The 20th Anniversary of the Power Mac G4 Cube (wired.com) 41
Steven Levy from Wired remembers the Power Mac G4 Cube, which debuted July 19, 2000. From the report: I was reminded of this last week, as I listened to a cassette tape recorded 20 years prior, almost to the day. It documented a two-hour session with Jobs in Cupertino, California, shortly before the launch. The main reason he had summoned me to Apple's headquarters was sitting under the over of a dark sheet of fabric on the long table in the boardroom of One Infinite Loop. "We have made the coolest computer ever," he told me. "I guess I'll just show it to you." He yanked off the fabric, exposing an 8-inch stump of transparent plastic with a block of electronics suspended inside. It looked less like a computer than a toaster born from an immaculate conception between Philip K. Dick and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. (But the fingerprints were, of course, Jony Ive's.) Alongside it were two speakers encased in Christmas-ornament-sized, glasslike spheres.
"The Cube," Jobs said, in a stage whisper, hardly containing his excitement. He began by emphasizing that while the Cube was powerful, it was air-cooled. (Jobs hated fans. Hated them.) He demonstrated how it didn't have a power switch, but could sense a wave of your hand to turn on the juice. He showed me how Apple had eliminated the tray that held CDs -- with the Cube, you just hovered the disk over the slot and the machine inhaled it. And then he got to the plastics. It was as if Jobs had taken to heart that guy in The Graduate who gave career advice to Benjamin Braddock. "We are doing more with plastics than anyone else in the world," he told me. "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!"
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. That wasn't the only issue with the G4 Cube. Those plastics were hard to manufacture, and people reported flaws. The air cooling had problems. If you left a sheet of paper on top of the device, it would shut down to prevent overheating. And because it had no On button, a stray wave of your hand would send the machine into action, like it or not. In any case, the G4 Cube failed to push buttons on the computer-buying public. Jobs told me it would sell millions. But Apple sold fewer than 150,000 units.
"The Cube," Jobs said, in a stage whisper, hardly containing his excitement. He began by emphasizing that while the Cube was powerful, it was air-cooled. (Jobs hated fans. Hated them.) He demonstrated how it didn't have a power switch, but could sense a wave of your hand to turn on the juice. He showed me how Apple had eliminated the tray that held CDs -- with the Cube, you just hovered the disk over the slot and the machine inhaled it. And then he got to the plastics. It was as if Jobs had taken to heart that guy in The Graduate who gave career advice to Benjamin Braddock. "We are doing more with plastics than anyone else in the world," he told me. "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!"
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. That wasn't the only issue with the G4 Cube. Those plastics were hard to manufacture, and people reported flaws. The air cooling had problems. If you left a sheet of paper on top of the device, it would shut down to prevent overheating. And because it had no On button, a stray wave of your hand would send the machine into action, like it or not. In any case, the G4 Cube failed to push buttons on the computer-buying public. Jobs told me it would sell millions. But Apple sold fewer than 150,000 units.
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I knew people at the university that felt the same way. Perfectly quiet and well worth the education price. (So they said even though it was their department who paid for it.)
I still have the box for one which was looks just as impressive.
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I saw it first in John Lewis (a British department store), while shopping for a uni computer with my sister. The thing looked pretty darn cool, but we went for the much much cheaper iMac instead. I remember trying to use the blasted puck mouse on that thing. I found my hand and arm always started aching and took me a while to figure out why. It would slowly rotate in my hand without me noticing and I'd subsonsciously grip ever harder as the pointer started not going straight. The cubes had a sensible mouse
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USB Floppy? Iomega Zip Disks all the way!
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Well those too, but you could only exchange disks with people who also had a zip drive. Whereas everyone had a floppy drive.
At the time I bought the iMac the zip vs LS120 battle hadn't played out. I opted for the LS120 because then or could also use normal floppies. It was 50% the right choice. Zip room shortly after, but the University in question still mostly used floppies so it was necessary for that.
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Most PCs don't quickly wilt like a hothouse flower if a vent is blocked for a bit, though.
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They weren't prone to overheating, but the thermal cycling caused by getting hot repeatedly would cause cracks to appear in the case over time. For heavy users, it took less than a year. A fan would have fixed that, and probably such a slow one that it would have been inaudible anyway.
Replacement (Score:2)
I remember a company made a replacement case made of perforated metal that wouldn't crack. Looked like the front panel of the PowerMac G5's, but still a cube. Not *quite* as cool looking as the transparent plexiglass, but still striking, and offered much better cooling.
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Had one of those for my main work machine for about a year and a half, and it was the first time in my career that my office was perfectly silent unless I was playing music. No fan FTW!
-jcr
There's no way that 3.5" HHD and optical drive was in any way perfectly silent!! :-)
Buy one on eBay (Score:3)
Ah yes, back from the day (Score:1)
when people bought computer to do stuff instead of wanting them to look pretty.
In other words, today that doorstop would sell the millions Jobs envisioned. Truely a visionary, he saw the future...
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I don't think anyone particularly relished their computers looking like beige ass.
And everyone loved Silicon Graphics. They knew how to make an expensive piece of kit look cool and expensive before Apple got in on that game. They sat on the desk of the most senior engineer just looking awesome. Sleek, colourful, slick. Cool logo picked out in shiny metallised plastic. Nifty black volume buttons. Webcam before they were called webcams.
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Before indigo SGIs looked pretty much like everything else. Indigo's design still looks good today. After indigo was Indy, which had decent design, fit on racks, and was a nifty color. NeXT hardware was black, which was cooler than beige, but ultimately not as good looking as SGI between indigo and their embarrassing foray into PCs.
Kinda (Score:2)
The late-80's IRIS systems didn't look like anything else, either. They weren't as striking as future designs, but they were a dark chocolate brown color, and had a clean, rounded design that didn't look like much else being produced at the time, which were mostly off-white or beige square boxes.
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You mean the Personal Iris? Sleek, but still boxy. The original Iris machines, which I know you're not talking about, looked like the old VME deskside cases from Sun.
The Challenge, though, that had a distinctive case...
IRIS 4D (Score:2)
The IRIS 4D was also brown, and quite a bit more rounded than the contemporary designs. You're right, the Challenge and Indigos were way more out there than the brown boxes, but compared to the off-white or beige squared-off rectangle cases of most of their contemporaries. Check out the Apollo Domain, Sun 4 series, HP 9000/400, or DECStations for comparable systems from the same time period.
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I've owned an Indigo, a bunch of Apollos (3000s IIRC), a Sun 4/260, and even RT/PC model 135s. So yeah, the NeXT boxes are absolutely fancier than any of those.
I did paint the monitor for my 4/260 black :)
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[...]And they cut the price, massively, so it went from being the most expensive Mac to the cheapest. They still sell it, it's called the Mac mini.
Which people buy, because the fact it looks nice coupled with the low price is acceptable when you consider the lower spec.
They buy it because it's the cheapest way to be a Macintosh user. It's still overpriced. A PC that knocks its socks off is around half the price.
[...]any old hand at Apple could have told Jobs it would flop because this was a mistake Apple had made repeatedly throughout its history. It'd make beautiful machines that were underpowered and overpriced. One of these Jobs himself saw happening in real time in his first phase at Apple, the Lisa.
The Lisa was not especially overpriced for what it was. It was just too soon. GUI desktops are fairly useless without enough RAM (etc.) for multitasking.
Probably the most famous example before the Cube was the TAM.
Which statistically nobody is aware of
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It's funny, because any old hand at Apple could have told Jobs it would flop because this was a mistake Apple had made repeatedly throughout its history.
Keep in mind that in 1997, Jobs had laid off 30% of Apple and after that, fired people he didn't like meeting in the elevator.
Few people were telling him what he didn't want to hear.
The first iMacs looked cool, but they were a buggy mess. The design was finally corrected in the fall 1999 model.
Then Apple went and made the same "cube" mistake with the 2013 Mac Pro trash can.
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Yeah, I wanted one of these in the worst way just based on design and the idea of a quiet computer, but the numbers simply would not work out, particularly for someone who needed a second monitor. I ended up buying a low-end G4 soon after, and that thing lasted me more than 5 years, so not a bad outcome.
I'd still like to get my hands on one--even a broken one--just to put on a display shelf.
Will they make an ARM based version? (Score:2)
Mac Mini (Score:2)
A few weeks ago Apple just released the first Mac ARM development boxes to developers, which are basically ARM-based Mac Minis. That's kinda close I think.
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Apple needs to release an ARM based upgrade.
It already exists and it is called an Apple TV. :-p
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You are in luck. The Apple ARM dev kit is pretty much a Mac Mini [9to5mac.com].
Lol (Score:3)
"We are doing more with plastics than anyone else in the world," he told me. "These are all specially formulated, and it's all proprietary, just us. It took us six months just to formulate these plastics.
Yeah, and it took just six months for stress cracks to form in the plastics and make it look like crap. Guess that passive cooling didn't work out as well as you thought it would, mighty Jobs.
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If I remember correctly, "sensing a wave of your hand" meant touching the box where the power button was, and "hovering the disc over the slot" meant putting the disc in the slot-loader, the same as any car stereo. Even Apple had slot-loaders on the iMac DV since 1998, so it's not like it was even some big unveiling when they showed up on later models.
It looked cool, but it wasn't that cool. And certainly not in the literal sense... If it came out today the "my keyboard is warm!" and "The bezels are huge!"
Um, that's not the reason the term G4 is trending. (Score:2)
This is the G4 I think Slashdot is afraid of... [bing.com]
Gorgeous box for a Raspberry Pi 4? (Score:3)
Even now, a broken one could provide a beautiful case for a raspberry pi 4. Did anyone try to build such a sexy Frankenstein creation?
Damnit, I'm getting even older (Score:3)
This of course means that job was 20 years in my past. Damnit slashdot I didn't want to be reminded on a Saturday morning that I'm getting old.
A Gorgeous Fire Hazard (Score:2)
Re:A Gorgeous Fire Hazard (Score:4, Funny)
A graphic designer friend bought one of these and it literally melted like an overworked air cooled Volkswagen, right on his desk.
They were holding it wrong.
I still use mine w/ Linux! (Score:2)
Is this Jobs or Trump? (Score:2)
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!"
So did they formulate these plastics or were they already being used for bulletproof vests? Or did Apple decide to start making bulletproof vests once they created the plastic?
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