[Eyenovation]

I notice alot of the people on here rant and rave about the G4 cube. I'm curious, if it has such a following, why did it get axed at Apple?
You would think with this much fan fare, they'd of kept it going.

[G4ME]

it was a great product, if i had the cash at the time i would have boughten one (in addition to my Dual 500) but there was no real market for it, it was supposed to be a compromise between the imac and the powermac but it was priced similarly to the powermac and you still had to buy a monitor.

it was priced to high and people wanted the expansion.

too bad, i hope they try and bring something like it back again.

[zigzag]

It was too expensive and/or exotic for most consumers and not flexible enough for geeks. I remember being in a store when it came out and hearing people say "What the hell is it?" and "Where do you plug stuff in?". Not very promising for the average consumer with a mess of peripherals and kids and dogs - they want a machine, not a museum piece. It looked more like something to decorate a rich executive's (e.g. Steve Jobs) desk. I bought one mostly because it's silent.

Nonetheless, it was a very clever product and has become something of a collector's item.

[Maflynn]

I think it was the most elegant designed computers, unfortunatly Apple failed to market the computer to the right audience. It was near the price of a regular power mac but w/o any expandability. They should have priced it lower to find a niche between the imac and the pm.

I bought one, though I sold it in favor of a dual gig. Of course now I'm looking through ebay to buy one because it was a great computer.

Mike

[Judge_Fire]

They are small, silent, unobtrusive and don't reek of Computer Hardware in that clunky, boxy way that the large PowerMac/PC towers do.

They also were ahead of their time, today most of my friends seem to run minitower PCs (me included), such as the http://www.shuttle.com ones. They fit a living room nicely, serving as digital hubs, not digital monoliths (Think PowerMac G5).

Additionally, unfortunately, the Cube was crippled in several ways:

- It was too expensive. The correct price point would have been between iMacs and PowerMacs. It was an engineering feat, yes, but a costly one - ahead of its time, no matter how good Apple is at compacting. (Like in the PowerBooks).

- It wasn't expandable at the time. By this I mean there wasn't yet the needed momentum in external expandability (firewire sound/video IO interfaces etc.) so that the target group would have been ready to give up internal slots. Additionally, the internal display card was only theoretically replaceable, the card would have to be less than fullsize and run quite cool.


I have one and won't be replacing it until Apple comes out with a minitower. I'm typing this on 12" PowerBook, so I have full confidence in their capacity of creating compact, beautiful pieces of hardware. And I know Steve wants quiet, elegant computers.

What I want is simply a small, quiet machine that allows me to keep its display card up to date and plug-in all the other pieces of expandability, like the display of my choice.

Many others, do, too. My workplace will propably end up buying rows of bulky G5s, which will go unexpanded inside. The space saved would alone be valuable. And if the price for a future minitower was between an iMac and a PowerMac, then the cost savings wouldn't hurt either.

Some day, who knows,

J

[dav]

i bought one, but i guess happen to fit into apparently small demographic this product was marketed to. i wanted the power of the g4 processor, to be able to add a monitor of my choice, and didn't need the pci expansion or want the size/noise of a tower. it was priced high, but it's a beautiful thing.

[SciFrog]

As great a product it was, the later G4 chips dissipated more heat and Apple would have needed to add a fan or revamp the Cube to accomodate faster chips. That combined with low sales because of high price killed it.

They have kept an incredible value on eBay, they sell for $700/800 for base specs. Similar towers sell for <$500.

[PowerCube]

The Cube was simply ahead of it's time, and sales were crippled by the high price point. It is a very elegant and functionaly unobtrusive machine, almost an "appliance" if you will. Consumers won't buy what they don't understand, and the Cube was a completely misunderstood concept. I have had no problems "upgrading" and "expanding", although I have had to make a few concessions (fan noise) and modifications (of my own design because I can't leave well enough alone), the base models, and the new processor upgrades would have served most very well. If the Cube had sold well and stayed in production, I am sure there would be more options for internal upgrades. Maybe. All I know is I have a spare GF3 card lying around, just in case.

I AM contemplating water cooling in the future with a remote radiator/pump. Then I could upgrade to the dual 1+ Ghz cards!
(in the background, one begins to hear "Dreamer, nothin' but a dreamer..." as sung by Supertramp oh so many years ago.) I think I will keep this for a long time, just for the "Cool" factor.

[driven]

I've got one ... I love it.

About the only thing that you can't expand on it is anything that requires PCI slots. You still have Firewire for external drives etc.

Today we also have these aftermarket options:
- DVD burner that will work with iDVD
- Replacement processor boards to bring us up to 1.2 Mhz and beyond .... A few folks have jammed dual processors in their cubes.
- Hard disk can be replaced. (I've got a WD 80GB with 8GB cache in mine!)

My big debate now is to decide should I upgrade my cube's processor from the stock 500 to a 1.2 Ghz (for about $500) or just put the money into a G5 and make the Cube a server or somesuch thing. I probably won't have the heart to sell it. It's a remarkable feat of engineering.