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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?
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.
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.
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
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!
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Never call a man a fool. Borrow from him.
"...the G3/G4 Macs which are still available, better machines, and cheaper to boot ."
I always thought, once you bought the machine, that booting it was free.
"Never bullshit a bullshitter" All That Jazz
The G4 cube casing was a problem that people continued to complain about. Around the rivets on the top of it people were finding what they thought were hair thin cracks. Apple said it was a normal part of manufacturing and not a defect but I think it bothered a lot of people getting the cube. There was also an issue with the power turning on and off. There wasn't an actual power on/off, and some people were having problems with the power touch detection working correctly. Heres a link from Sept 2000 about the cases:
:(
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200-2885165.html
Despite these small issues, it is sad to see it go. On the G4 Cube webpage there is now a heading about it being "put on ice"
http://www.apple.com/powermaccube/
bbh
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