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A few weeks back I hailed Apple's new G4 Cube computer as an aesthetic masterpiece. That judgment was based on opening the box and beholding this sleek ice cube of a computer for the first time. Now I've had a couple of weeks to bang the heck out of the Cube, as it's called. Am I still infatuated? Yes and no.
For sure, the Cube is a work of art -- and I don't mean just in terms of looks. It artfully incorporates some important new technologies, including a flat screen, optical mouse, and fanless cooling system. But I've also discovered some blemishes under the Cube's sleek exterior. To name just two annoyances: All the darn cords are too short, and you have to turn the thing upside down to plug anything in.
EYE OF THE BEHOLDER. To put it succinctly: In the name of art, Apple has made some compromises with the Cube. Take the way Apple redesigned the Cube's cooling system. The buzzing fan that's standard in other Macs has been replaced with several vents that pull air naturally through the Cube. That makes the new machine, depending on your point of view, either blissfully or deathly silent. It also means you'd better not block these vents by leaving a stack of papers atop the Cube: Its innards might fry.
But enough carping about the Cube's flaws for the moment. Let's take a look at what does work.
For starters, this computer has the smallest footprint of any desktop I've ever seen. Each side measures just 7.7 inches. It's almost invisible on my wife's white desk. But don't let size fool you. This is one powerful computer, featuring a 450-megahertz G4 processor and a 20-gigabyte hard drive.
MULTIMEDIA MARVEL. With the Cube, Apple has finally ditched that rotten hockey-puck of a mouse introduced with the iMac. It has been replaced with an optical mouse that has no moving parts and fits comfortably into the curve of your palm. You click by simply pressing forward.
The Cube was made to play games such as Quake or Riven and is the best
multimedia machine I've ever seen. Its 22-inch flat screen is brilliantly sharp. So is the sound from its tiny clear plastic speakers.
For more serious users, who favor reliability over flash, the Cube is the most stable Mac I've used in a long time. Now I don't have a testing lab, but I do have the second best thing: a teenage son. Any computer that can survive a weekend with him and his friends is sturdy. My son did manage to crash the Cube -- but only after great effort. Our experience was apparently no fluke. MacWorld magazine, which does have a lab staffed with real engineers, also declared the Cube a model of stability.
BELLY OF THE BEAST. But enough about the Cube's bright side -- let's get to the dark underbelly. To begin with, there are the Cube's ports, which Apple placed on the bottom of the computer. That helps give the Cube its smooth, rounded surface but makes connecting something like an external Zip drive a major pain.
Here's my favorite beef about the Cube: All the cables are laughably short, as if they were a pair of cotton pants left too long in the dryer on high heat. I'm hoping that this is an oversight, to be corrected in later models, and not a cost-cutting move.
Another thing Apple skimped on with the Cube is the amount of RAM, or random access memory. These are the chips that determine in large part the responsiveness of your Mac. In essence, the more RAM the better -- and the 64 megabytes that come standard with the Cube are not nearly enough. I have said this before -- and Apple has disagreed bitterly -- but every Mac should come with at least 128 megabytes of RAM. That is especially true of a machine like the Cube, designed as a premier multimedia computer.
In short, the Cube is a Mac for users who favor aesthetics over practicality -- and are willing to pay a little extra for it. There's nothing wrong with that. Just make sure that's what you want in a computer before plunking down the $1,800 required for a Cube.
Haddad, an Apple Computer buff, is an Atlanta-based correspondent for Business Week. If you're an Apple buff, too, follow his weekly column, only on BW Online Edited by Beth Belton
Copyright 2000, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
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