The Cube at 10: Why Apple's Eye Catching Desktop Flopped
When it comes to love-it-or-hate-it products out of Cupertino, few offerings can match the Power Mac G4 Cube for getting people to choose sides. Even a decade after its debut—Steve Jobs unveiled the Cube at the July 2000 Macworld Expo in New York and the desktop shipped a month later—the Cube still stirs passionate debate between its detractors and defenders.
To the anti-Cube crowd, the machine represented the pinnacle of what Apple detractors at the time decried as the company’s greatest fault: putting form over function and style over power. Fans of the Cube were equally as adamant that the machine was brilliant and its design beautiful.
What isn’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. Why didn’t people buy the G4 Cube?
Cube root
I always wanted one of these. I had a lust for the design, but I've never been able to purchase any Mac that didn't allow for expansion. Multiple hard drives at the very least. And firewire/USB won't cut it when you're doing heavy video/3D work.
I did finally get one, however, when a friend gave me a bunch of old Macintosh equipment for helping her set up her new Mac. The box included the cube, speakers, keyboard & mouse (as well as an old laptop that was about the size of a Bentley).
Loading Leopard onto it didn't leave a whole lot of storage/RAM. I basically kept it and played with it for a couple of weeks before donating it to another friend whose church needed a computer for some simply email and word processor functions.
It was nice to own it for even a short time. And the laptop? Really nice to be given a boat anchor that would've struggled running Mac OS 9.
***** Paul *****
Chiron (Ky-ron) in the IRC chatroom
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