Slashdot Mirror
Apple Dumps the Cube
bac_mit writes: "I guess we all saw this coming with the dismal sales, but Apple has finally decided to stop
making the cube. There's an article about it here. It's always sad to see a beautifully designed product die." A year ago, the Cube was being hyped like crazy. What happened?
We did. Twice.
Fit two workspaces too small for a tower.
It's also to have something this quiet if it happens to be set up in a bedroom.
I'm getting fucking SICK of the SHIT that's getting posted. Have you seen some of the submissions that have been accepted lately? "How To Make Money Online?" What the fuck! There are even dumbfucks using Ask Slashdot as a substitute for calling fucking tech support! Good, decent, well written articles are getting rejected and the bullshit is getting accepted. Despite what the mighty editors think, we visitors aren't all fucking idiots. More bullshit like this and we'll just find another place to visit.
Huh? In what world is this? Since Apple hardware tends to be slower and smaller (in memory, storage, etc) than PC hardware of the same price, does this mean that PC users will look forward to 700 mhz machines with 3 gig HD and 64 mb RAM in 5 years?
And software... there is hardly any out for the Mac, and what little there is is rudimentary and "not ready for prime time", since there are few developers and few alternative options, except for certain niches. Will most PC software vanish in 3-5 years so we can look forward to Apple's current dearth if we have PC's.... a PC that can do graphic design but nothing else, and forget about programming languages?
If PC's will be like Mac in 3-5 years, I'm going back to my Vic-20.
When will we lose 1 or 2 mouse buttons? When will buttons be replaced with pinholes for ejection? When will PCs with cracked cases that you can fry eggs on due to heat be common? Not in the real world.
Apple has set standards that are copied by others in some ways, true. There are one or two PC models that look like the iMac, and you can now buy a stapler at OfficeMax that has iMac like plastic on it. Macs are beautiful,elegant, but they do not have as much headroom anymore over PCs..
Headroom? Do you mean price? They cost twice as much. Yes, some of them are beautiful to look at, but once you turn them on....
Sometime next year when I buy a G5 machine, I know exactly what I'm going to do with the cube. It's going to get a 100gig disk, have its RAM maxed out at 1.5 gig, and it will go next to my stereo and become my digital audio server. It will probably remain in that role for ten years or more.
You are fucking insane. 1.5GB of RAM for it to be your damn MP3 player?
Like other Apple powerbooks in the past that use the Rage 128 Mobility chipset, the iBook is capable of driving displays as large as 1280 x 1024, not 1024 x 768. The "mirroring" limitation you cite means that if you choose to use both the internal and external displays, both displays need to have the same resolution, which in this case would limit you to 1024 x 768. The Wall St (G3 1998) PowerBooks also had this limitation. The term "mirroring" is used in opposition to the term "spanning" which means that the machine can drive both the external and internal displays at different resolutions, and the desktop can geographically be distributed between them. The current PowerBook (titanium) can do this. The iBook cannot.
The Cube failed because of the poor placement between the Pro G4 and low end G3 iMac models. The problem was that if you could afford a low end cube you could get an iMac for less and a monitor. And if you could afford a cube you could also probally afford a Pro G4 with the added expandability. The cube was great while it lasted. Perhaps some day it'll return.
But what of the iMac girl? Yes, only Japan could come up with somethinglike this.
Yep the cube can run gigabit - gigabit ethernet has been standard on all desktop macs for over a year now.
--
The workspaces were too small for a tower? I can't imagine working under conditions like that. Who would agree to work in a space that small?
I guess you'd be suprised, then. We certainly had a version Elite over here, too. My memories of seventh grade consist mostly of me trying to avoid pirates and figure out where I was going to sell 10 'tonnes' of radioactives.
The version I had was for the Commodore 64. In the research I've done since then, I found out that there were about a dozen versions of the Elite for various platforms. I still play it in VICE every once in a while.
My "thin, rattling box" (whatever-- An Inwin Q500 case is neither thin nor does it rattle) cost a lot less (less than a 1/3 as much as an equivalent G4 733 tower w/ 17" LCD), did not tie me down to the whims of a single manufacturer, and delivers at least equivalent performance of your silent box. Sure, it has cooling fans, but that's an acceptable tradeoff in my book.
On another tangent, LCDs are still far too expensive. Get back to me when I can equivalent viewing space on an LCD with TWICE the cost as an equivalent viewable size CRT. (19" Viewsonic short depth CRT cost me $335 -- the cheapest 18" LCD is many times more expensive. Even most 17" LCDs are still more than 3 times as expensive)
Apple wins on style over substance any day of the week. But I prefer substance and will keep the beige box. Thanks anyway.
Amiga had a nearly silent, small form-factor computer that, unlike the cube, was priced very attractively. The only noise from it came from the floppy drive. Also, unlike the cube, it was actually expandable in a meaningful way. It was called the Amiga 500, and that was really "ahead of its time" in the late 80's. I don't think the cube was "ahead of its time." It was just a dodgy design at the wrong price.
Let's hope that, as rumored, the Cube is being killed to make way for new stuff at MWNY.
Posted by polar_bear:
the Cube was too expensive for what you get. It's not expandable, and it's not that powerful to begin with. Plus, with normal PCs when the CD-ROM/DVD drive fails in two or three years, you can go buy a stock drive that you'll be able to replace it with. If your Cube warranty is up and the slot-loading drive bites the big one where are you going to find a replacement? Apple doesn't sell replacement parts as a rule - and if they did they'd be overpriced. (Compare the price they charge for RAM on their site vs. the price it goes for anywhere else...)
Once upon a time, Apple computers were higher-quality than their PC counterparts - they used SCSI drives instead of IDE and their graphics were higher-quality than most PCs.
Now they use stock IDE drives and their graphics cards are a generation behind what you can find in PCs. Hell, they even use stock CD/DVD drives and then they cover the headphone jack, volume control and eject button with their veneer of a case. On top of that - if you price an Apple computer next to a PC with the same specs, the Apple computer is going to run you at least $500 more. For instance, you can buy a Dell Dimension 8100 with 60GB hard drive, 256MB of RAM, 32MB GeForce2 MX and DVD drive for $1347.00 and a Pentium IV clocked at 1.3Ghz. An Apple G4 with the same video card, RAM and drives runs - get this - $2,999.00. I could, literally, buy two Dells for that price.
Apple is the underdog here - they should be fighting the price war, but they're not. They're milking the small population of Apple enthusiasts for ever dime they can get. I'm a Linux user, so I could run Linux on either platform - but I'll admit that I'd prefer to run the MacOS over Windows. However, I can't say that I like the MacOS so much better that I'd pay an extra $1,600 to do so.
I'm not on a limited income either - I either radically upgrade my PC or buy a new one every six to eight months. (The surplus parts filter down to other one of my other PCs, or to a friend or family member...) Even so, I don't spend more than $700 on an upgrade and still get quite a boost in power. With Apple parts, that's not possible.
They're just as bad as Microsoft when it comes to pricing and policies, they just don't have the market share that Microsoft does.
But I don't have an iMac residence. Like most people I have a hodge-podge of items that I have aquired over some time, and I'm not spendthrift or wasteful enough to replace everything with Good Design. I want items that are simple, inobtrusive, and sure, reasonably attractive. I must admit, beige is an ugly color -- I'd like black more. But I like a computer that is a very boxy box, because that's all it is -- it ain't art. My shelves aren't colorful or pretty either, nor my tables, and there's stuff everywhere. I don't live in a commercial. An iMac wouldn't make my residence/work any more beautiful.
More plants and better lighting. That's the kind of design that never goes out of style.
I'm not saying Jobs stole the GUI -- someone had to bring it to market, and God knows Xerox wasn't up to it. Apple did a lot of important grunt work of making the GUI practical. But it wasn't like Jobs was in mortal combat with the forces of CLI, and should he have lost the world would have been plunged into CLI darkness forever.
I think that's the point... You could leave the computer in your living room, or your family room without it looking like a college dorm room. The cube had class. I can only hope that Apple is readying something to take it's place.
>at university.
I don't know about him, but Raskin's Master's thesis was on the subject. Also check out
http://home.san.rr.com/deans/lisagui.html
--including mockups of the Lisa's GUI from *before* the visit . . .
hawk
I'm sorry, but you just can't tell people with a straight face that this $1800 machine with the 450Mhz processor is better than a $1000 Dell with a 1G processor. Yeah, talk all you want about the instruction level efficiency but it's hard to buy that you get 2-for-one under anything but some special PhotoShop code sequences.
And if you ARE going to sell on the basis of looks then don't make plastic cases that crack!
The revolution will NOT be televised.
gigabit ethernet has been standard on all desktop macs for over a year now.
Just to qualify that a little: it's standard on all PowerMac G4 models, and it was an option for the G4 cube. It has never been available on the iMac
http://store.apple.com/
Unlike most of the posters here, I actually have a Cube in my home -- it's my wife's machine, which she uses for 'net stuff and work-at-home layout & image work. She didn't want an iMac because she already had a flat-screen display, and she didn't want a G4 tower because she didn't want to take up the space in her small office.
The machine is a delight, to be honest. Utterly, completely silent and, when combined with a flat-screen display, a very calming experience to use. No low-level buzzing droning in the background. Just a quiet box on the corner of her desk.
Expandability? She had an external CDR from an earlier machine, and a USB scanner works just fine. Because of the internal 802.11b card, she doesn't have to worry about network wiring. She currently has half a gig of RAM in it. And with OS 9.1, it's been rock-solid. It's a great machine.
So what happened? As others have said, the price kept a lot of people away. If the Cube had been a sub-$1K system, Apple would have cannibalized their (more profitable) iMac sales, but they wouldn't have been able to keep the Cubes on the shelves.
The paperclip thing is if the computer _fails_. You'll kindly note that 99.44% of the CD/DVD drives you'll see also have paperclip holes. No one is expected to use them regularly; if you do, your drive or your disks are probably busted.
Nor is removable, writable storage really necessary.... At least in my experience, I haven't found a 1.44MB floppy that could reliably keep data on it. I had stopped using them at all c. 1993, and had no problems whatsoever with dropping the entire mechanism. Honestly, how the hell often do you use them? I'll bet it's not daily.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
And so far no one has managed to improve upon the CLIs developed nearly forty years ago. Good work, guys.
How the hell difficult is it to combine them. Pure GUIs are okay, but not great. Pure CLIs blow more than the blowiest thing that ever blowed blows. That includes shell windows. They ought to be joined at the hip - you cd to a directory, the gui window pops open, that kind of thing.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Well, if I remember right, it uses a 2.5" (laptop) HD, and today those HDs are virtually silent. What little noise came from it is (was) muffled by the case, much as is the case with laptops.
Yes, I'm aware older laptops have noisy HDs, the ones right off the shelf that I've touched recently have been very, very quiet.
Moof!
I know others have said it, but no one has given it enough importance: Apple is a high-margin dinosaur in a low-margin market. Computers are commodities, and Apple's attempt to decommoditize their systems by making them "unique" in some way just isn't going to work for the masses.
If they're content with selling to the ever-dwindling Mac-loving $80k income crowd, that's fine; they should then abandon all hope of reaching the rest of us who want the best computing for the lowest cost. I have been using PC's since 1984, and although I have often thought, "That's a cool looking case!", that thought never once even influenced my decision on what to buy.
Most people don't care about cute when it comes to computers. A computer is a tool that you ignore when you're not using it. About the only useful innovation Apple had they didn't execute well enough on: the fanless case.
Cheap, reliable, compatible: AMD chips, ABIT motherboards, brand X RAM, WD IDE hard drives. A computer more powerful than the Cube for less than half the cost. No-brainer.
They really should give up on hardware. Apple's true strength lies in software and user interfaces, but I don't expect the market for end-user software to be fruitful for very long, so in the end it looks like they'll be SOL anyway.
[ home ]
insert ice cube joke here
When I saw this story on the register I thought about submitting it to Slashdot(considering the Cube's physical appearance) with the headline "Cube is toast". :-)
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
If solar cell and battery technology ever advance enough you probably could have a small quiet computer and LCD monitor without power cables and with some sort of RF or IR link between them.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
If you use UPS it'll arrive pre-crashed anyway. :-)
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Maybe that's what kept Alexander Calder from building a "mobile" computer. :-)
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
How about a dodecahedral computer, floating in the air, and rotating with a floppy or DVD drive at the front? You'd have to make sure your disk was rotating at the same rate as the computer as you slide it in.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Take me out for a ride in your Model T sometime...
"The cube had "microfractures" around where the screws went into the plastic"
Hello? There are no screws going it the plastic of the cube, not the clear external plastics anyways.
- Henrik
- Henrik
- when the Shadows descend -
Daimler-Benz and Chrysler were both rather marginal auto companies that got their main revenue from selling adequate-and-cheaper vehicles in one of the three global markets (Europe, North America, and Japan). They merged roughly 55/45 so that their larger adequate-and-cheaper market competitors (GM, Toyota, Volkswagen, and Ford) wouldn't drive them out of buisness.
Steven E. Ehrbar
The Cube didn't have cracks. It did have mold seams. The one legit hardware problem was the touch sensor's sensitivity to RFI, which was fixable through the addition of a gasket. Anyone who sent their early Cube in got the gasket put in.
No, what did the Cube in was its narrow audience. It was too expensive to end up in many homes, given that the 30% slower iMac cost many hundreds less. And it was slightly more expensive than the low-end G4 tower.
Expandability wasn't much of an issue except for the minority of users who want to drive multiple video devices. Intel PC users seldom realize how little PCI slots get used in Macs. Nowadays, practically all the Mac peripherals that get purchased are 1394 and USB, even extra hard drives (including RAID arrays!). Save for old-timers bringing over a chain of SCSI devices from their old Macs, about the only use PCI slots get lately is those extra video cards.
Ultimately, despite making anyone who used one drool, it was too expensive (and high-end) for the home and reception-desk market, and lacked a quantifiable advantage over the modestly cheaper towers in the business market.
Actually, I have both a TV and a radio. You see, one's good for some things, and one's good for other things. Having both gives me a choice. Up until OS/X came out, using a Macintosh would have meant I didn't have a choice -- I'd have to use a GUI even if it made the job more difficult.
Of course, OS/X came out several years too late to matter. There are free Unixes all over the damn place, running on cheap and even obsolete hardware.
But your point is valid. Why don't TV's have built-in radio tuners?
--
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
If it wasn't for the Macintosh, I'd never have discovered Linux. It worked like this:
- Apple abandons the Apple II line in favor of the Macintosh.
- I abandon Apple and go to the IBM-PC, which still has a useful CLI interface in the form of Microsoft DOS.
- In the drive to compete with Apple, Microsoft abandons DOS in favor of Windows. At first (v3.x), this is just annoying, but later (Win95 and after), it really gets shoved down your throat.
- I abandon Microsoft as soon as a friend introduces me to an early version of RedHat Linux, which still has a useful CLI.
- Six years later, I wonder how the hell I ever got along without bash. I occasionally hear that Apple and Microsoft are still in business, but it's no longer relevant.
So thank you, Steve Jobs! If not for your insistence on twiddleware, I'd probably still be buying Apple products.--
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Where did you get the idea that the Cube is chrome? It's white.
>Also the reason for one button, is because most commands
>will only need one button, and if you want more options,
>you have to hold down the cntrl, option, or apple key, or
>any combination of them while you click.
Agreed, the number of mouse buttons is a non-issue. A scroll wheel wouldn't hurt but it is not necessary. And actually, most home PC users I've met don't even know what the second mouse button is for.
Let's all go out and be practical! buy things
strictly functional.
You don't buy a ferrari for it's functionality,
though it's still a vehicle for getting from
A to B... ( in style? or whatever might apply here)
'good design' two words that just do not match..
There's also something to be said about posting a flame as an anonymous coward. This was a related article, who cares if it was posted on my site?
Perhaps you need to get acquainted with the business world. Advertising rates are the lowest they've been in years. Even huge companies like Yahoo! are in trouble. How do you think it's hitting small web developers who were just barely making it before? When will you realize that people like me need to eat?
So go along, living in your perfect little world where you get pissed off when someone posts a link to their own article. I'd prefer it if you did something better with your time than bicker moan, but the least you could do is post your comment as yourself, you self-absorbed, arrogant, ignorant, moron.
Some people saw the dump coming. This Artificial Cheese article predicted the cube's departure before Apple made their announcement.
The Cube stands in line with other Apple and NeXT products, which had to be designed under Steve Jobs cubic fanatism. While the design of the computer itself looks great on pictures, the Apple Cube in the real world was not that beautiful. The enormously large external power supply, and all those fat cables coming out of the bottom clutter your desk. For the monitor cable, the Cube has a clunky "90 Degree" adapter and the microphone is a big black brick as well.
-- bmp System Support - Vienna, Austria
I'll take a Vaio any day of the week.
domc
Brushed aluminum might be nice.
domc
It's not larger. It's 8.5 x 11 x 1, and it only weighs 3.5lbs. It's called a super-slim Z505.
I paid $1500 brand new -- not very expensive.
BTW, I think it looks pretty cool. So does the Titanium, but I would never buy one.
domc
Not all LAN Gamerz are hardcore computer geeks. There is an easy 30% that bring their Dell/Gateway/HP/Etc and don't want to deal with the internals what-so-ever.
LAN Go'er: My network isn't working, help!
Staff: Did you configure it for DHCP?
LAN Go'er: Huh?
Staff: *sigh* What do you use at home?
LAN Go'er: Ummm I think we have cable.
Staff: Watch a lot of MTV do ya?
LAN Go'er: What?
Staff: It was a joke, nevermind.
*reboots*
Staff: There ya go.
-Tom
The Cube should really have been marketed towards the 3D Gamer / LAN Party go'er. A nice 3D chipset (Radeon, Nvidia) and a 20 gig hard drive. Try to make the price point as low as possible and they would have sold like hotcakes for LAN Parties. I used to think a Mac sucked for games (1 button? What is that!), but then a group of all Mac gamers showed me that if it can use USB... it can use a USB 3 button mouse :).
:) )
(I still want one for LAN Parties and Linux..
-Tom
So show me where oh smart one I can find a cheap PC setup like you claim that has a Firewire port and a built in antenna for wireless networking? Eight hundred bucks gets you a nice little bundle on the iMacs. They don't clock as high as Duron based systems but then they don't really need to. I don't see how iMacs don't work with "standard printers" either. It seems to me if it wasn't for iMacs there's be no USB shit at all going around. My Canon S400 works just fine with my Powerbook and my PC workstation, it works really well with both systems and I can't seem to find in memory a complaint I've had about it working with either.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
"Besides, the GUI makes so much sense that someone would stumble upon it eventually as
computing power became more abundant."
Not even. Those who invented the basic principles of the GUI back in the 50s (Kay and Sutherland) and 60s (Englebart and Raskin) pushed hard throughout the 70s to get their ideas implemented (at PARC, SRI, and other places).
Far from anyone stumbling upon it, it was only a matter of time before these visionaries finally succeeded in forcing it upon us waiting masses by convincing some company (Apple) to actually run with it.
You need to study your history, too. The GUI was not invented at PARC (all of the key pieces were invented before PARC was founded), and the original Mac (not 'MAC'; it is not an acronym) was not a blatant copy of STAR, unless you define every GUI that uses a mouse, overlapping windows, and icons as such. Apart from these superficial similarities, there is a lot of genuine innovation in the Macintosh GUI for which you wrongly deny Apple credit.
It's not just graphic designers; artists, musicians and writers of all kinds prefer the Mac. MacOS is also the platform of choice in some serious scientific circles such as top universities and federal research labs.
Seymour Cray, while he lived, used Macs to design the world's fastest supercomputers. If Macs are good enough for the man who invented vector supercomputing, they're certainly good enough for the rest of us.
In September came out with their most unique computer in atleast a decade. It was fanless, had an entirely different shape and form and was running with a top notch processor. Yet what happened?
Well #1, and I think this goes for all of Apple's line, the lack of the new exciting OS to go with the new exciting hardware caused people to hold back from buying new computers. The fact was that Apple had a very bad release despite releasing great equipment. They took a loss for that quarter.
#2. Typical of Apple, they had problems getting the machines into the hands of the users. Alot of folks I knew ordered them and discovered they were not coming when they expected. Then there were issues with the powerbuttons and expectation of upgrades and a struggle with the atypical monitor cables and such.
#3 In the end, business users did not need the quiet elegant but limited expanssion machine. It was closer to the old Mac Classic design then the Mac II and in comparison to the Powermac G4's this just wasn't a business machine. Probably they should have worked to get it into college dorms and such. But the price is just too high compared to the iMac and the pc compatibles.
In the end it is a shame. I also wanted a Cube. Hopefully they will find a way of dropping the price (iCube?) on a similar technology.
d
Any way I'll stop now so all the flat earthers can mod me down.
Grey (Chris Lusena)
What happened is that they were overpriced. Without the built-in monitor, it had less value than an iMac (which itself is pretty spartan) but it cost more(?!?!?!). I never heard of anyone I know, buying one of the cubes.
It had so little market. If you need a beefy Mac that might need future expansion, get one of the mini-towers. If you need cheepness and very moderate expansion (either via USB, or more likely, via other computers on your LAN) get an iMac. If you need _____, get the cube. Nobody knows what the _____ is.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
RF glitching == The touch switches (on the cube and monitors) randomly turn on and off when powerful Radio Frequency signals are transmitting nearby.
You think that fanless design is innovative... well that happened in the iMacs first IIRC.
yes its tiny, but in order to have a full system (speakers, power supply, etc) you have a bunch of 'stuff' scattered all over the place... what a mess.
I'm sitting here typing this message on a dual g4 under os X with an IBM 18 flat panel and I don't find myself sitting around wishing I had a cube.
I'm likely as much as an Apple 'fan' as yourself, (I've owned a Mac II, a Duo 270c, an 8100/80, a 9500/233, a 9600/300, a B/W G3, A pismo, and now a dual g4) but they simply blew it with the cube design.
I think this design was much more about a Steve Jobs' obsession, not a good design.
I INTERVIEWED at Apple last year at met a member of the Cube design team, and even he quietly stated that the machine was plagued with technical and mechanical design issues from the get-go, and that it was indeed 'Steve's Baby'.
-t
If you think about it, the machine was basically a G4 with the power supply pulled out... and if you ever saw both (the cube & the supply) you can imagine how that supply would fit right where the heat 'chimney is'. I wonder if they were going for a cube with the power supply inside but couldn't get enough convection current going without a fan... so they had to pull it out!
Anyway... So the main issues as I see them:
1. The cube idea is not new. (nextcube, cobalt servers, etc.)
2. The ONLY innovation on the machine, the ultra-cool touch power button, but unfortunately is susceptible to RF glitching. that sucks!
3. The main appeal of the machine, it's 'look', was marred by poor manufacturing quality (many of the cubes had visible, highly refractive seams)
4. To have a complete system, you had to have a huge mass of cabling going into a very small opening at the bottom and then steeply angling into the machines ports... just bad design.
One way they could have really improved the cube is to include a vid card that has s-video out and pitch the machine as an entertainment device with full DVD/CD/3D-Sound/Gaming capabilities and:
-Put the power supply back in the cube, with a fan!
-And get rid of those stupid orb shaped speakers... they look cool, but aren't practical.
Happy Birthday USA!
-t
I would love to see some real world test that actually compared a fast production PPC chip with the current in production PPC chips with Altivec.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Apple's big contribution is that they put a GUI out to the public in large numbers, sorta' like what they're doing with unix under OSX. They tend to popularize computer technologies and make them more mainstream.
I drank what? -- Socrates
______________________________
rooooar
______________________________
rooooar
Yet another stylish apple product goes down in flames. Crappy.
Guess all that's left is to grab a kleenex and dream of a titanium notebook.
I'll admit it. The Cube is the coolest sexiest looking computer I've seen yet (well next to some old Crays of course), especially when combined with a nice Cinema display, and those funkadelic matching speakers.
But the cube is not expandable, and, I'm sorry, but... too expensive for being not expandable. The lack of incremental upgradability means it'll be outdated on my desk that much sooner.
Or maybe its' just the thought of paying so much money for something so small.
Titanium looks cool? I'm not sure what you mean.
It looks silvery and shiny, like most every other metal.. perhaps not quite as shiny, not ulike Al.
Where did you see charcoal black Ti?
Okay. I thought you were referring to some bizarre alloy, or something.
In it's pure form, Titanium is only slightly lighter than Iron, and quite a bit heavier than Aluminum. I believe a Ti alloy is used in most cases.
but.. I have to say, regarding Titanium.
Is anyone else sick of the 'titanium' buzzword that everyone is in love with?
I saw this guy on TV, selling titanium kitchen knives. He talked about how strong it was, because it was developed for the space program, etc....
Titanium is very strong for it's weight... but that's it. Steel is still stronger (or at least, not as brittle). Also, from a knife point of view, titanium may never rust, but it's very porous, and although it may hold an edge for a logn time, it will not be a very sharp one. You cannot approach the razor-sharpness of good steel with titanium.
I have a space-age titanium backing on the LCD portion of my vaio z505le. Didn't take much jostling in the backpack to put a huge shiny gouge in it...
I believe you're a bit spotty on the technical details there. C64 / Atari 800 did *not* have more than 16 colors (fixed). Then later on amiga/atari ST raised the bar by having a pick of 16 colors amongst 256 colors. 8 bit on screen only came years later.
With the midtower G4's being so much cheaper and looking almost as cool this was just waiting to happen.
Karma: Good! Napster: Baad!
The slot-loading iMacs don't have fans, either.
Hrm. I'm less happy about this whole convection cooling idea than I was to begin with.
My Powerbook G3 (Bronze keyboard) almost caught fire once. Smoke came out through the keyboard. It was pretty hot while I was using it (my fingers were hot from the keyboard venting), but not once did the fan switch on.
It got sent back to Apple (three days before the end of the guarantee), and came back with a new logic board. Unfortunately, it hasn't been quite right since. I think the near-fire stressed out the other components.
Mac OS X freezes after 1 to 5 minutes. Yellow Dog Linux kernel-panics after a similar period. Mac OS 9 takes a few hours to freeze (just very casual use... not usual MOS9 crashing). (These are all clean OS installs, by the way.. no third-party stuff installed)
So, something's wrong.
Anyway, I was running MSN Messenger through Virtual PC for a while on my slot-loading iMac. I popped out for a little while to pick up a pizza. I came back, and there was a 'warm' smell coming from my iMac. It then shut down and refused to start for about six hours. On closer inspection, I noticed that a lot of the clear plastic is now browny yellow.
Both of these units were used in ventilated areas, with free space surrounding them. The Powerbook episode happened in a modern air-conditioned office, on a clean, flat desk. This is in England, by the way -- not the hottest country on Earth!
Anyway, I'm all for this fanless operation concept, but only if there is a fan, and it's threshold is set reasonably pessimistically.
The Cube just filled me with dread after my experiences. Last thing I would do is buy one of those unless I'd upped my insurance and bought a good halon system =)
Quite frankly, people who seriously factor the appearance of a computer into their buying choices are idiots.
I bet you drive a Yogo, don't you?
Shame on people who value style in their lives (or living rooms!). Shame on the people who want something more than a big grey box making lots of noise. Shame, Shame, Shame.
-gus
So the first thing I do, like any good mail order weenie, is go looking around on Pricewatch, various Mac-specific web sites etc looking for what the prices are for various kinds of hardware. Well, it turns out that just about every new Mac is priced within about $5 of the online Apple Store. That seems strange, especially considering that most of the big online retailers have their own "we'll throw in 256M/a printer/a scanner/a bunch of media" incentives. The simplest explanation for this seems to be that Apple prohibits its authorized dealers from advertising or competing on lower price, but still allows bundles for differentiation. Well, at least this makes price comparison shopping for new hardware very easy....
Now it's time to go looking for used machines and hit the auction sites. Well, in order to do that, I gotta understand what the specs of the various boxes are. So after a few evenings of trying to understand how the prices and specs work out, here's what I conclude:
So where does this put the Cube? Well, that's the problem. What I really wanted was a headless iMac. The Cube seemed pretty close because of its small size, no fan, and limited expandability. But it has a G4 and allows decent video resolutions, so Apple priced it like a "pro" system.
I think there would be a huge market for a headless iMac. But an important part of the iMac is low cost. And people who want a non-tiny monitor are just the people that Apple wants to squeeze for as many dollars per unit as they can get. As long as Apple has control over all the hardware that can run OS 9/OS X software, they'll probably continue to segment their market, sometimes with artificial limitations, to maximize profit from customers who are less price sensitive.
In general, PC hardware manufacturers can't do this. I can plop a GeForce 2 MX in Ye Olde Celeron 450 if I want video resolution. I can put a Maxtor 1394 card in any old PC. And if nVidia or Maxtor decides to artificially cripple their low-end cards to try to make more high-end sales, their competitors will eat their lunch. In fact, the only big player who has much luck with this kind of market segmentation is Intel (Celeron/P3/P4/Xeon), and AMD is...eating their lunch.
All this could change at MWNY, but I bet there will still be significant limitations designed into whatever new iMac is announced.
All you people going on about what a great design the Cube was... do you have one? Have you played with one? I have. It sucks.
The Cube is cute, but has a *big* external power supply. It's rectangular, but not at all stackable because of the cables, power supplies, power button, and CD/DVD drive access.
Sitting on a desk, with the power supply and cable converters, it's pretty ugly. It's useless to put under a desk because of the size, power, and drive position, unlike the G4 towers.
Exactly what is *so* great about the design besides "thinking different"? If it was a perfect sphere that kept rolling off your desk, would you still be lamenting its death?
--Jered
Granted, the G4 towers are a lot bulkier than the Cubes, but OTOH they are also amazingly quiet. I've been pleased with my dual 450 G4 in that regard -- it's the quietest computer I have, even quieter than my Powerbook (which, while it has a fan, only rarely turns on the fan).
For that matter, the iMacs are also very quiet. My family-in-law has an iMac DV, and it's also very decent (though it does crash a lot... ;-P ).
My Duron 800, though, is just *loud*...
Ethelred
Everyone wants to be Ethelred. Even I want to be Ethelred.
It's pretty odd that Apple did the Cube at all, really. Anyone remember the original four-box strategy that they implemented to prevent themselves from going overboard on models, like they used to?
In the old days, Apple had Quadras, Performas, Centrises and Classics, and no one could tell from the name or even case design which Mac was which. Futhermore, within each line (Centris/Performa/Quadra) there were myriad variations that made little sense, and often there was overlap. This confused both customer and sales team, and caused a lot of trouble.
Enter the four-box strategy:
Consumer portable: iBook
Consumer desktop: iMac
Pro portable: PowerBook
Pro desktop: G3/G4
This strategy worked just fine, and then Jobs got a wild hair and decided to add the Cube, which was neither cheap enough to be a Consumer box (like an iMac) nor powerful and expandable enough to be a Pro box. Sure, it looked great, but it was just a bad decision (unless they had cut the price dramatically, but then they would have run into problems with the Cube cannibalizing iMac sales).
They should stick to a simple product line, like they started to do, much in the same way that carmakers recycle chassis designs and parts to keep things simple and costs down.
For all the coolness of the Cube, it was simply a blunder IMO.
Ethelred
Everyone wants to be Ethelred. Even I want to be Ethelred.
OK, so they don't exactly "work well," but that aside, when they came out my friends and I were pretty impressed. Sexy, small and quiet. Finally someone took the ideal university girlfriend and extrapolated that into the realm of desktop computers.
First off it looks good. Who can argue with that? Certainly not the idiots encasing their PCs in plexiglass and lighting them up with neon. And the space and noise factors are important when living in a small room. Good job Apple, too bad it was DAMNED EXPENSIVE and kinda broke a lot.
DataSquid.net, a little about me.
A cube is the most Nazi of all shapes - an utter surrender of beauty to uniformity.
I'm sorry, but the Cube is a gorgeous machine. Although I like the idea of a spherical floating computer like someone else mentioned.
- Scott
--
Scott Stevenson
WildTofu
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
This will not happen unless Apple cuts its hardware prices by 50%. Then they will be merely competitive with PC's.
I think you're off by a significant amount on the price difference. Make sure you're comparing machines with equivalent features.
Cut prices even more and they might gain sales.
Apple isn't just an assembly service like so many grey box makers. They actually develop products. This takes money and this is why Apple's gross margins are higher. Sony has a similar approach.
BTW: Razor thing margins on cheap x86 don't seem to be a fantastic business model these days. VA has dumped its hardware, and Compaq has come close to doing the same. More units sales do not necessarily mean a more succesful business or a more healthy industry.
Better yet, Apple could license its OSX to other hardware vendors, who could make powerful competitively-priced feature-laden microcomputers
Apple makes the complete product -- that's the value proposition. Not just the OS, not just the hardware. They build computers.
Besides, show me one other company besides Microsoft that has made a solid business out of licensing x86 OSs.
- Scott
--
Scott Stevenson
WildTofu
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
I quote to you Hastings's Law: Adequate and cheaper wins against better but more expensive.
Isn't this more a theory than a law? Anyway...
Regardless of how many units are sold, "adequate and cheaper" cannot sustain an industry long term. To me it seems "better and expensive" is what actually drives most progress. But volume is what drives costs down.
I'm also not convinced the problem with the Cube was one merely of price, though that was clearly a major issue. It was at a really strange place in the product line. I don't think consumers knew who it was targeted at.
The Cube has exactly two things going for it: it looks cool, it is silent
Well, another major one is that it takes up very little space at 8" cubed. This means that it can go in places that are not practical for other computers.
- Scott
--
Scott Stevenson
WildTofu
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
You could interlace to 320x400 too (lowering the framerate to 25 or 30). Only worked for static
images. Other hacks included drawing pixels on the border for Sega Genesis-like graphics (that was the standard to behold for my friends and I back in the day).
The c64 did NOT have digital sound. It had a 3-voice synth/tone generator thing called the SID.
You could add a second SID for 6 voices (stereo).
The Amiga had 8-bit/4-channel sound (stereo). The 16-bit sound trick is a hack (although "superimposing" 2 8-bit waveforms will definitely improve sound quality).
Hands in my pocket
--
----
----
Am I the only one who thinks Microsoft is a misnomer? Perhaps Macrosoft would be a better fit?
-And get rid of those stupid orb shaped speakers... they look cool, but aren't practical.
What's so impractical about them? They're small and sound relatively good for their size. My only complaint is that the overall diameter of the case should be about 1"-2" greater to allow for a larger base---if they get unseated, they have the tendency to roll.
----
----
Am I the only one who thinks Microsoft is a misnomer? Perhaps Macrosoft would be a better fit?
Titanium G4 and the new iBook. 'Nuff said.
----
----
Am I the only one who thinks Microsoft is a misnomer? Perhaps Macrosoft would be a better fit?
I posted this comment on Macslash yesterday:
I hear a lot of people here complaining about the combo price of a cube and LCD display. I think these assesments are correct. I think Apple has heard the complaints and is fixing them.
From the sounds of the rumors, we'll see an LCD iMac announced this month. It'll be a G4, 128MB RAM etc. Essentially a Cube stuck to an LCD. And the pricing should be in line with the current iMac product line.
Reasons being:
1) No more CRTs at Apple. Therefore, iMac must move to LCD.
2) Apple has invested a great deal in LCD tech, as show by launching a 17" LCD and getting amazing pixel resolution from the new iBook LCD.
3) You can't really glue a desktop to an LCD unless you can get the components to fit into a tight space and make it look any good. The Cube showed Apple could stuff a desktop into a kleenex box. Proof of concept for this requirement.
4) Pricing has to be within the bounds of the current iMac line b/c Apple won't want to risk losing their low-end customers who want to buy Mac
5) It must be G4 b/c OS X runs like crap on a G3. This upgrade will leave the iBook as the only G3 in the fleet. Expect this to be revved to G4 by MW Tokyo at the latest. Sorry to the early adopters on this one, but I don't think Apple will stand idly by and try to flog a product line that can't really run their new OS.
6) My money is on three configs w/ speeds from the 750Mhz through the 866Mhz. Lowend will be CD-RW, middle DVD, highend will be a combo drive ala the iBooks.
So long live the Cube in its new form. These are my bets. No doubt everyone here is guessing something similar.
----------------------------
coming.
:)
This is one of those cases where it seems like everyone on the web was in on one big secret that Apple didn't discover until they started looking at quarterly reports and doing the math.
Notice that everyone likes the look of the Cube, the silence of the Cube, and in general the concept of the G4 Cube. I know that I personally have been lusting after an old NeXT Cube for years now, despite the fact that the hardware is so hopelessly out of date and there's really nothing for me to do on OpenStep. The concept of a computer in a Cube form factor is just so appealing to me that I'd be willing to spend the $400 or so that it costs to pick up a decent NeXT Cube used.
However, if you're going to create a silent cube computer, you have to realize that those are perks. Those are "neat things". Those are *not* important enough issues to justify a purchase at full new retail price for 99% of customers.
Sure, you read here about how Joe Sixpack bought it for his wife and she loves it, or how Fred Smith bought it to add to his stereo as a digital computer component and thinks it's pretty fantastic. Most of us do not have $1800 or $2000 or whatever a decent Cube costs these days (or did cost, heh heh) just to throw away on a whim based on a cutesy design.
Someone here mentioned Rolex and Bentley. These products are *extremely* high priced within their markets, but they are also the acknowledged *BEST* at what they do. The layman thinks "high-end watch", he thinks ROLEX. That makes a Rolex watch 1) a quality piece of equipment and 2) a status symbol.
Any Apple based computer these days is only a status symbol for a small subset of the community. I think Apple had starry-eyed visions of Dot-Com millionaires eating up Cubes like chocolate to put on their glasstop desks right next to their expensive LCD panels and stack of $400 motivational tapes. It just didn't happen. Within the computing industry, Mac owners are more often reviled than revered. Macs are seen as a toy, or at best, as a tool for an artist or graphics designer.
There aren't enough image-conscious artists or graphics designers to buy Cubes. Most of them are still probably holding onto their 9600s for the 6 PCI slots.
Which is the other issue - the Cube is NOT the best in its class. No, it is not "in a class of its own", it's a personal computer. There are much better machines in terms of functionality and quality of components than the Cube - even within Apple's own product line!
That's the one-two punch. The bonuses of the machine are not worth enough to most people in and of themselves, and the machine does not contain amazing whiz-bang hardware to drive the purchases. If the Cube had been the fastest piece of hardware Apple manufactured by a measurable amount and been delivered at a cost of only a few hundred dollars more than the G4 Tower (to make up for the lack of expandabiltiy, etc... even though it'd be the fastest, it would be a static configuration), I think it would have sold very well.
If the G4 Cube was delivered as-is but at a price point closer to the iMac than the G4 Towers, I think it also would have sold.
It was neither. It didn't sell.
In 10 years I'll probably buy one on eBay for $400 to sit next to my (at that point) 20 year old NeXT cube in the museam of cool machines that could've been.
Watch the rate of roll on that Cobra III, Commander Jameson...
Yes, I too had a mis-spent youth.
P.S.: I wonder how many Merkins will understand any of this?
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
But of course computing power for the dollar shouldn't factor into cost considerations at all.
Spencer Ogden
>-And get rid of those stupid orb shaped speakers... they look cool, but aren't practical.
I don't know what you mean by practical, but they sure sound great. I've never heard such clarity from such a small driver before in my life, and I'm used to the sound I get out of my Magneplanars.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I'm writing code. Having the extra RAM has cut way down on the paging when I build an app or launch it under the debugger.
As for maxing it out, I expect that when I do so next year it will cost me about $200 for two more sticks of 512Meg PC100 RAM.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
>You are fucking insane. 1.5GB of RAM for it to be your damn MP3 player?
I said it was going to be my digital audio server. That's not necessarily limited to MP3's.
It will probably also take over the tasks of being my incoming mail/news server which my NeXT slab is doing now.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I'm using one every day, it's my primary development system. For the first time in my entire career, there is NO FAN running in my office. It's wonderful to be able to really hear my music while I'm working.
The critical thing for getting any mac to perform is giving it enough memory. This cube on my desk was recently given an extra half-gig of RAM bringing it up to 704Meg, and the difference was astounding.
As for the alleged cracks, what I see in this case are a few mold lines which cast shadows that look like cracks under certain lighting conditions.
Sometime next year when I buy a G5 machine, I know exactly what I'm going to do with the cube. It's going to get a 100gig disk, have its RAM maxed out at 1.5 gig, and it will go next to my stereo and become my digital audio server. It will probably remain in that role for ten years or more.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
You don't know much about computers if you think that those things are going to be the problems..
The major problems would be:
- making extension cables for your PCI etc. slots
- extending all the other cables (including power which, btw is 5V and 12V so not much danger there)
- making sure the cards don't short each other out when it swings around
What's with this recent trend of calling the whole computer the CPU?
Aah! You have recalled one of my most priceless memories [hunts around for Mastercard lawyers]
There was this family who I'd often visit to geek, but they all had Amigas (A500 etc.) Eventually I convinced them to get a PC. When it arrived, one of them called me up excitedly telling me all about it:
"There's a box next to the computer..."
It took several seconds before it dawned on me what she meant
Not if Microsoft gets their way..
"G4 upgrades from a G3" benchmarks
Macworld's G4 cube review and benchmark
Wow, somebody other than me who also said that would be way cool. Yes, do that, and you'll get on /. if you take pictures. I mean if they post ugly wood PC cases....
Actually, the wires are pretty minimalist. Apple purposely tried to solve this with the ADC, and does a good job of it too.
Step 1. Click on the disk
Step 2. Drag the disk to the trash
Step 3. There's no step 3
ID10T
What you're missing here is stability of Mac over x86, as well as the support, and confidence that you won't get driver problems, or IRQ or DMA errors, no registry bugs, and less than 1 one-thousandth of the viruses.
x86 may be cheaper in terms of hardware, but there was a study and businesses found it cheaper to buy macs, they offered a better ROI, less support, good productivity, and outlast x86's. Mac classics are still around, they make great word processors, but there are very, very few 386's in circulation.
Unfortunately, Sierra bitched and moaned that mac users never bought any of their cruddy games in '96, so killed Half-life.
2 mouse buttons? sure, I use 5 on the MS intellimouse, you almost need them for Deus Ex.
I am sorry for you that you had to wait a year, but now the world is a much better place. Now the turnaround time for macs is very, very quick, within 5 days, while companies like Compaq are screwing the customers over in support.
Actually the LISA team stole some GUI ideas from Xerox.
The mac team lifted some key features and functions from Lisa. They never actually got Xerox stuff. So it was mostly second-hand GUI concepts that went on the mac, so the 'thievery' issue is old, OK? Besides, Steve Jobs went to the head of Xerox, and obtained permission to let all the lisa progammers see the GUI and get their hands on the ideas. Xerox never said they were robbed, they just gave away valuable stuff wuthout thinking.
I couldn't have put it better, now if only I had some mod points...
That I doubt, for one thing, It's quickly caught up to the BSD in number of installations, just look at all the OS X shipments and iMacs.
10 minutes? Here, take these 20 bucks and buy more than just 32MB of RAM.
Under a minute on my iBook G3, and G4's are under 30 seconds.
You'd be suprised, in an interview Steve Jobs said many customers say they're getting a great bargain. Ease of use, speed, low mantainence, looks, availibility of apps, and no hardwae conflicts means BARGAIN compared to x86.
Also, I've seen that every manufacturer including Dell makes the computer with everything and a huge price tag. It sells to those who money is no object. Doesn't the cube's main buyers fall into that category?
While I disagree with this outlook (and insulting people who don't share your stoic preferences is counterproductive), I find it amusing that a poster at maccentral.com used almost the same argument to defend the cube.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
While cute, the cube is also extremely practical in terms of desk space for those who do not need a lot of expansion options. It's noiselessness is also very practical, especially for musicians.
I don't know why you hate beautiful things, but for most people it's worth more to be surrounded by beauty than by ugliness, and they are happy to pay for it.
The price is what happened. How can Apple expect to make sales with a $2000+ computer? Dell/Compaq/HP/etc sells them for about a 1/4 of the price. Most common users don't care about inovation and style... they care about getting their email, web pages loaded quickly and price. Bottom Line. Enthusiasts may enjoy this sort of "toy" but, most steer clear once they see the price.
We are blind to the Worlds within us
We are blind to the Worlds within us
waiting to be born...
What's this about square apples...is this more of that genitically engineered food?
-Ben
Say what you mean, mean what you say! But please know what #$@% you are talking about!
... I'm glad to see the Cube bite it . It is capitalism's way of rolling up a newspaper and smacking Steve Jobs on his sometimes artistically elitist ass.
I love what Apple is capable of achieving in form, but it remains one of their most obnoxious tendencies to assume that form is a means unto itself. When function goes out the door - which it did in the case of the gorgeous but functionally impractical Cube - it is all but impossible to generate meaningful demand. A small population of design purists will buy anything Apple releases. They should have known better and released a more expensive Cube produced in smaller quantities (like the 20th Anniversary Mac from a while back).
This same elitist streak in Apple led to the 'innovation' of their sleek, gorgeous one-button mouse. I, along with the majority of other Apple Power Users, threw the dang thing away and plugged in (the horror) a 3 button Microsoft Mouse instead. I like the look of the Apple mouse better, but since I actually need to USE the thing, and since my usage entails more than simply surfing the Internet and single-clicking, I'm forced by practicality to use a functionally superior product from a company that remains mostly oblivious to aesthetics and originality.
After all these years, Steve Jobs' vanity continues to lead Apple to repeat their early blunders. With absolute certainty, the one thing we can all look forward to in the future of Apple under Steve Jobs' leadership is repeatedly making the most gorgeous mistakes in the computer industry.
Wait to see what happens at MacWorld.. There are a lot of rumors floting around, but I wouldn't be surprised to see a silent iMac with a G4 and an integrated flat panel display..
A computer.. If you wave your foot over the thing it shuts down..
...selling off whatever backstock of Cubes remains at remainder prices will probably wind up making it cheaper than the G4 tower after all.
This is Nature's way of telling you to change your socks.
--
Never mind Spamassassin. When's Spammerassassin coming out?
And longer cords all around... I want more separation between the speakers, and don't have a ADC display so I have to use the Cube's USB port...
I also heard that the thing got hotter than fuck ... Oh well. They still make the coolest hardware.
;)
----
Yes, i'm sorry, I should have noted the NEW beetle to be the one to which I was referring. I find that people who like the new beetles tend to be rather superficial and pride themselves on being 'trendy,' a notion that disgusts me to my core. *grimace*
----
I wouldn't go so far as calling an Apple 'beautiful.' Sure, it's an interesting design, but my PC is under my desk; I rarely see it and use it even as a footrest. The cube was sleek and interesting, but i don't think it would make as good a footrest as my sturdy beige midtower would!
To be more serious, though, I think that Apple's desire to be different is a vice as well as a virtue. People think of Macs as somewhat of a curiosity, but don't really consider them for heavy use. The interface is nice, the design is fluid, but it's like those PT Cruisers... some people like them, others hate them. I think that they're hideous; who on earth would want to buy such an ugly beast? Wherever you go, people notice your PT Cruiser, just like people notice your VW Beetle. It's a novelty, and not many people drive them. It's awfully conspicuous at times because of the amount of marketing put into such things as Beetles and Macs. Though you don't drive around your Apple iMac or Cube, I think the same mentality applies. In fact, I find that the same people who love their Macs also love their VWs. Interesting.
----
i've never understood the confusion surrounding the fans.
there is only one macintosh that currently sports a fan that runs full time, the G4 tower.
all other macs (powerbook, imac, and ibook) haven't had fans for a long time, longer than the cube has been out. my powerbook (1998) has only run its fan once in its lifetime, when it didn't go to sleep properly when i closed the lid and left it in my briefcase in the car for an hour.
it's becoming a fanless world. and thank god for that. my wife's pc laptop, which is one of the quieter models, drives me up the wall. computing should be silent.
Actually, regarding Halflife- the game was practically done being ported for the Mac when it was cancelled. Something to do with them not wanting to ship it with Mac-PC network support (even though the code was mostly done) so they wouldn't have to keep the versions in sync. It was really quite stupid I think- it was one of the most anticipated games on the Mac and would have sold quite well, and the work was practically done.
Pretty much the same thing happened with the Dreamcast port of Half-Life. Versions had gone out to reviewers and everything, and then they cancelled it. Kinda sad really.
Or a sphere, floating in the air...
Brings a whole new meaning to the term, Bernoulli Drive.
[
The cube failed because it was too goddamned expensive. Apple products were worth the price when they outperformed comparable PCs, and were a million times as stable as PCs. Now that AMD processors and a huge amount of competition in the DRAM market has dramatically lowered the cost of high-end PCs, and Windows 2000 is almost as stable as UNIX, there is no longer a reason to pay Apple's prices for a workstation.
What a strange idea - do you buy things based on whether you like them, or based on whether you think they're targeted at you?
--
I guess resistance isn't quite so futile after all.
Actually, I kinda want a cube. They're foxy, and it'd fit in nicely with my old video game stuff (while at the same time actually being USEFUL.)
The Cube is just another option, and obviously not one that caught on, but remember the Newton? It failed miserably, and now we all use palmtops.
I just think it's interesting that people are down on the Cube, when Apple was trying to give people an option other than the standard pizzabox, tower, or laptop decision. It didn't work this time, but I applaud any computer manufacturer that at least attempts to improve the status quo in hardware design.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
For those of us who don't have all kinds of space, the Cube was an excellent idea. From what I've heard, Apple was expecting to sell a whole lot of Cubes in Japan, for example.
The fact that Apple mispriced the Cube, making the G4 tower a much more cost-effective bet, and that they mistimed it by releasing it before OS X was available, doesn't take away from the fact that they had the right idea in a small form-factor CPU that actually looked nice.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Because he was lying. The simplicity of this argument is only reflective of the way in which Apple has fused itself around the core of Steve Jobs - even when Steve wasn't necessarily at the centre. It's the Apple Myth. Just because Steve said it's so doesn't mean it's gospel. Alot of people who were there say different - it just took them months to convince Steve, so he decided it was all his idea.
toeslikefingers.com - because
God, here we go again. Bill Atkinson and Jef Raskin deserve alot of credit. In fact, I seem to recall Bill had been doing research on GUIs at university. The best book I've read on it was Infinite Loop, which says that they were already set on a GUI, and took Steve over to PARC to convince him, too. He wasn't the guy who 'stole' it, nobody was. It's all Official Apple History, not actual history.
toeslikefingers.com - because
Sun ELCs had the computer at the back of the monitor. The main board just slid out of the top for replacement/repair/upgrade.
Cable-wise you had the power cord, the network cable and a wire between the keyboard and the computer. The mouse plugged in to the keyboard.
It was a nice, tidy arrangement. I still have a couple in my basement.
well, they did sell more cubes than NeXT ever sold of both cubes and NeXTstations.
still I have to say that the NeXT cube looks a lot better IMO.
/Erik
Erik Dalén
Maybe so, but then so is Murphy's Law.
To me it seems "better and expensive" is what actually drives most progress.
True, but there needs to be at least a segment of the market that actually needs (or at least wants) the better and expensive product. For example, if you were to invent an improved floppy disk drive, at this point you would not be likely to sell many... especially if it is expensive. Current floppy disk drives are adequate for the purposes for which people need them.
Another example: gourmet hamburger restaurants seem to have a hard time. I really enjoy eating at Fuddruckers and I don't mind paying extra for the quality... but McDonalds is cheaper and considered adequate by most people, and Fuddruckers has trouble competing.
[The Cube] was at a really strange place in the product line.
Yah. Folks who needed the absolute top performance (including the best expansion capabilities) would buy G4 tower Macs, not the Cube; folks looking for a decent computer that doesn't cost too much would buy an iMac, not the Cube.
another major one is that it takes up very little space at 8" cubed.
IMHO, it is a stretch to call that a "major" one. How many people will pay a premium price for a computer because it has an 8" by 8" footprint? (Answer: not enough.)
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Other Macs, with far better price/performance, outsold the Cube. The Cube has exactly two things going for it:
it looks cool
it is silent
Well, other Macs look cool enough, and are quiet enough, and cost less for what they do.
And, by the way, while you can make money by selling a product that is expensive but really cool -- consider Rolex watches, or Bentley cars -- a few visible cracks in clear plastic just may be enough to disappoint the folks who are motivated to buy such products.
The Cube is the only Mac that remotely tempts me. A truly silent box would be a nice thing. If I ever decide to buy a Mac, I'll probably get a used Cube, perhaps on eBay. Apple may not make any more new ones, but there will still be a few around.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Well, the shape is not that new. My computer, for instance, also has got 6 sides and 12 edges. (Ok, it's not a perfect cube...) I think this shape was invented -- let me guess... some few thousands years ago? Oh, wait. That's not correct. The Egyptians only had pyramids. But The Romans definitely had cubes.
[--- PGP key and more on http://www.root42.de ---]
Of course, without Jobs, it would have taken much longer to get GUI to the masses if it ever made it. Linux could really use a Steve Jobs to bring Linux to the masses. God Bless Linus, but he just is not the kind of person that Linux needs at this point in it's lifecycle.
THIS SPACE FOR RENT
The Register had a story on this a day or so ago. Seems a real shame, and a shame also that Motorolla can't get the G4 to scale like they thought they could.
Did you miss the "...when new things come from apple..." part?
FWIW I had an optical mouse on a Sun 3/50 in the mid eighties and one on my Mac IIci in the early nineties.
Insanity is the last line of defence for the master diplomat. But you have to lay the groundwork early.
I keep reading this headline as:
"Apple Dumps Core"
Probably need sleep...
Some people have a way with words, and some people, um, thingy.
IBM? Weren't they the ones who created OS/2? You know, the best desktop OS between CP/M and (possibly) OS X? They certainly made huge waves with THAT now, didn't they?
:-)
IBM could not, can not, and will not ever understand the desktop market. They just don't get that part of the market. (they're not much better in most other area either, but that's another story) If I were Linus, I'd be saying to IBM "Thanks, but we don't want your support--we want to survive!"
Can OS X be the next revolution? Maybe. It should be--it has the potential at least. Personally I'm hoping for it as hard as I can.
Incidentally , you're wrong on one important point: Given the current state of computers, innovation _is_ a pretty box, and a pretty box with no fan and interesting ideas about space is doubly innovative. In the case of the cube, it just wasn't innovative enough to compensate for its flaws.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
The Atari 400/800 could in fact display 16 colours simultaneously from a palate of 256. However, through the magic of VSI programming, you could change the 16 colours that were set to be displayed partway through the TV scan, and effectively have 256 onscreen at once.
Trust me--I've still got printouts of the code I wrote to do it.
Also, someone else pointed out that the C-64 only had 8-bit/4-channel sound. The Atari had this as well, but allowed one to gang together two channels into a single 16-bit channel. (hence, two 16-bit channels from 4 8-bit ones) I vaguely remembered that the C-64 could do the same, but I could easily be mistaken.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Damn damn damn! Somebody moderate this up--it's the funniest thing I've heard all day!
Mind you, it's been a slow day...
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
I didn't say "became," I said "began." It was the beginning--the bleeding edge that MS (and IBM) stole from. Regardless of who won, it was the Mac first.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
I don't know how many here actually remember the original release of the Mac, but there are some substantial similarities between that product and this one. Why did the Mac survive while the cube didn't? Therein lies the key...
Those were the days of the Atari 800, the C-64, and even Apple's own ][+ (e, xe, c, whatever). The Atari and C64 had the ability to do 256 colours at about 320x200 (with some seriously clever programming) and had 16-bit sound! Then came the Mac. Lunky, clunky, tiny B+W built-in monitor, bad sound, and this goofy interface. (Remember this was the first home compute with a mouse, and the original mac mouse was _ugly_ to use even after you got used to it)
But it worked! It caught on. It singlehandedly began the next wave of computing, despite its severe limitations. Why?
1) Apple had the money to support it for more than eight months or so.
2) It was absolutely unique! There was nothing like it out there, and what it was offering was a whole new experience.
3) They could _deliver_ the damned things when the orders started rolling in.
4) There was no real concept of a standard platform. You bought your computer, and bought the software for that platform. When the largest company only had 15-20% of the market, there was less feeling of picking the 'right' or 'wrong' platform--just the one you wanted.
Now we have (or rather, had) the cube. Although it was intriguingly sexy, it lost out on all of the above points. Apple cannot afford to keep flogging the things until they start selling. Furthermore, they can't get production up to match demand anyways. The fact that they're perceived as being a (nearly) dead company vs. Microsoft is a huge handicap as well.
But the killer is this: The cube isn't unique enough. It's beautiful, it's advanced (fanless case? It's already becoming the Next Thing--except to see fanless desktop processors from Intel and AMD again in about 18 months), but underneath the skin it's still Another Mac--just like the G3/G4 Macs which are still available, better machines, and cheaper to boot.
Apple has been a computer _design_ company from day 1. This design just wasn't revolutionary to overcome its flaws.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Coo.. can we have removable storage shaped like the Cobra III from Elite too?
404 Not Found: No such file or resource as '.sig'
This works even better with flat screens, which aren't so bulky.
I'm thinking of a flat panel attached to a thick base.
Unfortunately the cars of now a days are significantly differnet under the hood. And hey if spending a lil cash on shaping the plastic and sheet metal sells the things who cares?
Its not like Linus can do anything about IBM's support of linux even if he wanted to.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
Inovation is not a pretty box, and that is part of why Microsoft is wiping the market with Apple. Superiority in OS design aside, Job needs to stop pimping his elitist case designs and focus on making better computers. Better means ease of use and power, and the promise that Mac OS X shows could be the key to finally dethroning Microsoft. If Apple doesn't do it, look for IBM to make some serious waves with their support of Linux...
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10)'
Thing that always amazes me about Apple is that they have such well thought out hardware designs, yet they can never seem to turn that into commerical success. Their OSes have also been well made compared to the other mass market system out there.
Actually, as a Mac user at home (and now only at home, now that I lost my Powerbook after a breaking and entering robbery) and general interface snob, I must admit that the scroll wheel is an absolutely fantastic addition to the mouse. I also must agree with the earlier post that the much maligned single mouse button is typically good enough for most tasks performed by casual users. Maybe Apple should offer a mouse (made out of Lucite or bright translucent plastic so it looks like a half-eaten Jolly Rancher candy, naturaly) with just a wheel that clicks as the single mouse button. I only use the wheel-click in one application on the PC, 3D Studio MAX. Other times, it gets in the way.
That computer was just a decoration in your living room, nothing more. I don't see the use of having a very small cute computer if it's not even portable.
Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.
I look at MOSR like this (as I'm sure its keepers do as well) -- unfiltered possibilities. Even they admit not everything they say is true, and I'm sure they'd be the first to tell you that not everything they say is to be taken as gospel.
So I still read it -- I just don't count on seeing everything they talk about appearing at my local MicroCenter.
/Brian
The cube was essentially a G4 iMac with no monitor. Apple, in their infinite wisdom, failed to market it as such, and took a bath on it because of it. If they'd marketed it as the system they'd developed, we wouldn't be having this situation right now.
/Brian
Maybe I can actually AFFORD one now!
The g3, g4 cases, titanium powerbook, macOS X, ibook, optical mice
I don't remember. Did the optical mouse first debut as an Apple product?
In the pc world, you have 50 companies all releasing new models every few month, and hardly changing anything.
Well, that's what I like about the P.C. market. You don't have any one organization with a stranglehold on the entire market. Consumer demand drives sales, and what the P.C. consumer market wants is the same old simple beige box with more power. Personally, I'm not any more impressed with a computer because it has translucent plastic casing than one that doesn't. That, and I don't have any O.S. telling me what memory I can and can't use in my P.C.
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
>and the mass market appeal of an easy to use PC made PCs cheaper for all of us
I believe I paid less (ok my parents paid less) for my C64 in 1984 (which was GUI free, and came out well before PCs were popular) than I have paid for the "low end" PIII I'm writing this on now. Yes, that is adjusted for inflation...
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
No, it shouldn't, because the rate of computing power increase has stayed the same before and after the C64 was invented (Moore's Law). If we were to somehow deviate from that, then yes, I would factor computing power into my answer.
But that's my point of view, you are free to differ. Both are valid, depending on how you look at things...
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
I'm sure they're moving on to more interesting shapes. A dodecahedral computer, that'd be neat. Or a sphere, floating in the air... Of course, if you lost power, crashing would take on a whole new meaning... I guess it's true every technological benefit introduces new problems!
--------
Never call a man a fool. Borrow from him.
people who seriously factor the appearance of a computer into their buying choices are idiots ... It's like buying a furnace or water-heater for its looks.
You don't have a girlfriend, do you?
If he does i bet shes not shallow, vapid and stupid, all characteristics of people with consumer-centered (read:fucking pathetic and offensive) priorities...
... a normal person likes attractive objects, be those clothes, vehicles, residences, members of the appropriate sex, or, yes, even computers.
Hmmm
The original fellow seems just clueless, and when he starts dating he'll figure out in short order that in normal society it is expected that one pays at least moderate attention to the aesthetics of one's existence -- but you, now, display an altogether different level of fear and loathing. My diagnosis is advanced sociopathy manifesting itself as an alleged rejection of mainstream values in an effort to disguise your inability to relate to polite society -- what does your therapist say?
I don't remember. Did the optical mouse first debut as an Apple product?
No, not even if you don't count those SGI optical mice.
Josh Sisk
Sounds like that luser is a tool, if you know what I mean.
In NT/2K, you don't have to give lusers the equivalent of root access, which would be to put them in the Admin group. The Power User group is almost as dangerous. Chuck the luser into plain generic "Users" and lock that group down tight. Jane Luser wouldn't have been able to delete NTLDR and others.
Agreed, xNIXen are more secure from the word go. But if you take the effort you can lock down an NT/2K box, at least from stupid luser tricks like that.
Ms. Geek
----
http://www.msgeek.org/html/
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Hahah, no really, the other day my grandma was sitting at my OS9 Mac and she tore me a new one because she couldn't run bash on it.
Hilarious.
--
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Sometimes in business image is everything. Why do most companies give their secretaries flat screen monitors? A regular monitor is cheaper and can do the same things that a flat screen monitor can, but the appearance is what they are looking for, it is impressive. Apple's product has some flaws, but the hardware inside was not too shabby. They just did a piss poor job marketing it. They also should have found a way to lower the price. But to say that selling something based on its look is wrong, take the VW Beetle for example.
Try Mercedes for the price of a Mercedes. Elegant, well-engineered, and a pleasure to use. Of course, if you grew up thinking a Ford Fiesta was just fine, you sort of miss the point of having an elegant machine.
When the day is done, what really makes a computer good is what it does when it is turned on, not how the case looks.
S'funny. I thought that when the day is done, what really makes a computer good is what you can do with it when its turned on, not what it does. I'm incredibly more productive with my Mac than any of my PC's. Sure I paid a higher price, but it helps me get where I need to go and makes it a pleasure to get there. Of course, YMMV.
Be ot or bot ne ot, taht is the nestquoi.
"Don't you know you're going to shock the monkey?"- Peter Gabriel
The problem with the Cube is fragementation. Not hard drive fragmentation, but market. Look, you have two big, stable markets: Power Mac G4, and iMac. Two computers -- one benefits pros, one benefits consumers.
The Cube is for "power consumers" who "Aren't quite pros." Okay, awesome -- but you've just divided your two stable markets and mixed them together. Messy sales.
Instead, you'll make more money offering new "power iMacs" under the same brand name. There's no reason for an extra brand. The entire resurgence of the company was based on diminishing all the product models.
But yes, the Cube was a VERY cool machine.
The next comment I write will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
No, Mercedes for the price of a Mercedes would be a SGI workstation. They had innovative style way before the Mac tried to patent it, and under the hood can blow the doors off of about anything you put up against it.
Damn, are you ever out of date with that opinion!
My 4-button scroll-wheel optical USB mouse (made by Microsoft, by the way) costs exactly the same as the PC version of the same mouse. Apple uses AGP graphics cards, PCI for other internal cards, USB and Firewire for external expansion; all industry-standard stuff, really.
They also have the cheapest 802.11b solution of anybody in the industry ($99 for the card, $299 for the hub).
Your information is from the previous Century.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
What happened?... what do you mean, "what happened?" Don't you know anything? The Cubes were highly vulnerable. The cracks, ok, that was one problem, but the real problem was that they weren't ready for the Enterprise. In use, the Cubes proved to be vulnerable to both Enterprise and Voyager class starships. Finally, I guess they decided that change was necessary.
The latest rumor is that the cube will replace the iMac, possibly at MacWorld later this month. Apple is now an all-LCD company now, but the iMac remains a CRT.
I use Macs to up my productivity, so up yours Microsoft!
Never attribute to intention what can sufficiently be explained by stupidity. They were unreliable and defect-prone exactly because they were poorly engineered and pushed out the door without sufficient quality control. Equipment unreliabily is quite simple to acheive without going to the trouble of being unorthodox, and it's quite possible to be unorthodox while remaining careful about your engineering. The two NeXT cubes running in my basement, while based on different principles, testify that this unorthodox design can be implemented well.
Quite frankly, people who seriously factor the appearance of a computer into their buying choices are idiots.
I myself thought this until the day I borrowed a friend's VAIO and went to a cafe, and a woman sat next to me and said "that's a really sexy machine."
Dell doesn't get you laid :)
But think: with the Cube being discontinued, wait 6 months and head to eBay where you'll be able to pick them up for dirt cheap.
---
MacTacToe - for every problem, an elegant solution
You don't have a girlfriend, do you?
... It's like buying a furnace or water-heater for its looks.
If he does i bet shes not shallow, vapid and stupid, all characteristics of people with consumer-centered (read:fucking pathetic and offensive) priorities... the ones who are destorying the environment based on branding and appearance and not utility. The people who seriously factor the appearance of a computer into their buying choices
The problem was they tried to sell too many.
History recap. Apple, after Jobs came back, decided that there were 4 markets they could go after. There was the basic computer (iMac), the Advanced for professionals (G4 tower), the Laptop (the iMac laptop and g4 titanium), and the executive. For businesses, the cube was a brilliant idea. They had something for the clerks (iMac), something for the techies (G4 tower), and the cube was their attempt to go after the executives that otherwise wouldn't touch an Apple. This could've been a real coup. Sell them to the execs. The boss really likes it (esp. if you pair it up with a flat-display), hates the incompatibilities with PCs and so moves the company to Macs. Brilliant. I know of several execs that did that.
The problem was that it was never supposed to be for the masses. Yes, it's cool looking. Yes it's silent. Yes I want one. But it's not expandable (which is a much smaller deal than everyone makes it out to be.... your average computer buyer will never upgrade anything aside from RAM), and it was widely panned. If they had marketed it at executives exclusively (ala the 20th Anniversay Mac), they could've done gangbusters, and possibly raised their market share. Alas...
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
Well, they still are tiny, tiny molding lines, completely harmless, and you have to be a pure purist to be offended by them, or ...
you must be making money on Intel hardware.
Why me? I have a NeXT - discontinued, I have an iMate - discontinued, I have a Cube - ...discontinued.
Because: I still use the NeXT frequently (SolidThinking), my son is inseparable from his iMate, and my wife loves the Cube because she can't hear it's there.
Compared to now, the living room sounded like a machine room. We used to feel like we were going deaf when those older machines were shut down. That sudden silence.
--------
* Sigh *
Mine only seems to have a hole big enough for unleavened communion wafers. That's okay, though, because the wafers get stuck in the bottom of my other toaster.
And this is different from Wintel hardware in what way? Every PC laptop suffers from the same problem.
No one is disputing that there is more software for the PC. We are disputing: there is hardly any out for the Mac
The place to go mac 'news' and unsubstatiated rumours, is the hilarious As the Apple Turns, where they treat the news with the respect it deserves - as an entertaining soap opera. It makes me laugh out loud every day. Read all about The Great Steve's Reality Distortion Field, the ongoing saga of Redmond Justice and the longer-running saga of their DSL line.
Ironically, they seem to be getting the best tip-off's too.
The only people who say that looks don't matter are ugly people who are lying to themselves, and beautiful people who are lying to you. Its a fact of life. What's wrong with liking beautiful things. Call me shallow, but all things being equal, I would prefer to be surrounded by attractive looking objects, people etc. Notice I said all things being equal. If I have to look at my furnace siiting in the corner of my room, I'd sure prefer to buy the one that's silent, a third the size of most other furnaces and looks like a piece of art, rather than a noisy, ugly lump.
Will Apple stop being innovative in terms of case design?
Cool case design does not seem to have helped these guys much, either.
What does it say about the computer consumer? One could argue that consumers are not fooled by sleek design when the utilitarian beige box is available. Or that computer buyers have no sense for visual design.
"Never bullshit a bullshitter" All That Jazz
2001-07-04 04:04:15 Mac Cube shelved (articles,apple) (rejected)
Gets re-jected
Another article here
"Never bullshit a bullshitter" All That Jazz
An enormous bolder could roll down and smash their Cupertino offices, destroying all their code, forcing them into bankruptcy and I would get 50 e-mails saying it was "good news for Mac users."
OSX was delayed so many times, it was almost renamed WindowsXP. But every delay was "good news for Mac users."
What's next? iMacs begin exploding on startup- but it's good news for Mac users.
It isn't because PCs aren't liked or are "ugly". It is because at >95% of the market, it is saturated. The expansion curve for computer users is no longer in the exponential growth phase, it is flattening out.
For Apple, with a pittance in sales (relative), AND being the ONLY source for Apple computers, they are supply-limited and ANY sale is an exponential increase for them.
Apples and oranges, so to speak, to compare sales of the two. Even with PC sales slowing down, their overall sales are MUCH higher than Apple's. If 100% of your sales arena is made up of 2, and for me it is 100, the sale of 1 for you is a HUGE percentage increase but for me is merely a tenth of one percent increase, yet I still own the larger market.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
But I have never seen a single user who did NOT use the scroll wheel (if his/her mouse had one). This is absolutely necessary for any mouse today.
--
michael at slashdot.org: The real answer is that a couple of the slashdot authors are sick.
More seriously, though, at least this means they'll be able to make the next iMac more kickass w/ less worries of cannibalizing sales of other models.
The Cube comes in a 450/500MHz version, which is comparable to the G4 Tower... Before the current crop of 466/533/733MHz models were released. The newer models feature 133MHz RAM/bus, gigbit Ethernet, 4x AGP and other slightly enhanced items.
With the pricing the way it was, it made a lot more sense to get a G4 Tower in the latest flavor, and in the end, have room to add in features. I'm planning on using the Mac for video editing, and the prospect of adding drives in a RAID or a video processing card (like the RTMac from Matrox) was all too likely.
The price/performance/expandability of the Cube just couldn't compare to the G4 Tower, and in the end - like others have said, it came down to "style" vs. having a real tool. I still want a Cube. I'd buy one if the price came down a few hundred dollars. I'm sure I can find a use for it even if it's not my primary system.
So, I ended up getting a G4 Tower w/466MHz G4, 256MB RAM, 30GB drive - with the 133MHz bus/RAM, gigabit Ethernet for $1500. A Cube at 450MHz, 64MB RAM, 20GB drive - with a 100MHz bus/RAM and "only" 10/100 Ethernet and a slower AGP slot was $1000-1200. Both have the same ATI Rage Pro AGP video card. For $300 more, the Tower makes a LOT more sense.
Cause my new Toaster seems to crash an awful lot
When I first read that, I parsed it as:
"Apple dumps core".
Man... I gotta go get some more coffee
Right: I'd much rather have a seriously ugly, very noisy, way too large generic box. That's why Apple's sales are going up and PC makers' sales are going down.
Name a PC manufacturer who isn't laying off people?
A cube is the most Nazi of all shapes - an utter surrender of beauty to uniformity.
Honestly, who among you would choose to drop 1500 on a cube instead of a tower?
- Dan I.
I was never sure if you should use the cube as a computer or as a foot warmer.
I also heard that the thing got hotter than fuck
Actually, the convection cooling works remarkably well. I can use my cube for hours, pull out the core, stick my hand inside, and it's only warm to the touch. If you block the bottom opening or top vent, though, then I can see how it would get a little toasty.
This
Hmm... True that the iMac was fanless before, but I still think the implementation in the Cube is pretty novel. As for the "mess", it sounds like a lot of tangled stuff, but in reality it's pretty darn tidy. It's a heck of a lot cleaner than my PC used to be.
Actually, I don't blame you for not wanting a Cube. There's a lot of things it sucks at. It's just irritating to see so many people bashing the Cube needlessly. It was designed as a niche product from the start. That niche (which I fit into) happened to be a lot smaller than Steve anticipated. That doesn't make it a bad product, just a poor business decision.
This
As the proud owner of a G4 Cube, I think your analysis has some flaws. Let's address them:
The cube idea is not new. (nextcube, cobalt servers, etc.)
No, it's not new. However, Apple's is the prettiest, most elegant implementation of the idea that I've ever seen. Dammit, it's just plain cool.
The ONLY innovation on the machine, the ultra-cool touch power button, but unfortunately is susceptible to RF glitching. that sucks!
Innovation? What about the fact that it's totally fanless? What about the fact that it's darn tiny? What about the ceramic wireless antennas that are an integral part of the case? What about the ease of access to the internals? With a single handle, you can pull out the whole core of the machine so that everything's accessible. No screws, no latches, just a handle that you push down (to unlock it) and then pull. Can your computer do that? Oh, and I have no idea what "RF glitching" you're talking about. I've never had any problems.
The main appeal of the machine, it's 'look', was marred by poor manufacturing quality (many of the cubes had visible, highly refractive seams)
Ah, the infamous cracks. My Cube happens to have all of them. You know what? You can't see them. Even when I'm sitting right next to it and staring at it I can't see them. The light has to catch them just right while you're looking really closely. Berating such a minor cosmetic flaw seems like nitpicking in my book. It's still the most beautiful computer I've ever seen.
To have a complete system, you had to have a huge mass of cabling going into a very small opening at the bottom and then steeply angling into the machines ports... just bad design.
Simply not true. I've only got two cables going into my cube. Power with a really slick angled connector, and monitor with a nifty hinged connector for that steep angle. Everything else is internal or daisy-chained off of my monitor. It's definitely a complete system, too. I've got a DVD drive (internal), flat panel monitor (connected to the cube), ethernet (via internal AirPort), speakers (off of the monitor), keyboard (off of the monitor), mouse (MS Intellimouse Explorer off of the keyboard), and a CD-RW (off of the keyboard). If I want to add a printer/webcam/whatever, I just attach a USB hub to the monitor. There's still only two cords going into the cube. Heck, there's not even a power cable for the monitor. The display gets the DVI signal, USB, and power via that single cord.
As for your "improvements", they'd ruin the machine. Adding the power supply and fan would make it larger and noisy. As for the speakers, they rock. Small footprint with great sound. Personally, I think the Cube failed due to overinflated expectations for it. Everybody wanted a superbox and missed the point.
As I write this, I'm sitting at a small uncluttered desk looking at an incredibly vivid LCD screen. The tiny Cube sits off by my right hand, glowing gently. The only sound I hear is the click of the keys and the sound of my own breathing. It's the most serene and transparent computing experience I've ever had. That's why I love my Cube.
This
Perhaps it's time to switch metaphors.
Apple is trying to be Bose. Design for the sake of design, even when it leads to sometimes questionable functionality (think Bose's idiosyncratic sound coloration). Pretends to be high-end, but really people buy it because they like the looks. Meanwhile the rest of the industry has moved on to boom boxes. Never mind the sound quality, they're cheap, you can stuff any kind of media you like into them, and it usually plays OK.
The difference is that, in the computer market, the boom box equivalents have nearly overtaken the high-end stereos, while still managing to retain their cheesy origins.
Get your teeth into a small slice: the cake of liberty
A year ago, the Cube was being hyped like crazy. What happened? If you looked at the article it mentioned hefty initial price, performance slower than other models, cracks in the plastic, and misaligned switches. But that can't be it.
'Same speed C but faster'
The cube had "microfractures" around where the screws went into the plastic, and they grew to be less-micro over time. I don't think apple ever admitted it, though a lot of people thought there should have been a recall. I've only seen a couple cubes, but the one that used to be on display at my local compusa did indeed have the cracks around the screw holes.
;-)
I also heard that the thing got hotter than fuck, which I know is an issue with some of apple's other machines too (*cough*titanium*cough*).
Oh well. They still make the coolest hardware. And I still want an iBook...
___
___
The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason. --Ben Franklin
Steve Jobs seems to be trying to prove that he has ADD. They never stick with anything long enough to make a scratch in the market, it seems. Highly unscientific opinion, but it appears that Apple can't stay focused. They've been around for 20-something years and still haven't decided who their market is....(home users, ubergeeks, non-geeks, IT depts, and around again).
I was waiting for OSX to get better, then I was going to convert my intel boxes to cubes. Then maybe my wife would stop complaining about the noise from the closet.
cute little machine...
Maybe Apple realized that they are supposed to be a computer company, not an art company. They have been focusing on the design of the box rather than what is inside, and unfortunately, people loved it with the iMac.
Whenever I see a pre-built computer these days, they always have cases with extra useless decoration and crap on the inside.
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
Then you have robert cringley interviewing Steve Jobs himself - where he revealed that the GUI he saw at Xerox Parc during a tour of the facility was and I quote "the most fantastics thing I had ever seen" - so if they were going to go GUI the whole time why was it so fantastic?
Heh - the first GUI I ever used was on the Atari ST (and it wasn't even my machine). I think the second GUI I used was on an Apple II GS. I don't recall it blowing me away at the time - because there were graphics and mouse's for computers like the Commodore 64 - plus I was just a kid then.
Well he may have been talking about the Xerox Star - which had a GUI and was a computer you could purchase before the mac came out. Mind you it cost like 15,000+ dollars.
When the Commodore 64 came out the Apple II cost $1530. The commodore 64 cost 595$. This was in 1982. I think Commodore did more to make computing affordable and acessable to more people then Apple or IBM.
Its got to be one of the most hairbrained designed machines ever built. Out of the box it has 8 megs of system ram (I don't even think when it came out it was capable of running anything in addition to System 7.x) and 640k of video ram. 640k of video ram? What were they thinking? Even my Amiga 1200 - which cost like 450$ (in 93) came with 2 megs of video ram.
I think thats what the original poster is getting at. Sure they look great, but they have rotten specs - usually requiring the user to upgrade everything (and they do - I used to do mac sales...).
150$ part...
Can the Mac play half-life and run counter-strike? I use both mouse buttons while playing games - what about that?
I like macs too, but they are lousy for games. Similiar prephials on macs cost twice as much as they do on the PC, repairing them is an absolute bitch. Few years back when I serviced macs it was not too uncommon to wait over a year (that meant the user had no computer for over a year) for simple parts like volume buttons, disk drives (superdrives), and other things like that.
The company I worked for was Koalas computers - when I left the company the system was still there waiting for parts - that was like a year and two months waiting and I'm not BS'ing you in the slightest.
It wasn't too uncommon to wait months for specific powerbook parts either.
However like everyone and their sister has pointed out that was a while back (couple of years) and that apple uses standard this and that, and that they have fixed their service problems.
I don't hate macs - I've got one at home I use all the time - a Powermac 6100/60 with a 210 MHz G3 turbo board inside with a 21" monitor and 72 megs of ram. Yes it has broke down a lot, but I've been able to repair it every time (so far).
So much for my keyboard :)
Apple has always been an innovative system builder with a strong emphasis on design, playing at being Ferrari while the rest of the industry was happy playing at being Ford - the Mac Classic, the 20th Anniversary Mac, the iMac, even today's standard G4's all have design features that have critics and users alike begging for more.
Unfortunately, the Cube also had its share of faults. Its fanless silence, case design and touch sensitive on-off switch were all great but were all problematic - the units overheated often, cases became cracked and the switches sometimes failed. Apple buried its head in the sand over these for a while, but it was inevitable that the writing was on the wall for the Cube, not least of all because of all the negative press that these failures generated.
Will Apple stop being innovative in terms of case design? Not likely while Steve Jobs is still at the helm, and a good thing too. Without the influence of Jobs and Apple we'd probably all be stuck with a CLI. That's not to say that CLIs are a bad thing but Apple bought the GUI to the mass market, and the mass market appeal of an easy to use PC made PCs cheaper for all of us.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Heh, I'm betting these will be among the most valuable of vintage computers in a few decades or so. (I'd still prefer an original Macintosh though.)
The coolest voice ever.
Oh yeah, and all the Cubes came with 15" flat-panel displays. I'm glad to see my dollars paying for such absolutely essential technology. I mean, how did I ever do word processing on a cathode-ray monitor? -grimace-
The coolest voice ever.
The cube was and is a fantastic machine. It wasn't extreme high-end, but it was powerful enough. The greatest thing, of course, was the lack of fans. A beefier graphic card would've ruined that. Look at the GeForce 3's fan and heatsink. Ohmygod! :-)
The cube, though, was just not at the right price point. It probably should've been priced between the iMac and the G4 towers.
where's your water heater? right there on the desk, eh? next to the furnace? and you have to listen to them run all day, do ya? that's gotta suck.
when you went to buy a television, did you get the phat looking sony WEGA or dig around for a wooden-cabineted victrola-esque unit?
consumer electronics REQUIRES aesthetics and usability. I, for one, would like to hear at LEAST ONE less fan running on/near my desk. the downfall of the cube is that it had zero expandability - so that even people who very much enjoy Macs (like me) wouldn't buy one because i can't slap in another vid card and run dual head, etc.
different is better if it's innovative. try pulling the fans out of your PC and see how long before your PIII melts the solder off your Slot1.
my wish is that they would've made a 9" cube with room for at least one card and another HD. best of both worlds.
www.pixelectric.com
I don't know about prices in US. But here in Brazil, G4/TheCube price was prohibited. A wonderfull machine, with a amazing price.
Taiwan importings made PC prices fall down since 1992, and then apple became here no more than a expensive-but-graphically-good computer-house, just like other computer-houses, we call them here griff-machines.
Since i-Mac and brand-new-Dell-factory in south-brazil, the so called grif-machines became accessible to home consumer. But G4/TheCube was too expensive, as I said before prohibited.
I'm sorry about discontinuation, PC are getting more and more beautiful due to Apple's new design. Hope new inovatives designs shows up soon.
-=-=-=-=
I know life isn't fair, but why can't it ever be un-fair in MY favor!?
Apple failed to set up themselves the latest trends. They not know to shape 'cube' like 'zig'.
Why bother.
I myself thought this until the day I borrowed a friend's VAIO and went to a cafe, and a woman sat next to me and said "that's a really sexy machine."
Oh, come on, I obviously wasn't talking about portables. Towers go under the desk, nobody sees them. I rarely even have a cover on mine. A portable goes out in public; it's like a watch or a car. At least a little attention to appearance is called for.
As for the engineering, it would have been vastly more expensive if they had worked out the bugs first. Unlike the NeXT box, they weren't starting from a clean sheet, with the freedom to choose the most reasonable design, they were told to cram a tower into a cute little fanless cube, consequences be damned. The chips were too hot, the hard drive was too hot, and they couldn't afford to design new ones. The NeXT box's unorthodoxy resulted from freedom to create a superior machine (at a higher price), not a command from on high to be superficially weird and different for marketing purposes while using standard components to duplicate standard functionality.
--
Being non-standard for the sake of being different is not good design. These things had a poor cost-performance ratio and upgrade capacity exactly because they were made to be cute. They were unreliable and defect prone exactly because they were unorthodox.
Quite frankly, people who seriously factor the appearance of a computer into their buying choices are idiots. It's like buying a furnace or water-heater for its looks. While idiots might seem like an ideal target market, you have to beat the competition to get to them, and Apple's marketing isn't aggressive enough.
--
Yeah...looks should never be considered when buying a product... Pretty soon they might actually sell cars based on looks..or clothing...or movies...or...hey wait a minute... Good design is something that works well AND looks good... At least Apple didn't forget that.. They may be a little lean on the function side at times...but you can't just take one and ignore the other... Gotta give them credit for being able to take the punches for bad designs... at least they're out there trying different (pardon the cliche) things.
--
A year. Please. Where do you live, Mars?
And are you really claiming that people went without their computers for a year because of a broken volume button? I suppose these same people also stopped driving thier cars when the cigarette lighter stopped working.
That's pretty funny. I think I'll make that my sig for a little while.
Simply put, Apple chose form over function, which is a bad move. The cube was pretty ugly anyway. Who wants a small plexiglass thing to run a Mac anyway?
But just as Apple's Newton PDA was ahead of it's time, the cube was too. And when the time is right the cube will somehow reinvent itself and reappear, if not from Apple then from someone else, just like how the Newton was reinvented as Palm.
"The company said there is a small chance it will reintroduce an upgraded model of the unique computer in the future, but that there are no plans to do so at this time."
"I think you're off by a significant amount on the price difference. Make sure you're comparing machines with equivalent features. "
No , I think he is right on the target.
Apples are terribly overpriced , especially when one compares technical side of their products.
You might have a point as far as external design is concerned but internally Apples are , well, overpriced junk ( at least when compared to newer Athlon based systems)
...and you can't blame meteors for everything.
The Cube sales were an abboration based on novelty factor - "gee, let's buy that cool looking computer, it looks even cooler that the iMac". In typical marketing fashion, Apple then thought that fashion was of more importance that function - dream on!
At the end of the day, the sustainability of sales is based on product quality and value, not looks. If Apple can't work this one out they deserve to go under - after all, a Porsche with a 250cc 2 cylinder engine would not exactly generate great sales would it?
Go permanent? In your dreams and my worst nightmares.
Apple didn't copy a GUI, Xerox PARC had an influence on the Lisa UI and later MacOS but nothing is developed in a vacuum. the GUI Apple developed is quite different from what i have seen of Xerox's
they said it was a 450mhz? Sadly, perhaps more of the population than we think are obsessed with having the highest *number of mhz* rather than a computer that performs in real-life tasks (compiling a kernel?).
I guess it's those same people who have the dual PIII-500's and brag about their 1ghz system...
Ever hear of a docking station or port replicator? At work I plug my thinkpad into a portreplicator, and use it with my 21" monitor and standard keyboard, and intellimouse explorer. Works real nice, and takes up very little space.... I need all the space I can get... I have 4 towers on the floor next to me :)
i really want one of these. unfortunately, there is no good reason to buy one - i have a powerbook (as silent as the cube but with one advantage: i can take it to the cafe) and a win PC for development. i do remain confident that apple will bring it back in some form or another, though.
I had a Cube for several days. I took it back. Why? The system may be fanless quiet but the hard drive wasn't and the sound of the drive meant I couldn't keep the unit on my desktop. With the new quieter drives Apple is using this year that wouldn't have been a problem.
But because of the length of the USB speaker cable, I couldn't have the unit on the floor and still have the speakers on my desktop. Besides it really is supposed to sit on the desktop.
I would have kept it (most Mac users don't put expansion cards or 2nd drives in their Mac anyway) if only the drive was quiet enough to sit on the desktop. A beautiful machine but some practical aspects just didn't quite mesh.
Sigh. MacOsRumors has been around forever (or some form) and people who come into the mac community think everyone follows what they say as though they have truly insider information.
.
.
.
Yes if you just buy a mac or casually come across those sites it is kind of exciting to think "oooh, the inside scoop" but there is more going on than that..
On the mac side, we have one company churning out new products, and generally (generally) they are very, very cool products. We don't have 3000 clone manufacturers making new computers with always something new going on... we have just apple, so we focus and analyze what is coming down the pike..
Not only that, generally (and especially recently) when new things come from apple, they are f***ing cool. The g3, g4 cases, titanium powerbook, macOS X, ibook, optical mice, iMac, insanely cool jellyfish subwoofer...
In the pc world, you have 50 companies all releasing new models every few month, and hardly changing anything. If ONLY IBM made personal computers, you can bet the PC world would be hanging on a thread, wanting to know what was coming down the pike..
Most people who have been in the mac world long enough know that rumors (or the other mac rumor sites, or even the register.uk) are generally just making educated (and sometimes not so educated), but it is part of the fun... to guess, to wonder at what the hell apple is going to pull out of it's hat... to salivate. They're more a form of entertainment than anything else, and should be taken as such..
As an aside about the cube... the thing just rocked, and was an AMAZING piece of engineering (if you have ever taken one apart and realized how painstaking it must have been to get it all to work, especially with no fan and a G4) and was the first mac that the IT Linux guys where I worked actually started salivating over and saying "I need to get a new computer in a bit, I'm really looking at the cube."... if nothing else, the thing just generated a ton of excitement and pushed apple into people's heads as an industrial design innovator again..
Maybe it wasnt the soundest business decision, and maybe it wasnt marketed/positioned correctly... but damn, anyone involved with that project should feel proud as hell..
One last aside, here are a list of some decent mac news sites:.
.
http://www.macnn.com/
http://www.macsurfer.com/.
http://www.macslash.comSigh. MacOsRumors has been around forever (or some form) and people who come into the mac community think everyone follows what they say as though they have truly insider information.
Yes if you just buy a mac or casually come across those sites it is kind of exciting to think "oooh, the inside scoop" but there is more going on than that..
On the mac side, we have one company churning out new products, and generally (generally) they are very, very cool products. We don't have 3000 clone manufacturers making new computers with always something new going on... we have just apple, so we focus and analyze what is coming down the pike..
Not only that, generally (and especially recently) when new things come from apple, they are f***ing cool. The g3, g4 cases, titanium powerbook, macOS X, ibook, optical mice, iMac, insanely cool jellyfish subwoofer...
In the pc world, you have 50 companies all releasing new models every few month, and hardly changing anything. If ONLY IBM made personal computers, you can bet the PC world would be hanging on a thread, wanting to know what was coming down the pike..
Most people who have been in the mac world long enough know that rumors (or the other mac rumor sites, or even the register.uk) are generally just making educated (and sometimes not so educated), but it is part of the fun... to guess, to wonder at what the hell apple is going to pull out of it's hat... to salivate. They're more a form of entertainment than anything else, and should be taken as such..
As an aside about the cube... the thing just rocked, and was an AMAZING piece of engineering (if you have ever taken one apart and realized how painstaking it must have been to get it all to work, especially with no fan and a G4) and was the first mac that the IT Linux guys where I worked actually started salivating over and saying "I need to get a new computer in a bit, I'm really looking at the cube."... if nothing else, the thing just generated a ton of excitement and pushed apple into people's heads as an industrial design innovator again..
Maybe it wasnt the soundest business decision, and maybe it wasnt marketed/positioned correctly... but damn, anyone involved with that project should feel proud as hell..
One last aside, here are a list of some decent mac news sites:.
.
http://www.macnn.com/.
http://www.macsurfer.com/.
http://www.macslash.com/.
Rumor sites:.
http://www.macosrumors.com.
http://www.appleinsider.com.
http://www.thinksecret.com/
Man it sounds like you copied this out of a Apple sales brochure.
No, I've just had a lot of experience with macs and pc's in different markets.
Can the Mac play half-life and run counter-strike? I use both mouse buttons while playing games - what about that?
Did you even read my post? I said, "those games are on the pc". Valve was a small company (thats why they used such an outdated engine) and doesnt have the resources to bring half life to the mac... but come to think of it, i think their publisher did, although you can only network with other macs.
As for using two mice... duh. Come on. All mac's have USB. Buy a cheap 2-button mouse, and it works. I use the microsoft intellimouse explorer, but also have a logitech and macally.
PC's are where it's at for hardcore and niche gaming, that's what i said. But for the casual user, most of what they will want is there (diablo, quake, unreal, myst3, etc, etc).
Similiar prephials on macs cost twice as much as they do on the PC
Um, no they dont. Give me an example? Macs and PC's use the same memory now, both use PCI, same hard drive, cd burners all plug in via firewire or usb or ata or external scsi, scanners are all usb or firewire or scsi, digital cameras are all usb or firewire, mice are all usb.... what exactly are you talking about?
repairing them is an absolute bitch. Few years back when I serviced macs it was not too uncommon to wait over a year (that meant the user had no computer for over a year) for simple parts like volume buttons, disk drives (superdrives), and other things like that
You're either trolling or living in the cold war. A few years is like 20 in computer years. First of all, those were the performa years. Those computers sucked. Lemons. Apple should be raked over the coals for those. But almost all mac parts now are also pc parts (memory, hard drive, etc) and anything that isnt is on the motherboard, and if that goes under warranty you're taken care of.
Depending on who you ask, this is either a blessing (commodity parts allow pc makers to make mac versions cheaply and apple doesnt have to invent the wheel every time) or a curse, in that maybe apple could do them better.
What you're saying had merit: a couple of years ago.
Kudo's to you for at least backing up where you were coming from and explaining.
:) It goes both ways, apple has made some nasty things (some of the performas when apple tried to come down in price but keep some of their margins) but most are really well built machines (i have one friend still using her lc 475, and another is just now upgrading their performa 575).
As for your 6100... god man, that thing is pushing the envelope.
I actually have a 6100/66, I'm sorry you've had problems with yours... mine has been really stable, although now I primarily just use it as part of a render farm and an email backup in case my main system goes psycho.
You might want to consider getting a used beige g3 (i just got a 266mhz g3 with a 4gig hd, 96megs of ram and a 17" monitor for $400) and imacs are cheap... I think you'd be surrpised at the quality and how they are put together.
Look, I love macs (for a lot of reasons). I believe a computer is a tool, and you should use the best tool for the job, and reward the companies making the best tools by using their products..
I mean i really, really like apple... but some of their machines just suck (especially right before jobs came back in)... like the performa line. The 6400x-6500x's are just awful machines, I cant tell you how many problems I've had with them, or how awful it was to install ram in an 8100, 8500, etc.... but when they get it right... the g3's, ibooks, imacs (the first was awful to install ram in, but after that its cake) are just great computers.
But a computer is really a tool... and for the most part, for most users, i really think having a mac is the best way to go. Are there exceptions? Yep... but macs are a great tool for most jobs.
Hardcore gamers: If you just want to play the biggest games out there... no big deal. Quake, Starcraft, tomb raider, unreal, deus ex, etc are all there... and now that they have write combing on the macs the macs can actually outperform pc's. BUT alot of stuff just doesnt get ported, so the PC is the way to go. Is it a nicer experience installing, playing and maintaining your games on your Mac? Yes. But all the niche games are on the pc..
Corporate Use: For a small business, macs are great. The machines last forever, not much maintenance and the major accounting programs are there. Can have problems with with niche credit card software and other certain things, like if you want your mac to use some obscure bar code reading accounting package..
And corporate use... you can get by on a mac generally. Powerpoint, excel, all those are there... but it can be a hassle dealing with network issues, and speciality programs (like visio, etc)..
.
Graphic Design: You can get by on a PC doing this... but the mac just makes your life so much easier in so many ways, it's not worth going into. There is a reason most professionals use the mac for it..
.
Web Design:The mac just rocks. Golive, Dreamweaver, BBEdit, etc... Are there some times when a PC is easier? Yes, if you need to use things like interdev for checking in code, etc. But for actual production, the mac is the way to go..
.
Databases:Personal preference really, there is something to be said for getting a mac webstar server up and running with lasso and filemaker pro or something else... secure and stable and quick to setup... but SLOW. It just is boys and girls. A server running PHP and mySQL will run circles around it. BUT it is a good thing MacOS X comes running apache with perl, php and mySQL installed, no?.
For database coding, it is personal preference. You can do perl and php coding easily on the mac, or the pc..
.
Vertical Markets if you're a kitchen and bathroom designer or a cabinet shop, or a machining shop... you'll want a pc. Would a mac last longer, be easier to use and learn, and have less problems? Yes. But the software you want doesnt exist on the mac. TrueVision (a kitchen design software, one of the biggest) and others only run on the pc... and virtual PC on the mac wont cut it because you need dongles..
.
.
Home Use:For general use, the mac. It just rocks, doesnt screw up, and is easy to learn. But some people will get annoyed with the fact that certain browser plugins arent there for the mac, and while there are ports of all the IM clients out there, they really dont equal the pc versions..
In closing... the best tool for the job. PC's have their place, and macs do too.
Well think about it, Microsoft have bought out most of the company earlier and it was a known fact that if they didnt do that Apple would be gone now. Apple is slowing giving away and unfortunately its not getting enough sales.
The Cube seems to be the computer that every Apple fanatic loves to hate. I too had my doubts when I first checked out its specifications and read reviews.
Then I bought one.
The Cube is the perfect compromise computer for someone who wants more than an iMac (I hate the idea of being restricted to an all-in-one design) and doesn't have the space or need for a full blown minitower.
I live in quarters that are best described as "cramped." (I'm being polite here...hear that Uncle Sam? We want better living arrangements.) I share a room with another soldier and there simply isn't enough room to wedge a minitower in and still have a usable desk so the Cube is a perfect solution. I also bought a flat-panel display (not Apple brand, but I like their thinking) so now I have a full size computer and room left over.
Now that the Cube's gone I can't wait to see what Apple comes up with next. Maybe the Cube (or some of its design cues) will resurface as the iMac II. Wouldn't that be nifty? Either way I'm sure that Apple will come up with something to talk about.