EEVblog #1211 - Apple's Most Beautiful Failure

hi check this out it is arguably one of Apple's most beautiful products they've ever designed and sold look at it it's the Mac g4 cube as its called or the Power Mac g4 cube released at the Macworld Expo in New York in 2000 by Steve Jobs himself and what we've miniaturized it into is an eight inch cube unbelievable this is a stunning product quite possibly the most beautiful product we've ever designed the computer is in an 8 inch cube and it's suspended in a stunning crystal clear enclosure and it's just a thing of beauty look at it it's a it's an 8 inch Macintosh g4 cube suspended in a gorgeous acrylic case and it was an absolutely groundbreaking product in terms of visual appearance miniaturization and engineering brilliance as we'll take a look at but unfortunately it was almost a complete failure discontinued less than a year later let's take a look at it look it's fou this is actually the Power Mac g5 beautiful aluminium case R this is a later one than the g4 but it's a similar size you can see how large this thing is so imagine this is the Power Mac g4 which was available at the time and it was a leading computer at the time this one is one quarter the size not only the area but the volume as well because the g4 was about 16 inches by 16 inches by 8 inches deep yes for you Yanks I'm using inches and this is famously an 8 inch cube 8 by 8 by 8 awesome and it was essentially all of the g4 Power Mac stuffed into an 8 inch cube unbelievable so this was designed by Jonathan Ives and clearly it's a homage to the next cube Steve Jobs's famous next computer company that he founded after he left Appl when that was the mid 90s and then it was acquired once again a by Apple and it came back so clearly that was the inspiration for this the cube form factor but Jonathan dyes wanted to minimize the clutter hence he wanted to look like it was floating off the bench like this we'll see why it has a minimum of cables coming out shortly and it's housed in this gorgeous single piece Plexiglas case and it's simply stunning but I think as is visually appealing as it is and you can argue this is probably one of the most appealing products Apple has ever designed the heart of the default cube is incredibly complex I mean it's it's supercomputer but we were looking for a final design that was very simple but the design that left you with a sense of well of course that's the most unnatural the most elegant solution possible all the kind of functional characteristics are taken care of but then there's another level of aesthetic that just lifts it and gives its spirit I think that's part about this is actually the engineering that goes in it because this is actually almost completely silent there is no fan in this even though if they packed in a Power Mac g4 processor along with an ATI Rage hundred and twenty eight graphics card which was pretty decent at the time into this 8-inch weight each cube that had no fan and the thermal solution and engineering solution to this is one of the most remarkable things about this looks aside so it's a double whammy not only in the looks department you can see the vent hole on the top completely passive check this out this is my most favorite part of this and even better than the looks look at this just pop a handle on top cry here look at that the whole thing lifts out and you can access all of the components and then just put it back there's no cables where's Willy nothing put it back in pop it it's ready to go oh it's beautiful so let's take a look at the design and engineering that went into this thing and we'll talk about why it ultimately failed so let's check it out in more detail and I will provide high-res photos over on eevblog comm of all the teardown of this so definitely check that out if you want to see it in more detail as I said it's a gorgeous single piece acrylic or a plexiglass case on this thing and it's absolutely beautiful for those playing along at home the Power Mac g4 cube designed by Apple in California model number m7w eight six and you can see that on the top here we have the top loading auto load in power loading whatever you want to call it CD slot so you just push it in there's no eject button none of that rubbish we've got the grill on the top for the as we'll see inside this has the natural convection ventilation we've got some more vent holes along the top here I guess they and we might figure out why they aren't needed those later and this is actually the power button and it is touch sensitive and I don't know if that was a that was a first at the time but certainly through the case and through the Plexiglas thing that's absolutely remarkable and the monitor and I believe the keyboard had a similar like art touch controls on it as well and there are like a couple of little ports down here but they don't go anywhere so we'll take a look at those let's have a look at the bottom of it assembled by Uncle Sam in the United States of America beautiful this model is the four 50 megahertz one so this is the lower end one the higher end one was the 500 megahertz model one Meg K 64 Meg of RAM so this one wasn't the fully option up one so this was the cheapskates 1799 version but that fantastic pop out handle look at that with the Kensington lock as well we've got Ethernet I believe you could get a one gig option for it at which I think was stunning at the time dual firewire interface dual USB but it actually has more USB ports than this as I explained in a minute and of course classic modem interface because we are talking about the year 2000 and a DC power input yes this does not have the mains power adapter inside hence why it can get so small and comp and then it had the Apple display connector it looks like a DVI and it is kind of but it's not physically are compatible and it's the it's the Apple a DC connector and this actually provides power and USB through to the monitor so those monitors were powered through one single cable to reduce cable clutter and that's absolutely brilliant or standard VGA here and as you can no doubt see that is a plug-in card as we'll see inside but it also had a little reset button on the bottom just in case you know she locked up so yes the only way that we're going to get a g4 Power Mac into a cube this size was to have the power pack external and you can see the physical size of this thing it's you know it's absolutely enormous the cable hasn't fared well over the last 20 years and it's just a four pin interface like that but Universal what mains input and it's a 205 watt power adapter designed by Apple in California and assembled in Thailand I don't my Thai viewers but it was actually manufactured by Delta electronics of course Apple that most companies don't roll their own power supplies just leave it up to the professionals oh it's even got a little white Apple logo in there which does vanish when you get it in the right angle of light I miss your color Apple logo bring it back and it did optionally come with an apple while an airport wireless adapter if you had the wireless adapter technically you could get online with only two cables just the power cable and the monitor cable coming out as I said would have the monitor the power for the monitor and the USB as well so you'd only have two cables on your desk brilliant so the only thing that penetrates the acrylic case of these two metal studs which would attach this backplate well this top plate as we'll see in the teardown but even those are finished very well nice and flush looks very nice but I'm sure there was much swearing in the design team when they realized that they really can't get away without having these two pins like holding in this top part of it because as you'll see when we slide it out all the top part just retains integration we the acrylic case so it had to be secured somehow and I'm probably I'm sure they went through like I'll be can glue it in place so we don't have to have these because I'm sure they would have like fussed over that completely but if anyone knows anyone from the design team please let us know so here we go by far the best part of this you just click it it springs up like that ah thing of beauty is a joy forever look at that and it just comes out and then you can access all the stuff fantastic and you can see down inside the case there's just the vent holes there I'm not sure how they would have stopped like dust accumulating down there cuz you can't really there's no filter on that you can just see right through that and here's the surround for the touch button down there as you can see there's absolutely no wires inside this thing and it looks like it's gonna say are they a little rubber baby buggy bumpers rubber compliance but because there's no fan in here apart from the well the only thing that spins inside this thing is the hard drive so yeah I thought maybe they had some compliance on there but anyway the things so the touch sensing little ring spins around in there but that's obviously a window a capacitively transparent window because it's capacitive sensing so it's got to detect that and as you can see the middle case there's only one seam in here but even attention to detail like that look at the spot welding on that large plate in there that's absolutely beautiful you can see we've got plastic windows here and they actually it looks like metal but that would be a part of the plastic plug there so yeah you don't want everything metal as we'll see and just look at the access available on this there's our ATI graphics card has to be right angle of course they have to get that riser board that comes out and then goes out at right angles I'm not sure what is the highest graphics card you can put inside this thing three DIMM slots they were above what technology were they Beulah Beulah then over on this side you can see our hard drive in there we sure we have to unlock it unscrew it somehow and we got our little backup they're little lithium job' that's replaceable very nice and you can see why we had the plastic ports before because this is an antenna and they've got a match in one on the other side here and that goes into the optional Apple Airport card which slots inside here it's very nicely designed and look at that just drop down is absolutely brilliant so that's where it slides in there they've got the contacts down in there and a flat flex which goes over brilliant design I love it regardless of the orientation of your cue and daddy give you a better coverage around your cube because this thing is remember mostly metal shielded so yeah doesn't have any visible external antennas very nice and here's our power supply board the output of this as you'll see on the top side it's a very thin board it's got a connector down in there that plugs into some other part of the system and the top side of it up here that plugs into the main motherboard down in there you can see that goes off under there to your hard drive and to your DVD drive as well which is up in there and that's your flat flex connector interface through to your wireless card and it doesn't seem trivial to get the video card out it's not like a slides out they've got a bracket up here which you unscrew which connects to the corner of the video card if we get that off we might be able to slide up the riser but it's it's a little bit how you're doing it's a bit disappointing after the big fancy cable and whatnot so that just gets caught Oh at least the Rams reasonably easy but it's a bit hard to get your fingers in there though but still you can change them it's almost a shame really to you know with the otherwise good engineering in this just to see the point one inch header going over there to your reset buttons on the bottom it's a bit how you're doing and then you've got their power going over to over to here near your power supply and other like the 12-volt power supply board which is powering your hard drive and your DVD and everything else so there to be a high current one they've got some more regulation down here but that's all your local digital stuff on the board and that just goes over to your little riser board there that converts the PCI interface and of course that one is your power going off to your video card Apple Computer there is the main processor board there that's one big custom LSI job' that's upside down so all the electrons are going to fall out and as I said like there's not a huge amount more in there really you know there's just some interface and glue logic and power supply and stuff like that nothing real fancy pantsy Oh gotta loosen chipset over there it looks like a TI job' down there is that for the USB and there's a modem card for you modem aficionados it's a connect sent there's your SSI memory down there there looks like your isolation trenny that's cut out into the board there to keep the low profile nice it's a P kitty do under they've done the same for the electrolytic cup under there as well they have just him a right-angle embedded that in the board profile was important checked by Hongkong telecom Compaq Computer Corporation sacrilege someone's at a diddle there's another big Lucent job down in there check that out I can't readily find a data sheet for that but obviously that's tied into the modem here well I check out those chokes on the USB ports your enormous just pan around the power supply slowly there for you aficionados knock yourself out so it looks like this extra grill here on the top once again that's for our passive convection cooling that actually lines up with this slot here which is it goes over the video card so the passive heatsink on the video card yes they got the fins in the right orientation look at that because if you had the heatsink like that it wouldn't have been as effective to get the convection flowing from here which would have been down like that of course that comes through the bottom and rises up and straight out the top there well somebody had fun on the that's how they get the spring-loaded handle on this thing there's one of those clips either side oh it's just beautiful it really makes the product yeah somewhat surprisingly there's actually a whole bunch of wasted space down in there it looks like they designed it for what seems like a full-height DVD drive because that's the top part of the disk loading mechanism but it looks like they've put in a half-height job' and did you lose wasted space shame by the way Steve actually sold this short he said it was an 8 inch cube but it's not it's actually less than that it's about seven point eight inches and the actual metal itself is like six point eight by six point eight oh by seven there you go all the most remarkable things in this is the capacitive touch sensor on the top here and look they've got a little like an inner plastic thing that's actually just holding the power LED in there which but there's a metal ring going around the outside of that so presumably they're sensing the proximity of your finger but it's got to go through the case see if your finger is going to be like a fair height above that like that that's probably why they need that lover rather large ring around there hmm there's the board for it and you can see the lead going in the back of it and I've got a big metal shield a can around there so lots of sensitive stuff under that they've gone to a lot of effort with that board just for a capacitive touch since button now it's like like every single a 50 cent micro has got like 12 you know a couple of dozen capacitive touch sensor inputs no worries and it looks like it took 56 versions of the firmware in that microcontroller to get it right I'm sure Steve would have fussed over that just fingering this thing day in day out Oh secret button wonder what that does and you can see and the secret sauce for the thermals is you can see right through there you can see my hand at the back hello you can see right through so passive heatsink of course they've got the fins in the right direction if they didn't you wouldn't get your passive convection flow right up and you need really deep thin on your heatsink like that to get the massive surface area required to actually and the spacing as well you can't have them too close together because that interferes there's lots of complex are thermal modeling and everything involved in heat sinks if you really want to get down to it in fact I've got some stuff I'm working on with the micro supply at the moment I've got somebody actually analyzing a fan actually analyzing the the heating performance of the model in performance of that and it's like it's really interesting stuff anyway there's just a tip a separate top heatsink there just to get take the edge off but of course the fins aren't in the right direction for the convection of convection but just adding some thermal bulk and some fins on there there it helps the hard drive actually doesn't come out with too much of a fight you just take the heatsink off the top like that with three screws and then the hard drive just slides out of the cage there are no screws in the bottom side there's three screws in the top side here we go in a MAC store for you Mac store fanboys and this is the tight-ass 20 gig model war end warranty end okay I think it's way out of warranty anyway people upgrade these with that solid-state drives because this thing is bloody noisy let me tell you in fact it's so annoying I would actually prefer to have a fan in it to actually give some low frequency you know drone noise just to like get rid of the high-pitched crap of this listen to it so yeah it's probably the you know the bearings starting to go on this puppy he probably didn't sound like that but you know the hard drives light annoying by the way they are very serious about the AMC compliance on this thing look at the nice little RF gaskets all around there that's very nice and around the top of the case as well right around the outside edges going right around sealing that bottom edge of the case absolutely brilliant love it I would really love to show you the PowerPC g4 processor but unfortunately it is and here which looks pretty difficult to get out probably have to get out the whole motherboard and everything else I think it's assembled as part of the motherboard and then put in you can see it's on its own little daughter board there and the heatsink is it's on the top well that gets the bottom side in this image the bottom side there and we've got the big ass passive heatsink on the bottom and then just a high-speed in a comport the board interconnect under there connecting it up to the processor that's why you got all those vias down there that would be a big more layer board and they're fanning those out and to go straight into the big ass main LSI chipset there there we go we can see some of the processor assembly down in there see that big ass choke there it's got some local voltage regulation what I am quite disappointed about though is that they don't have any rubber baby buggy bumper isolation on the hard drive so to prevent a vibration getting through to the chassis so that I think that could be amplifying the noise somewhat so I think that's a yeah that's an oversight the only thing that's a bit loosey-goosey on this is this panel up here that covers the CD drive so yeah anyway I don't see how to get that out of there without like taking off the outer bracket watch this when I put on my finger near it it's on at the moment look at that mm-hm if you leave your finger there I can turn this baby off hold it there long enough yeah sure and it just dims out nice I really wish this was field of vision because can't feel the vibration much on there from that annoying whine in hard drive but the hard drive heatsink wow I can really feel that vibration but it is coming through the case that's for sure I can't feel a bit it is actually at NU ater but yeah that's not good and that little card down in there that's the that's the ethernet adapter as I said I think you could actually get a one gig bit per second option on this thing it's a law I'm booting it up out of the case there it seems intermittent I've had a few issues with her to be trying to get it going for some time yeah that harddrive want to be replacing that anyway Mac OS 9.2 no kidding it didn't stop there shut down properly whoo the smiley face of course you can install out later versions to the Mac OS oh the Apple fans gone boy we got our little watch I don't know is that have a name I don't know I don't use Apple Lee products these fruity products anyway we're in like Flynn check it out tell you what's a slow a wet wait oh you gotta have America Online fantastic here you go Mac OSX 9.2 - Mac OS rom 9.0 one building memory 320 Meg of now someone's been running weather studio on here they've updated the firmware so presumably have updated it to the latest job' packet for teachers Internet Explorer well what what wha there's eevblog comm I guess it doesn't work too well on old versions of Internet Explorer oops as terrible Muriel but the eevblog forum works at redundant ah hey the add up the top doesn't work a couple of the ads don't work yep well you still read all the for me goodness check it out I worries I've had known for 10 minutes now just doing internet er stuff and if you're wondering about the thermals well I can bet that's probably gone up by 5 degrees tops the thing that is the warmest of course is the video card but I can still certainly keep my hand on there no worries so yeah when is it maybe fifty couldn't even be bothered getting the thermal camera out it's not that big a deal I'd really have to you know flood the guts out of this thing to check the thermal performance won't do that in this video but certainly CPU it's not much coming through and I've got it horizontal like that so why was this groundbreaking visual and engineering masterpiece a failure and they discontinued less than a year later well pretty much comes down to price and mark there was nothing to do with the engineering of this thing which was absolutely brilliant was nothing to do with the peel of it which I like people still lust after this thing today it has a huge fan base as one of the most you know remarkable computers come consumer computers engineered well ultimately it worked came down to price in pretty much and what was bundled with it this was fantastic and you'd get your keyboard you get your brilliant keyboard with it you get your nice Harman Kardon speakers and everything's absolutely fantastic but it didn't come with a monitor so the consumers were looking at I love this okay where's the monitor oh that's extra you got to buy it extra and they came they released three monitors at the same time as this one was a gorgeous looking CRT display but CRTs were pretty much going the way of the dodo that that was the 17-inch a flat screen CRT fully calibrated at the factory 499 dollars worth of the retail price of the monitor this unit was released at $17.99 which was kind of an okay price but as I said it didn't include the maunder and if you won one of the newfangled sexy LCD monitors with it they are at least two monitors at the same time one was a 15-inch thousand and twenty four by 768 LCD and it was pretty nice-looking a nice companion to this thing but it was 999 dollars extra or you could get the new Apple Cinema Display which looked absolutely fantastic and it was larger 17-inch but that was more expensive again so really the total package that people were weighing up the pros and cons versus the regular g4 and the value just wasn't there people weren't willing to pay for the sexy look at this thing and you know your average Joe Bloggs consumer just was probably confused that there was no monitor included so it was like a bundling problem maybe they just bundled it with the monitor from the get-go and made it a bit cheaper and more competitive price would have been a winner everyone would have had one of these so let that be a lesson to you no matter how well you engineer a product if you don't get the marketing right Evans all things which you think may not matter like bundle in a monitor with it can be a complete flop that's a real shame anyway the Power Mac g4 cube absolutely gorgeous I still have not seen a better engineered computer today I don't think it's absolutely groundbreaking for its day and even today if they rerelease this it would have been stunning but I guess this turned into like the Mac Mini I guess which was you know kind of a follow up to this absolute stunning product visually and engineering-wise hats off to the design team behind this thing so let us know in the comments down below if you had one of these did you lust after are you still using one of these gorgeous little things ah beautiful so I hope you enjoyed that video if you did please give it a big thumbs up and you can subscribe down in the corner as well and check out my other videos at the end of this and as always you can discuss down below and the comments are over on the EEV blog forum catch you next time be good [Music]

Channel: EEVblog

Views: 244,967

Keywords: eevblog, video, apple g4 cube, macintosh g4 cube, powermac g4, power mac g4 cube, power mac g4 cube teardown, apple macintosh, power mac, steve jobs, jonathan ive, apple cube, apple power mac, apple computer, macintosh

Id: uawHtD4eWhE

Length: 27min 58sec (1678 seconds)

Published: Tue May 14 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

It didn't sell well because for the same money you could get a well optioned G4 Power Mac. I knew one person who justified paying the extra premium for the Cube. He was a photographer and he had a tiny work area, so he was willing to pay more to gain extra space.

[u/vswr]

Love this guy’s videos. He’s SO EXCITED and PASSIONATE about EVERYTHING.