature , the press latched onto the taradiddle and amplified it into a Commonwealth of Puerto Rico nightmare for Apple , which observe itself essay to sell a computer whose appeal largely hinged on esthetics that was now being portrayed as aesthetically flawed . Apple ’s prescribed response at the time was that the manifest hairline cracks were just “ mold lines”—normal artifacts of the manufacturing process . But customers balked , and it never became clear in the press if there were in reality any flaw or not .
It ’s unreadable how many client might have been spooked by the negatively publicity . But it probably did n’t add to the appeal of a $ 1799 machine . And the controversy certainly served as a latch breaker point for critic eager to highlight reasons why Apple ’s unusual reckoner was a frivolous dissipation of money .
Limited upgrade potential
Sure , opening a Cube was loose . sky it opened , pop out a handle in the bottom , and pull the core of the machine out of the guinea pig . From there , one could easily reach the three RAM slot and tot up an Airport batting order . There was only so much one could do to upgrade the organisation beyond that , however .
While designing a compact electronic computer , Apple naturally had to sacrifice some upgradability to compress everything into an 8x8x8 - inch block . Gone were the PCI slots of the Power Mac G4 tugboat railway line that helped those machines handle everything from professional audio production to movie editing via plug - in hardware . moreover , the Cube ’s video card ( nestled in a single AGP one-armed bandit ) had to be shrunken down to fit into tight quarters . As a resolution , few rise - desirable video menu conform to into the auto ’s pocket-size chassis .
The Cube ’s interior offered room for only one hard drive , so any extra storage you needed would have to be external . And the extraneous driving force market was n’t anything like it is today — user option for USB and Firewire drives were set in 2000 .
Ironically , the challenge of upgrade Apple ’s unusual machine is what drives the Cube ’s fans today . For years , they ’ve been wedge in impressive CPU upgrade , tally fans , and even slipping the Cube ’s inner chassis into large cuboid display case to accommodate good art cards . That ’s the disembodied spirit of a diehard Cube fan for you . After all , those few the great unwashed who actually did corrupt Cubes during that one yr period still fuck them to death .
