EEVblog #1211 - Apple's Most Beautiful Failure

Why did Apple's most beautiful product fail?
A look at the Apple PowerMac G4 Cube designed by Jonathan Ive.
A teardown and power-up.

#Apple #Macintosh #Fail

Bitcoin Donations: 38y7DE8HEHNj8fGDtUr4PkCn9nWxiorvvy
Litecoin: ML7oQokTwB38bgzzjLDbRV97HKAHuwRfHA
Ethereum: 0x11AceA38DCA9DbFfB4F35f3F746af65F9dED28ce

Support the EEVblog through Patreon!

Buy anything through that link and Dave gets a commission at no cost to you.

Stuff I recommend:

Donate With Bitcoin & Other Crypto Currencies!

[freeman]

Nowadays, instead of a convenient handle to access the inside, it would be conveniently soldered shut for "your protection".

[andljoy]

Replaceable ram AND gpu ! Man the guy who designed that would totoaly get fired today !

[williamforbes]

Remember when Apple made computers with repair technician's in mind? Dave Jones remembers.

[punkerReal]

"I see you're admiring our MyCube. It's fuelled by dreams and powered by imagination, "
Homer: “What does it do?"
Salesman: "You should ask yourself "What can I do for it?"
Homer is on his knees in front of the cube:OK, what can I do for you?Please I'm begging you..."
Salesman: "Sir, it's not even turned on yet."
Homer: "But it's glowing."
Salesman: "That light confirms that it's off."

[dan_]

I never realised how accurate all the Apple marketing parodies were until I heard Jonathan Ive speak just now.

[markday]

We called it the Power Mac toaster (for both the CD ejecting vertically, and the heat from the central core).

[marcKingdom]

keeping cats off the warm air vent flowing from the top was almost impossible. And then the touch sensitive power button would trip.

[EEVblog]

BTW, I'm now lighting both the talking head and bench shots with my 95 CRI Aputure studio lights, let me know if you notice a colour quality difference from previous videos.

[nikmilosevic]

Yes upgradable, one of mine has dual G4 500MHz with Geforce 4mx card, have another with dual 450MHz and an ATI 8500. The space below is for a fan, which you will need to install if you run dual CPU.

[FixingOldStuff]

Oh, and getting a matching HD was indeed a problem, no rubber dampers and the PC case transmitted every little bit of HD vibration to the table, so it became surprisingly loud.

The HD of choice back then came surprisingly from Seagate, not actually known as a builder of quiet HDs, but the Barracuda ATA IV/V were incredibly quiet and worked great. Great times ;-)

[AZREDFERN]

I remember when these came out, and I used to drool over them at Fry's. But I was only 11 at the time, and even then I realized the overall price was absolutely outlandish and unobtainable.
I was using a garage sale MacII at the time, and the G4 (or any modern Mac) at the time looked like a space ship... and cost more than one.

[alexc]

13:37 "It's upside down so all the electrons are gonna fall out" Good one haha

[krnlg]

25:12 That CRT is beautiful - certainly a good look for an "end of an era" device to send out the old cathode ray tube display with a bang!

[gudenau]

I'm sure that inspired the trash can of today.

[thenaimis]

Am I the only one that thinks it looks like a box of kleenex tissue?

[DennisBishop]

I have one of these G4 Cubes serving faithfully as the doorstop to my office. In a previous iteration, I made it into a suggestion box that I placed outside our IT office. Still very useful after all these years!

[Super]

Someone should just stuff a NUC inside one and run a hackintosh inside a macintosh.

[hikaru-live]

I think you can upgrade the IDE hard drive with a 32GB or 64GB CompactFlash card on a passive adapter board. That gives you solid state storage and eliminates the last moving part in this computer.

[YaFunklord]

I used it as a 100% silent movie box in my bedroom during the xvid days.
You didn't need to use flash memory, Linux laptop mode and maxed out RAM and the noisy hdd would only spin up once every 24h.

[ericcindycrowder]

We had one of these at my work back in the day. I was in charge of maintaining this wonderful device. The industrial design was stunning. I love how the pull handle is spring loaded and dampened.