Looking back at Apple's Cube, ten years later

The Register has an excellent writeup posted with a look back at Apple's Power Mac G4 Cube (affectionately referred to as "The Cube"), which was released to the public 'suspended' from production 10 years ago this coming weekend.

At the time, back in 2001, the Cube drew a lot of jeers, mostly from PC enthusiasts who enjoyed making fun of Apple's whimsical and somewhat pretentious designs. For a number of different reasons, the Cube never really took off in the way that the iMac or, later, the iPhone did. Nevertheless, the Cube has its followers, and the idea -- a powerful computer put into a form very different than anything else seen at the time -- remains intriguing even today.

Perhaps that's why even today, modders are trying to push the limits of what the Cube can be. User Marcelo over at CubeOwner.com is actually building an "All Apple 10th Anniversary Cube" right now, which will rock an Intel Core 2 Duo processor, two 100 GB SSD drives, a dual-layer DVD drive; the finished product will even support Mac OS X 10.7 Lion when it's released. That's a spicy meatball of a computer, all squeezed into that same floating box.

We have to be careful not to look back too fondly on the Cube itself -- I used one back in the day and there were some issues with the hardware and the way it all worked, no matter how you felt about the case. But the Cube came right near the end of the Think Different campaign, and in some ways, even before the iAge changed the form of computing completely, the Cube was the last word on what Apple Computers was trying to accomplish with the PC itself.

Thanks Laurie D.