Dan Knight of Low End Mac says that "Pretty much everyone agrees on two things: the Cube is cool and the Cube is overpriced.

Dan offers a proposal to fix the bad part: Offer the Cube in lower-priced, lower powered versions. Specifically, along with the present 450 MHz and 500 MHz versions which are priced at $1,799 and $2,299 respectively, Dan says Apple should offer:

€ The Cube/400 selling for $1,399 with a 10 GB hard drive
€ The Cube/350 selling for $1,099 with a 7 GB had drive.

Dan says if he didn't think this made sense, he wouldn't propose it. In fact, he would go one step further and suggest Apple reduce the price of the current Cubes by $100 to help reduce the perceived price premium over the 400 MHz Power Mac. This would yield the following lineup:

€ Cube/350, 64 MB RAM, 7 GB hard drive, CD-ROM, $1,099
€ Cube/400, 64 MB RAM, 10 GB hard drive, DVD, $1,399
€ Cube/450, 64 MB RAM, 20 GB hard drive, DVD, $1,699
€ Cube/500, 128 MB RAM, 30 GB hard drive, DVD, $2,199

Advantages for Apple's bottom line would include better economies of scale to amortize development and tooling costs, greater choice and flexibility for customers (who, as Apple sometimes seems to forget, are ultimately always right), and, perhaos most important, "The larger the Cube user base, the more likely other companies are to produce peripherals that complement the Cube's styling. "

I enthusiastically agree with what Dan has to say here. In fact I would even go farther and suggest that Apple use IBM's new 750cx G3e chips in the lower end Cubes to maximize potential cost reduction.

Another possibility would be offering the Cube with a bundled monitor and some software as an integrated package at a price competitive with, say, the Dell Inspiron.

You can read Dan's column at:
http://lowendmac.com/musings/rescue.html

Charles W. Moore

.