Power Mac G4 Cube

The Power Mac G4 Cube was a compact desktop version of the Power Mac G4 tower that was introduced by Apple Computer on July 19, 2000 at the Macworld Expo in New York City.

Features
Boasting over 3 gigaflops, which was the equivalant to a supercomputer at the time, it was marketed towards professional users. The Apple design team fit the cube's contents within an 8x8x8-inch space that used heat to avoid the need for a fan, making it extremely quiet. It shipped with a base configuration of 64 MB of RAM (expandable to 1.5 GB), a 20 GB hard drive, and a top-loading DVD-ROM drive. The Cube was somewhat expandable but requires smaller AGP cards because of its unique size. It featured 2 USB ports, 2 FireWire ports, and 2 different monitor connectors, lacked analog audio ports. Peripherals included were the pro keyboard and Mouse, and USB speakers with special adapter. There were two choices of LCD studio monitors available in 15" and 17" size. There was also Apple's last CRT monitor, a 17" model that somewhat resembled the previous CRT Studio Display but was shorter and more egg shaped in a completely transparent case.

Reception
The G4 Cube did not take off with consumers, generating only a third of projected sales. It was discontinued less than a year later, when Steve Jobs announced that it was being placed "on ice". Its replacement arrived in 2005 in the form of the Mac mini, which was more successful and remains in production today.



In popular culture
For the production of Star Trek: Enterprise in 2002, an array of sixteen Power Mac G4 Cubes running Macromedia Director were used to generate the screens of the Enterprise NX-01 in real time, with Michael Okuda acting as the system administrator.