| The Cube, First Impressions by a Creative Pro
All right! I got my G4 Cube. How nice it is.
My readers demand a review. I serve to live.
...Where to start? there are so many aspects. Well OK, let's just bite into it, and hope we get it all covered.
For me, the Cube is pretty much the perfect personal computer in the beginning of the twenty first Century. For certain users, naturellement. It is not the perfect computer for the home user on a budget. That would be the iMac. And it is not the perfect computer for the video or music professional, that would be the G4 multiprocessor with its big expansion capacity.
But you will notice that this leaves a good many customers! The Cube is the perfect computer for the user who A: is not on a budget enough that he will want the iMac for financial reasons. B: does not work with video or music to the degree that he needs multiprocessors or specialized expansion cards.
This would be:
1: Steve Jobs
2: Me
3: Home business owners
4: Executives
5: Artists and designers
6: Power users
7: Anybody who wants a silent, beautiful computer, and can and will pay for the privilege.
The dominant impression I get from the Cube right from the beginning is one of quality. This thing is so wonderfully solid.
Yes, it is beautiful, in an understated way. Pictures don't do it justice. And it is a different kind of beauty than the iMac's. While I love the iMac and would happily use it except for my need of a larger monitor, there is no denying that it is designed to look like what it is: a consumer machine. It is damn pretty, but in a slightly "plastic" way. Not so the Cube. That one is high class pretty. The iMac is the girl who gets the whistles on the street, and the Cube is the girl you want to marry. The girl who is strong, and who stays beautiful down the years.
The iMac is designed to be beautiful to people who don't care for technology. The Cube is designed to be beautiful to people who do.
I pulled out the core of the machine before I set it up, and if not for the big number of different cables tying it down now, I would do so again once in a while just to admire the insides. They just... feel so good. You can feel that this is one damn well-built machine. It has a solidity, and at the same time an airyness inside that lets the chimney function air cooling system do its stuff without help from noisy fans. It is simply damn well built.
I would say that it is built so well that it is now made more clear than ever how much we need OS X. To have something that well built and high quality that still crashes once in a while is just... stupid. But once OS X is here, along with most of the apps in native format for that system (which will take a while), then... cooooool.
We are talking class all the way. Skipping lightly over the fact that it took two years for Apple to correct the awful keyboard and mouse, the new ones are really topnotch. I used a MacAlly keyboard, which was not bad. But the look and the feel of it next to the new Apple keyboard... forget about it.
If I have to complain about something, it is the length of the USB cables for the keyboard, the mouse, and the speakers. They are all exactly long enough for the positions Apple consider optimal, and for use with a new Apple monitor (which has USB ports). Not an centimeter longer. If you want to put the speakers further apart, or want the Cube anywhere but right next to the monitor, or want to sit back with the keyboard in your lap, you are just boffed. I mean seriously, would a foot or two of extra cable ruin Apple's budget? (You can get extension cables, but it really should not be necessary.)
For the past year, I have used a PowerBook 400 (bronze keyboard) as my main computer, for the past couple of months with an external Mitsubishi Diamond Plus 19 inch monitor (which is excellent). That is a damn good machine. The main reasons that I got the Cube also are that 1: I need a backup machine. I live off my web sites, and I can't live with being offline for days, should something happen to the machine. 2: The hard disk was getting full, and also it is kinda slow, which comes with the territory with portables.
The Cube of course is faster processor wise, especially for apps optimized for Altivec, which for me means Photoshop. This is nice. And since I got the top model (500 MHz) it also comes with the faster 30 meg hard disk (Optional for the 450 MHz model), which really makes a difference when you come from a portable. Finder operations, starting apps, etc, really zips along. (I went whole hog and got the machine with 512 megabyte of RAM. I often run several big programs at once, and in my experience you get trouble whenever you are close to the limit of your installed memory. Plus being able to run everything without Virtual Memory should be optimum.)
I put in a session of optimizing a bunch of images for the web. Both opening files and using filters happened as fast as I could push the keys. Just, prrrrrrrrrrrr! Wonderful.
I got the Cube not the least for its quiet operation. As you may be aware, it is cooled only by updraft through the inside of the machine, and so has no fan to make noise. I have my main computer in my living room, and I use it at all times of the day and night, for designing, working with images, writing, surfing, e-mailing, studying, playing music, and reading. So I really appreciate a machine that does not make noise. The hard disk is slightly louder than the one in the PowerBook, but it is a much faster disk, so that is to be expected. If I want real silence, for instance when I am reading stuff from the web late at night, I can power down the disk, and the silence is total. But that extreme option is only for the hypersensitive artiste types like me.
Some people have trouble seeing what niche market the Cube is for. They can't see the wood for all the trees. The Cube is not the special computer, it is the other ones that are. iMac is the budget computer. The pro G4 dual processor is for multimedia creatives needing all the power they can get.
And the Cube... well, the Cube is for the rest of us.
- Stobblehouse |
