The 20th anniversary of the Power Mac G4 Cube
wired.com
wired.com
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.
The Cube was so cool for its time and it still looks good, a lot better than most of the modern PC gear. Opening it was also really cool. It just felt like magic when everything else in the market was basically big, ugly beige boxes which required force, trickery and bloody fingers to open and modify the components.
I wish they would make a new version with some Mac Mini hardware.
Funny thing about the Cube. It has a place for a fan but as the article mentioned, it didn't have it in production builds. There are still some aftermarket kits to retrofit the fan in place :)
Been still thinking about buying one to run Mac OS PPC Classic apps...
But, in terms of visual design... I don't think it's as pretty as Leopard, but what I find intriguing is how well it matches the hardware design of the era. On a Powerbook or PowerPC iMac, I can imagine how the contents of the screen would perfectly match the hardware that framed it.
I don't think Apple has done anything quite like that since...
The ease of use is so much higher than recent MacOS versions it's not even funny.
Actually, on the rare occasion when OS X freezes up, I have experienced this. For a solid minute I mash keys and click my mouse in vain, and then boom, the system wakes up and all of my keystrokes and mouse clicks execute at once.
Looked like it was warped in from the future. Moved at dialup pace.
https://www.panic.com/extras/audionstory/popup-stevedev.html (An aside from The True Story of Audion: https://www.panic.com/extras/audionstory/)
I'm very nostalgic for those times and maintain several classic Macs, but for the most part I'm glad it's in the past.
It's an environment that takes a while to know the ins-and-outs of, but it's also very fun and incredible hackable in ways no OS could be these days. The Wallstreet is a fantastic computer, one of the best Powerbooks ever made. Try it with Mac OS 8.6, at least 64MB RAM (128MB even better), RAMDoubler 8 or 9 with compression disabled (it has a better VM system than built-in), on a mSATA SSD in a JM20330 ATA/mSATA adapter, with the boot partition under 8GB (ATA-5 limitation) using either Apple's Disk Utility driver or Lacie Silverlining 6 if you're feeling adventurous :)
edit: Unless your MIL was unfortunate enough to own the first (non-"PDQ") 233mhz model with no L2 cache, in which case yes it really is that bad lol https://lowendmac.com/1999/cacheless-mainstreet-powerbook-g3...
The main issue with it right now is that the sound doesn't work at all. I was going to take it apart and check the DC / sound card (which is the same module) and see if there's something obviously wrong with it once I get the chance.
https://68kmla.org/forums/index.php?app=forums&module=forums...
"If you disable virtual memory, the system's MMU is disabled. When that happens:
- Every program you launch needs to be 100% loaded from disk when you launch that program, which could cause program launches to take longer, particularly applications which are themselves large. The impact of this will vary based on the speed of the disk or network volume the application file resides on
- The other thing that will happen is all applications will instantly take up their maximum possible RAM allocation, which even in 768, if you're running 9-era stuff, especially anything creative, could have a big impact."
That's why I recommended RAM Doubler since it allows you to disable VM and its own memory compression without hitting this limitation.
What was especially cool was how older (pre-SDRAM) PowerBooks persisted files in RAM Disk across reboots. You could copy a minimal System, your documents, and an app (tiny ones like Word 5.1a), reboot off the RAM Disk, then eject and spin down the internal HDD for a big battery life boost!
Meanwhile on my Pentium 166, I could smoothly have a few IM windows going while doing other things (Visual C++, Netscape...)
That was because the OS was hacked (I guess the design looked differently, initially) to run on a 8MHz 68000 in 128k of RAM. To make menu opening and closing snappy (necessary because users will open and close menus searching for a menu option), it was implemented by
1. saving the screen bits that would be clobbered drawing the menu.
2. handling menu selection.
3. copying back those bits.
Drawing to the screen could mean writing directly to screen memory, which couldn’t be detected because there was no MMU, but even if it was done using system calls, programs couldn’t be halted when they made such calls. So, step 3 meant changes ‘under’ the opened menu would be lost, so nothing could be allowed to draw to the screen during step 2.
And of course, little of that mattered for the original OS, as it wouldn’t run multiple programs or multiple threads in a program. Step 2 would be the only thing running that was supposed to do screen drawing (with exceptions for drawing the mouse pointer, a feature that just have been fun to implement. Sound and async disk I/O (with its funny software-controlled floppy rotation speed) also would run, but those were limited in what they were supposed to do)
I’m not 100% glad those times are gone. Things were harder to do, but getting anything done felt way more as an accomplishment.
For example: What I really want is an end to the laptop form factor altogether. Take an RPI4 form-factor with a projection keyboard and a flexible fabric display I can roll up into a map tube and a few cables. Now THAT would be a game changer.
"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."
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2000/07/19Apple-Introduces-Re...
In my country, after taxes, a 16-inch Macbook Pro starts at nearly $3k
yeah, but the world is now filled with workstation style laptops that can be optioned to 5k+.
When the Cube came out it was staggering from a relative personal computer standpoint.
(viewed from the lens of HPC, it's all insanely cheap.)
The conceit on the cube was that people would pay a fat premium for a completely silent, nice looking computer. I'd have paid a premium, but not that much.
Correction: The Lampshade Mac was a couple years after the cube. Brought much of the good design aspects of the cube with only a moderately eye watering price. I bought mine as a refurb.
We bought one for my brother as a birthday gift. It had an 800mhz g4 , a 15" screen, and a 60gb (I think?) 5400rpm(?) hard drive that was so loud I could hear it a mile away (maxtor probably).
Sadly stolen. I totally would've kept that computer after he was done with it! It was sooooo cooooool looking!
Did it "fail?" I'd like to see some sales figures on that, and not just the latter-day revisionist history echo chamber that is the internet these days.
I don't understand how they could think that would sell many units.
This was during the era when "selling units" wasn't what Apple was trying to achieve. In the time between Steve Jobs' return and Tim Cook taking the helm, Apple was about producing interesting, cutting-edge, quality products for its loyal fanbase.
Today, you can measure Apple's success by units sold, because that's how Mr. Cook rolls. But at the time of the Cube, Apple was a different company.
The sales numbers are in the article. They pulled the plug after one year.
I simply don't understand the myth of the prohibitive price. Just check the price lists. [1]
BTW, I've it still in my office and it's still running flawlessly on OS X Tiger an System 9.2.2. (At one point, rather early on, the capacitive start button failed and was replaced. Otherwise no issues in two decades.)
[1] Edit: Mind that the Cube had a special type of a digital RGB connector for the monitor and worked only with the dedicated CRT and the LCD displays. Both displays weren't exactly cheap and you couldn't just use a cheap 3rd party display as a replacement, which added to the price.
Yes, that's inaccurate in the article, isn't it?
"because it had no On button, a stray wave of your hand would send the machine into action"
You didn't "wave your hand", you touched the button. The button wouldn't move, but you did have to press it. (Maybe they changed that from prototype to production? But it definitely wasn't an issue I remember).
> I simply don't understand the myth of the prohibitive price.
It was pretty expensive at the beginning, but IIRC it came down pretty soon.
As it happens, the monitors had USB connection and an on/off button on the front bezel, which was much more practical than the one on the main unit. Because of this, I (and probably most of the owners) used the one on top of the Cube rarely. This was more a design gack. But yes, it was definitely a button, while an unusual one.
> It was pretty expensive at the beginning, but IIRC it came down pretty soon.
That might be correct. I didn't buy mine in the very first month.
Another slight flaw: the material of the transparent cables which came with the Cube is subject to chemical decay and turned a bit sticky. Interestingly, the process stopped and even reversed somewhat. Ah, polymers, always worth a surprise…
It's about electronic devices designed to be used in prison, so they're intentionally made transparent.
I guess that's more transparency than translucency, but it's easy to put together a workstation with visible internals. You don't even have to load it up with rainbow LEDs if you don't want it looking like some hot rodder's ground effects ;)
Not only that, I wish 20 years after G4 Cube we could figure out way for translucent casing not turn yellow after a few years.
[1] https://specials-images.forbesimg.com/imageserve/5dbe2597b4d...
"We think we've got the most incredible access story in the business, and you know what it's called? Let's get the video up here — it's called 'a door'!" https://youtu.be/pH-6Tek9yF4?t=2435
It's possible I just tuned this out and never noticed the stop lights going away, but I'm running the latest beta of Big Sur while typing this and the stop lights are definitely back, if so!
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!
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.
That being said I would love to add a TAM to my vintage Mac collection.
The “cheese-grater” Power Mac G5/Mac Pro had handles. Which are great on a 42-pound chunk of aluminum…except they had sharp edges, and you sure felt that.
(I hauled my 2006 Mac Pro between 3 different apartments. I remember.)
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.
How many people ran Photoshop or did desktop publishing on a GameCube?
It's all software, some of it just costs more.
May be even a Wireless Charger on Top so you could charge your future mouse, Apple Watch and iPhone on it.
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.
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
[2] https://medium.com/@unmakr/moma-approved-harman-kardon-sound...
As a size comparison, upside down with an ITX on the bottom.
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.
One of the few things that makes the Year 2000 what it was cracked up to be.
I really wanted a cube when it came out though.
> “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?”
Who cares if it would power cycle on sufficiently hot days :D
His cat loves sitting on top of it, causing it to shutdown unexpectedly.
Does anybody know what he means there?
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.)
Weird. This reads like something straight out of a Trump speech.
Answer: Yes
This is with Firefox 78.0.2 running uBlock Origin.