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Third Party Selling Upgraded G4 Cubes
cybercyph writes "A 3rd party is selling upgraded G4 cubes. The upgraded cubes have a 1.2 GHz G4 processor, GeForce 3 card with 64 MB RAM, 1 GB RAM (upgradable to 1.5) and a 120 GB hard drive! I can't imagine this making Apple too happy..." They are asking $1879, which is comparable to a similarly equipped new G4 from Apple.
Can anyone out there tell my why Apple would send a C&D to this company? All they're doing is buying old stock of Cubes, upgrading parts of them, and reselling them. They're not claiming that they're made by Apple. They're just being a VAR in the used market.
--Mike
Apple has no way to shut them down because they don't have to go through apple retailers for the processors. Who doesn't like the cube? This is very smart business. Apple won't be very happy about this.
Granted it only has 512 of ram, but we all now how cheap ram is these days, and i can max out at 2 GB not 1.5.
It's cool. It's got commodity, but its more money and less power than what apple is selling. And like someone else said, mine will definitely work with panther.
And all in an out of warranty cube which is already maxed (you can add a whole 512MB extra RAM and the controller is only ATA66 so no drives > 120GB for you!) out so no room for future upgrades! for $1879 it sounds like a steal to me, especially with those pokey G5's retailing for a bloated $1999.
Get real.
Unless you have some sort of cube fetish, really - whats the point, for $120 extra you can have yourself a 64 bit workstation that's likely 3x as powerful. With room to grow. And warranty. And new technology like bluetooth and FW800.
I honestly can't imagine Apple caring less either way.
They'll have a C&D letter in by morning, if it isn't already sitting on their FAX machine.
No they won't! Apple has contracts with their dealers which prohibit all sorts of activities they deem undesirable wrt machines bought from Apple intended for retail sale. But Apple has nothing--repeat after me--Apple has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to say about the trade in used Macs. They have no legal right to do so, nor would they have any conceivable reason to even try. (And please note that reselling used Macs is quite different from trying to scrounge repair parts, build FrankenMacs, and sell those.)
they are nice, and apple really led charge on the small system form factor.
downside to the cube is, personally, i don't like the connectors on the bottom, well there should be at least a usb and firewire on the front. a hub would help, but that expands the footprint.
and repair absolutely sucks. i had to replace an ethernet card in a friends cube and it was a huge process -- you have to completely dismount the motherboard to replace it, no easy task in itself.
wouldn't have been such a hassle if someone had a usb-ethernet driver for OS X.
other than that they are sweet machines. i'd love to have even an old one as a wireless MP3 server and to leave permantly connected to my firewire video converter to do imports with.
the basis of the appeal of this deal to me is the cube...i don't think anyone would bat an eye at this if it were an old imac refurb, but apple somehow struck a nerve with the cube. i've never heard anyone describe the cube as anything but sexy. the question then becomes: what premium are you willing to pay for sexy? many people are willing to sacrafice speed for sexiness, many others will not. personally, as a poor college student, i couln't afford either, and thus am stuck with my dual-cracked hinge ti powerbook. (because of the hinges, i have to constantly prop the display up against something. right now, a pillow...sigh...)
This is exactly true. If it weren't eBay and such would have a whole lot of hell to catch from apple for reselling old macs with upgrade cards installed.
- Sherman
If their business depends on nobody finding out about it, I'd say it's not much of a business.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I imagine that the cubes were very carefully designed to remove a certain amount of heat, and all this new hotter stuff may cause serious problems?