It was $200 more than an equivalent PowerMac, which (at the time) themselves weren’t exactly known for being cheap.

Laptops are more expensive, but you get a tangible feature for your money. For $200, all I get is a bit more desk space (and a bit less expandability), and you know, I can buy more than a PowerMac worth of desk space $200.

I endorse almost all of the remarks made here, but especially bbum’s central tenet about how the thing sacrificed function in the name of form. Bill, you missed the observation that because the ports were on the bottom and the power button was on the top and far too easy to operate by mistake, it was extremely easy to pick the cube up for access to the underside and discover you’d switched it on. Consider William Gibson’s novel Pattern Recognition, where Cayce Pollard encounters some Cube quirks that are sufficiently familiar so as to sound to me like Gibson filing a bug report.

Cats? See also http://icanhascheezburger.com/ . No FLB ever managed to sit atop my Cube.

Dated? Yes, but then when it was launched in 1999 disks bigger than 120GB were new rare and expensive, there were no superdrives, 1.5GB of RAM was possible but impractical on grounds of cost; USB 2.0 did not exist; and so on.

Upgradable? Not really. But better than the iMac G3, and the Summer 2000 DV-SE I had was the best variant of that product line from that point of view. The stock 20GB IBM drive in my Cube was too noisy, so I put successively bigger quieter Seagates in it. Compared to that Cube, a PC with a fan sounded like somebody running an airliner engine test. And I used it as a silent webserver.

Lack of ports? Yes. I had Firewire devices daisychained off into the distance, and a 7-port USB hub. The Cube’s supplied speakers (looked like whatever the Pro speaker range was called, but they weren’t) required extra power so the Cube only had trick USB ports to supply it; but I decommissioned those speakers early on in favour of USB Soundsticks as they sounded nasty compared to the iMac+iSub. Clutter everywhere.

As I recall the Cube got invented because customers said they wanted it, after The Steve’s return to Apple in Dec 1996. People, including me, were expecting something 12″x12″x12″ in black-painted metal, not something 7″x5″x5″ in clear plastic. A Pro system in a funny-shaped case using a laptop motherboard perhaps, and certainly upgradable and practical. Possible now; but if I really wanted that sort of a Pro system now, I could buy one, provided I was prepared to have something with a case in a more practical shape.

MacBook Air? What, does that make my consumer MacBook a MacBook Heavier-Than-Air now?

As for the port/cable problems - I use the USB ports on the side of the keyboard for my printer, scanner, and memory sticks - yes that means I have to unplug one to use the other, but they’re right there on the keyboard - no tilting required. If I do need to plug in a USB device that needs more power (the keyboard port doesn’t carry a lot of power), I unplug the speakers from the back of the monitor, and use that port. I never have to tilt the Cube itself. And all my Firewire is daisy-chained, so there’s always an open port on the back of the last device on the chain.

And dust in the optical drive? I don’t know, it might be full of dust, but it still works great after 7 years and 3 months. But I don’t have cats, so I can’t address that concern.

The power switch is all the way on the other side of the cooling vent from the optical drive slot, so I’m not sure how anybody could accidently hit it while inserting a disc…

But I’d gladly put up with any perceived or actual inconvenience for the blessed silence of this machine. Oh, and it looks good, too.

As for the MacBook Air, it doesn’t do anything at all for me, but I remember reading all the negative comments about the Cube back when it first came out, and wondering how anybody could criticize such a beautiful machine that fit my every need. So, even though the MacBook Air isn’t for me, I’ll never criticize it, since I’m sure there are a lot of people out there for which it’s the perfect computer. I’ve often wondered if all the negative comments about the Cube affected it’s success…

There was actually a problem with static charge building on the acrylic case and triggering the (at least the initial) capacitance switches. I first noticed this when I was wiping a plastic desktop mat and it would sleep/unsleep/sleep the cube that was on it. So there is more there, there, that you might think…

But the silence is so sweet.

My sister had the machine for awhile, also, and I will add that she hated it.

Funny, but I used mine as a PC. Perhaps that’s why my experience was good and yours was less so?

It sat on the desk next to my bed. Stone silent. Powerful for its day. A computer you didn’t mind having out on display (or have we all forgotten how ugly towers and desktop PCs were back then?). It did everything I asked it to do, and did it well. I used it for years, it was on 24 hours a day.

I miss it (I gave it to a friend who needed a computer when my needs changed and I got a iBook).