Origin of the mid ranged Mac: the G4 Cube and Power Mac G5 SP
In 2000 Apple released a product that would not survive much longer than a year after release before quietly slipping into discontinuation. It was just three years prior that Steve Jobs returned to the company and with successes of the iMac and iBook behind him. During the keynote at MacWorld New York conference Steve Jobs announced toward the end of his address that he had just one more thing that would add another product to the Macintosh family (”and it’s not a laptop!”).
Proclaimed by the CEO as the most beautiful thing ever to come out of Apple, the new Mac was housed in a 8″ cube and punched the power of it’s bigger brother the Power Macintosh G4. With features to match the Power Mac’s and one of the most unique designs ever to grace a computer, the Power Macintosh G4 Cube (or just G4 Cube) should have been a very lucrative product.
Maybe it was the price coupled with buyers not quite knowing where the G4 Cube fit in relation to the the full sized Power Mac, the 8″ cube didn’t sell all that well even after a number of price decreases. In July 2001 the cube was “put on ice” in a press release with Apple stating there is a small chance they might reintroduce an upgraded model of the unique computer but there were no plans to do so in the near future.
Skip to October 2004 which saw the introduction of a new low end Power Macintosh G5 featuring a single processor based around the G5 platform that was introduced with the iMac G5. The new low end Power Mac provided an entry point to the Power Mac range but one that was crippled with a slower bus and fewer features of it’s bigger siblings. Poor sales of the new entry level Power Mac saw the model dropped quietly not long after the release of the revised Power Mac G5’s in June, 2005.
Continue to read Part II: Should Apple introduce a new Cube?