Apple - Products - Power Mac G4 Cube

Presenting the Power Mac G4 Cube: a supercomputer miraculously engineered into an eight-inch cube, suspended in a stunning crystal-clear enclosure.

Though it’s less than one quarter the size of most PCs, the G4 Cube delivers far greater performance. With its built-in Velocity Engine, the G4 processor reaches speeds of over one billion calculations per second. Humbling even the fastest Pentium III. And giving you more than enough horsepower for the most demanding uses, from desktop publishing to making Desktop Movies, and from playing ultra-realistic 3D games to enjoying the latest DVD movies.

The 450MHz Power Mac G4 Cube comes ready for action with Mac OS 9, 64MB of high-performance RAM, 1MB of backside level 2 cache, a capacious 20GB Ultra ATA/66 hard disk drive, DVD-ROM drive with DVD-Video playback, and the ATI RAGE 128 Pro graphics card with 16MB of graphics memory.

Amazingly, we figured out how to cool this enormous G4 power without a fan, making this one of the quietest computers ever built. Running in virtual silence, the G4 Cube doesn’t distract you from more important things — like thinking. This also lets you appreciate the pristine audio quality of the pair of Apple-designed Harman Kardon stereo speakers that bring hi-fidelity sound to your movies, music and games.

The G4 Cube is also the first computer to come standard with the Apple Pro Mouse, for perfect precision on almost any surface. The optical tracking engine tracks movement 1500 times per second for pinpoint cursor control. It’s ultrasensitive, too. In fact, the entire surface is a button, ergonomically designed so you can rest your finger wherever it’s most comfortable. Since we’ve eliminated the mouse ball, you get a mouse that doesn’t skip, stick or need cleaning.
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The key to everything
The Power Mac G4 Cube comes with a 108-key Apple Pro Keyboard with 15 full-size function keys, full document navigation controls, full-size inverted T cursor keys, audio control keys and a disk-eject key. Lefty? No problem: the keyboard has a USB port on either side, so you can set it up for right — or left-handed mouse use and still have a port to plug in your digital camera, Palm OS-based handheld or other USB device.

The 108-key professional keyboard with 15 full-size function keys, full document navigation controls, full-size inverted T cursor keys, audio control keys and a disk-eject key.

Less is more
In another first, the G4 Cube connects to your display in an entirely new way, thanks to another bit of nifty engineering. It’s called the new Apple Display Connector (ADC), and it reduces desktop clutter even further by combining power, video and USB signals on a single slim cable.

The single-connection ADC lets you attach your Power Mac G4 Cube to your choice of three displays of equally stunning design. The 17-inch (16-inch viewable) Apple Studio Display features a Natural Flat Diamondtron CRT that cuts glare and provides images of extraordinary sharpness. The 15-inch flat-panel Apple Studio Display features a liquid crystal screen that delivers a pure digital image from the G4 Cube, with no image degradation and absolutely zero flicker. And the 22-inch all-digital Apple Cinema Display — the largest LCD monitor available — gives you more than two pages of workspace (or playspace, as the case may be) and retains its brilliant colors over a wide range of viewing angles.

True, it looks like it belongs in the Museum of Modern Art. But the G4 Cube is really a thoroughbred supercomputer that belongs right on your desk.

Reactions:

“The Cube is Beautiful”
“The company that has long stood for style and innovation in a sea of industrial, me-too computers has now introduced a top-of-the-line, powerful machine that is simply the most gorgeous personal computer I've ever seen or used. And I've seen most of them.”

—	Walter S. Mossberg The Wall Street Journal

“Classic beauty”
“I suppose some things would move me to choose Windows, if, say, the alternative was eating rats. Both are acquired tastes. But the new Macintosh G4 Cube computer, like the Parthenon in Athens, is a thing of classic beauty.”

—	Peter H. Lewis New York Times

Ingenuity Cubed
“I’ve tried out and appreciated most of Apple’s recent models, but the Cube is the one I really wish I could keep.”

—	Henry Norr San Francisco Examiner

The Transparent Cube
“The G4 Cube’s most striking visual effect is transparency, in its shell and its components like the optical mouse and crystal-ball-like speakers. Entire teams of engineers had to work on its specially molded plastic, going with an optical-grade polymer that would resist scratches and modulate the way light would refract through the surface.”

—	Steven Levy Newsweek

Like Christmas Morning
“Setting it up at The Examiner … reduced otherwise jaded journalists to anxious kids on Christmas morning, waiting for Santa to kick them down the latest and greatest from Cupertino. People literally gasp when they see this thing.”

—	Alan T. Saracevic San Francisco Examiner

“The most beautiful”
“OK. I admit, it’s hard for me to be objective about ‘the cube.’ It’s quite simply the most beautiful personal computer I’ve ever seen. Packing a 450MHz PowerPC G4 processor and everything else most users will ever need into an eight-inch cube suspended in a stunning crystal-clear enclosure, it’s one of the most amazing pieces of engineering Apple’s ever produced.”

—	Bob Levitus Houston Chronicle

Ice & Platinum
“The Cube is a work of art … For lack of a more emotive description, the Cube looks like it should be floating in an enormous glass of water — it’s an ice sculpture with a block of platinum trapped inside. It is a thing of beauty.”

—	Andrew Gore Macworld

Cube Style
“The Cube sets a new standard in style for Macs and PCs, There’s no cooling fan, so it`s quiet except for the sound of the hard disk. Cable clutter is minimized with a new design that puts the power, video and USB signals on a single cable.”

—	Chris Cobbs Orlando Sentinel

The Apple Store offers convenient online ordering—24 hours a day, every day.

See the new Power Mac Cube ad.

Learn more about the design of the G4 Cube in this 6 Minute Video.

Both are desktop supercomputers, that can deliver a sustained performance of over one gigaflop, yet the Power Mac G4 Cube delivers this power in concentrated form as it is less than one fourth the size of a Power Mac G4.

See the Power Mac G4 Cube in QuickTime VR.

Make the connection
Connecting to the Internet is a snap. The Power Mac G4 Cube comes with built-in 10/100BASE-T Ethernet networking for broadband access, and a built-in 56K V.90 modem. Plus, the G4 Cube is AirPort-ready for wireless networking.

FireWire and USB cable

Just plug and play
The G4 Cube has two 400Mbps FireWire ports and two USB ports. So you can attach a printer, scanner, external hard disk, DV camera or camcorder — or a combination thereof — with plug-and-play ease of use.

Drop a hint, show your stuff or share your love. Send a PowerMac G4 Cube iCard.

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