
The 20th anniversary of the Power Mac G4 Cube - merricksb
https://www.wired.com/story/20-years-ago-steve-jobs-built-the-coolest-computer-ever-it-bombed/
======
thought_alarm
The Cube with matching LCD monitor and USB keyboard was way ahead of its time.
A premium product at a premium price.

The problem was software. Apple did not have the operating system to justify
such a premium product. MacOS 9 was laughably dated, slow, and unstable,
especially compared to Win2000 and WinXP, and OS X was years away from being
ready.

The hardware writes a check that the software can't cash. Anyone would have
been better with a PowerMac or a Win2k machine.

I own a Cube, and with OS X 10.4 installed it is a completely different
machine. It boots faster than a modern Mac, and is light years ahead of aged
Mac OS 9 and the early versions of OS X. It feels utterly modern, and takes
full advantage of the tight integration between the hardware, LCD monitor, and
USB peripherals.

Unfortunately for Apple, OS X 10.4 was released 4 years after the Cube was
cancelled. I think that if Apple had OS X 10.4 ready in 2000, we would look
back at the Cube in a different way.

~~~
everdrive
10.4 was such a beautiful operating system. I really believe that Apple had
the best operating system out there for the short window that 10.4 was around.

~~~
mfarris
I still use 10.4 on a 2005 PowerMac several times a week for various creative
projects.

The ease of use is so much higher than recent MacOS versions it's not even
funny.

~~~
everdrive
What software are you using? Is the machine connected to the internet?

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blakesterz
I remember when this came out watching the big unveiling and absolutely LOVING
it. And then. My god, that price. It was so stupidly expensive it really
deserved to fail. I don't understand how they could think that would sell many
units. It was a super cool looking, super small, super quiet machine that
could've really worked well for many people. From the Wired article:

"That didn’t happen. For one thing, the price was prohibitive—by the time you
bought the display, it was almost three times the price of an iMac and even
more than some PowerMacs. By and large, people don’t spend their art budget on
computers."

~~~
smnrchrds
How much was it?

~~~
weare138
I found the old press release. The base price was $1,799 for the 400Mhz G4 and
$2,299 for the 500Mhz. Adjusted for inflation it's equivalent to $2,783 and
$3,557 in today's money.

[https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2000/07/19Apple-Introduces-
Re...](https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2000/07/19Apple-Introduces-
Revolutionary/)

~~~
puranjay
That's...not as expensive as I had expected.

In my country, after taxes, a 16-inch Macbook Pro starts at nearly $3k

~~~
weare138
The big issue was how underpowered it was for the price. It was the same price
as a good desktop Mac at the time but with all the limitations of the iMac.

~~~
masswerk
Mind that the iMacs of the time were considerably underpowered G3s with not
the best graphics. The Cube was in another league.

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cflewis
I miss Apple using color. I know they abandoned it because they want their
machines to melt away and just have the screen left, but they abandoned fun in
the process. Computers don't just have to be windows into a virtual space.

~~~
FreakyT
Personally, what I miss is translucency! I'd really like to see translucent
electronics make a comeback, it was always neat to see the inner workings.

~~~
gugagore
You might enjoy this video:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3PfsndsihY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3PfsndsihY)

It's about electronic devices designed to be used in prison, so they're
intentionally made transparent.

~~~
sukilot
It's hard to enjoy tech made for USA's cruelly overlong prison sentences.

------
gnicholas
For me, the cool thing about the Cube was that I could bring it home from
college in a carry-on suitcase. At the time, the laptops had G3 processors,
and the G4 towers obviously didn't fit in a suitcase. But I could travel with
my G4 Cube (500 MHz with DVD) in my rolling luggage and my Apple Studio
Display (15", with tilt arm detached) in my shoulder bag. It was the only way
to get G4 performance in a semi-portable form factor.

This was great because when I went home for Christmas, I had my computer (and
DVD player) in my room. And when I went to summer internships, it was easy to
bring my digital life with me. I loved it!

~~~
Lammy
I did this just a couple years ago when I found a Cube while traveling!
[https://i.imgur.com/H8UxYCj.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/H8UxYCj.jpg)

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giantrobot
When the Cube came out I was thinking it would be what the Mac mini became.
Instead it was a shitty PowerMac that cost almost as much as a PowerMac.

If you wanted to use it for anything but trivial stuff you really just wanted
a PowerMac. If your needs were trivial you were much better off with an iMac.
Apple's 2x2 product matrix worked pretty well and the Cube didn't fit in it at
all.

It was a weird expensive mutant.

~~~
timw4mail
Kind of like the Twentieth Anniversary Mac before it in terms of having more
style than substance.

~~~
giantrobot
The TAM was _way_ more style over substance than the Cube. The Cube did have
some utility in that it was virtually silent. I know a lot of audio people
that liked them for this reason. The TAM was a $10,000 pure luxury item.

That being said I would love to add a TAM to my vintage Mac collection.

------
scott_s
Curious - people have long drawn parallels between Apple and Nintendo's
aesthetics for hardware and strategy, but I never realized how close the G4
Cube (July 2000) was to the Nintendo GameCube (September 2001). I still think
the GameCube is the most aesthetically pleasing console.

~~~
CoolGuySteve
Yeah, for all the love the G4 Cube gets, the Gamecube was much, much, smaller,
had more efficient cooling, similar specs (minus the disk drive), and was
1/10th the price.

The 1T-SRAM and EDRAM framebuffer caches in the Gamecube were also much more
interesting on a technical level. Considering how poorly Aqua ran on the Mac's
of that era, the Gamecube's 3D hardware probably would have been better suited
to OS X than Apple's own.

It's a far superior design imo.

~~~
reaperducer
_the Gamecube was much, much, smaller, had more efficient cooling, similar
specs (minus the disk drive), and was 1 /10th the price_

How many people ran Photoshop or did desktop publishing on a GameCube?

~~~
CoolGuySteve
Honestly, Resident Evil 4 was far more computationally intensive than anything
Photoshop does. It's applying thousands of texture filters and transformations
in real time and then mapping them to polygon surfaces with lighting
transforms.

It's all software, some of it just costs more.

------
abruzzi
I actually still have my Cube. I haven't powered it on in years, I can't bring
myself to throw it out, but I can't figure anything useful for it to do. I
have other PPC macs that are in regular use, but its mostly to support
hardware that never made it to intel. Since I cant stick a PCI card in the
Cube, it just sits there.

~~~
tyingq
It makes a pretty tissue box. [https://www.applegazette.com/wp-
content/uploads/g4cube_tissu...](https://www.applegazette.com/wp-
content/uploads/g4cube_tissuebox-550x733.jpg)

------
jtlienwis
For a minute I thought it was the Next. But that was a bomb that went off 32
years ago.

~~~
kjs3
Same here. NeXT was way cooler than any old Power Mac in a pretty box.

~~~
evgen
Yeah, I am guessing you never actually tried to get any work done on one.
Nothing like listening to it swap on the floptical while doing a big compile.
CHUNKA-CHUNKA-CHUNKA...CHUNKA-CHUNKA.

~~~
kjs3
I actually had a lab full of them. I said they were cool, not fast. :-)

Most everyone I knew who had one added a SCSI hard drive real quick to their
NeXT cube and moved stuff like swap there, and eventually folks figured out
how to replace the optical as the boot drive. If you were desperate, you could
swap to NFS which while not much faster was usually smoother (and quieter)
than swapping to the optical.

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FabHK
The Cube was great, particularly once OS X came out in the following year. But
even before that, iTunes was released, and with the Harman Kardon Soundsticks
[1,2] (two little speakers and a subwoofer) it was a brilliant machine for the
living room. Looked great, you could work on it, surf, listen to music and
watch DVDs.

You could set iTunes to automatically rip CDs it hadn't ripped before, IIRC,
and with the nifty mechanism it was really pleasant to pop in your entire
music collection one at a time and turn it into mp3s. Rip, mix, burn [3]. And
then the iPod came out in 2001 as well, and your entire collection was on the
damn thing in minutes (over FireWire).

Nowadays, this is all a matter of course, but back then it was way ahead of
the rest. (Should have bought Apple shares...)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoundSticks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoundSticks)

[2] [https://medium.com/@unmakr/moma-approved-harman-kardon-
sound...](https://medium.com/@unmakr/moma-approved-harman-kardon-soundsticks-
ii-teardown-f5ef983185cb)

[3]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0ZWuhcM7t4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0ZWuhcM7t4)

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chaoticmass
Back when this came out, I was 15, and still stuck in my zealous fanboyism
_against_ anything Apple-- but even I had to admit it looked cool.

------
selimnairb
They learned the lesson of the Cube so well, they created the 2013 Mac Pro.

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jdofaz
These were not compatible with users who set the computer on it's side, or
people who would lay papers on top of it. Either way it would overheat
(speaking as a former tech support person)

~~~
atrn
My Cube cracked the PCBs of two graphics cards before I gave up on it.

------
heelix
I was gifted one of these long after they hit their EOL. I plan to turn it
into a normal x86-64 box since the form factor.. with just a minor bit of
dremel work, should fit an ITX board.

As a size comparison, upside down with an ITX on the bottom.

[https://i.imgur.com/W1BTU4u.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/W1BTU4u.jpg)

~~~
Lammy
Please don't gut a working rare classic computer :(

~~~
heelix
The fact that it still runs and can even connect to the net (however unsafe
that may be with its current state) has delayed the project.

The power supply is flaking out. When the magic goes, it goes.

One of the more amazing things was the monitor. It manages to power itself via
the DVI cable.

~~~
Lammy
Yeah, the internal DC/DC board is known to die if you load the machine up with
a CPU/GPU upgrade, even worse if you use the ADC monitor too. It's not cheap,
but Artmix makes an upgraded replacement. I promise if you get into modding
the Cube it will be a million times more fun than turning such a rare machine
into Yet Another Intel Box ;) [https://artmix.com/products/product/stratos-
technology-power...](https://artmix.com/products/product/stratos-technology-
powermac-g4-cube-high-power-vrm-unit/)

------
dhosek
I bought one of these after they were discontinued as a refurb. It was a great
semi-portable computer—I'd take it with a cheap flat panel display, keyboard
and mouse to band rehearsals and gigs to do recordings. Absolutely silent. At
the refurb price it was a pretty good deal. I sold it for not much less than I
paid for it to help fund my first PowerBook.

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mariodiana
I don't remember the exact quote I read, but someone back then noted that it
was a supercomputer the size of a box of tissues, and that it was (and I'm
going by memory now):

 _One of the few things that makes the Year 2000 what it was cracked up to
be._

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kyuudou
Now I wonder if the Cobalt Qube[1] was inspired by this...

1:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_Qube](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_Qube)

~~~
KSS42
Maybe the other way around. Your link says Qube came out in 1998. The G4 Cube
came out in 2000.

~~~
Lammy
The G4 Cube was not Jobs' first cube computer:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTcube](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTcube)

------
paultopia
That kind of move is always Apple's big failing---super-expensive, years ahead
of its time but not _enough_ years ahead (and quickly self-cannibalized by
better yet cheaper products), marquee products. They did that with the Lisa,
and arguably with the Newton too. Though I guess the Newton wasn't Jobs's
fault, like the others were.

I really wanted a cube when it came out though.

------
mumblemumble
I had one of these, once upon a time. The model with the capacitive power
button. Great machine, but it sure was annoying when people would come by my
desk to talk to me, and accidentally put my computer to sleep by
absentmindedly resting a hand on a convenient surface.

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Izkata
A hint of the coming future:

> “Do you really want to put a hole in this thing and put a button there?”
> Jobs asked me, justifying the lack of a power switch. “Look at the energy we
> put into this slot drive so you wouldn’t have a tray, and you want to ruin
> that and put a button in?”

------
gigatexal
I still hope they bring this back with the new Apple silicon macs. I loved the
cube!

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snorkel
The Cube also had bad market timing. The dotcom bubble was bursting so the
market for luxury office equipment was quickly drying up. Aside from that
everyone said it looked like a overpriced tissue box.

------
KingOfCoders
Loved by G4 Cube. Was my first OSX machine. Liked the hardware extension scene
with CPU extensions and new graphics cards that could work in that small space
and without active cooling.

------
eucryphia
I did fall in love with one of these as soon as I saw it in the University
shop. But the sticker price was simply unaffordable, our worplace ran MS
Windows and I had a house to pay off.

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olliej
In fairness it was an astonishingly pretty machine, and I've always really
wanted one - even today when it would be totally useless.

Who cares if it would power cycle on sufficiently hot days :D

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valuearb
This is a testament to the greatness of Steve Jobs. It’s not just your
successes that define you when you constantly are pushing the envelope.

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regularfry
I know more than one person who bought these just because Apple had released
new hardware. Totally bought in to the image.

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didip
heh, one of my classmates had this.

His cat loves sitting on top of it, causing it to shutdown unexpectedly.

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elcapitan
> Jobs: Yeah, we did one before. Cubes are very efficient spaces.

Does anybody know what he means there?

~~~
dhosek
The NeXT Cube

~~~
jmkb
Also highly hyped, also bombed, but severely influential. IMO has a better
claim to "coolest" than the Mac cube does.

~~~
ghaff
NeXT was conceptually interesting. It had a magneto-optical drive and, as I
recall, one of the pitches was that in a world of expensive computers and slow
networks, especially in higher education it was an interesting concept that
you could carry around a removable disk and essentially make any workstation
"your" personal workstation by inserting your disk.

And, yes, Jobs was quite the salesman. I wasn't at the original announcement
but he reprised the announcement for the Boston Computer Society in Symphony
Hall. (Which also says something about the size of the BCS at the time.)

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nickbauman
The cube was a rehash of the NeXT Cube. Why do that again?

~~~
als0
Because the NeXT Cube was an undeniable work of art...

------
kingkawn
I knew someone who had one of these, it was awesome

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sigzero
I loved my cube. <3

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klyrs
> These are all specially formulated, and it’s all proprietary, just us. It
> took us six months just to formulate these plastics. They make bulletproof
> vests out of it! And it’s incredibly sturdy, and it’s just beautiful!
> There’s never been anything like that. How do you make something like that?
> Nobody ever made anything like that! Isn’t that beautiful? I think it’s
> stunning!

Weird. This reads like something straight out of a Trump speech.

~~~
rowanG077
Why is that weird? Both Trump and Jobs have/had huge sway with crowds. It's
not surprising to me their speech patterns are similar.

~~~
mhh__
Because Trump usually speaks in huge unpunctuated sentences? When did Steve
jobs randomly say "Good genes, good genes" while explaining how good he is at
nuclear

~~~
sukilot
Jobs died before he got old enough to ge to that linguistic stage, thanks in
part to his peculiar views on health science (another similarity to Trump)

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staycoolboy
Do I have too many blockers running, because there's no article here?

Answer: Yes

~~~
neogodless
This was my experience. I've got headline, lead image, one line of text and
then an author bio!

This is with Firefox 78.0.2 running uBlock Origin.

~~~
staycoolboy
Same here, but apparently this info is worth several downvotes.

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_threads
I love it but I’m pretty sure it was built by workers in a factory, but our
world only remember names of so-called « leaders »

