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MacUser.co.uk reports that Apple's Power Mac G4 Cube development team has been dissolved, and that Cupertino has bought back some 3000 ($3.5 million-worth) of Cubes from CompUSA.

The majority of the Cube group has been laid off, with a few team members kept and transferred to other projects. The MacUser story notes that despite increasing standard RAM from 64Mb to 128Mb, replacing the DVD-ROM drive with CD-RW, and sweetening the software bundle, the Cube was selling poorly at CompUSA, and recent price cuts were not making much of a difference.

This is sad news, because the Cube is the most interesting desktop computer that Apple makes, and in the opinion of this writer, it represents the future much more than do the iMac or the G4 Power Mac towers.

The Cube is different, and consequently has been slow to catch on, but I hope that Apple will not completely abandon the concept, and will give the Cube time to develop a market. A consumer oriented, mass marketing operation like CompUSA, most of whose sales personnel are PC focused, and consequently conformist in their personal preferences and tastes, is not the ideal place to be developing a market for the Cube.

The MacUser story notes that while further development of the Cube will now merely be upgrades to faster processors and higher capacity storage media, their "sources" say the news should not be interpreted as an indication that the Cube is headed for oblivion. That at least is encouraging.

Desktop computers are too darned big. One of the reasons I am a PowerBook enthusiast is that I think small computers make a lot more sense. Flat panel LCD monitors are major step in the right direction, but so are smaller CPU form factors like the Cube.

I think that Apple has focused its marketing efforts for the Cube off target from the start. A large proportion of people I know who are considering the purchase of a Cube (including me) are thinking of it as an alternative to using a laptop as mainly a desktop substitute, not to buying an iMac or a Power Mac.

The "supercomputer in a nine inch square" advertising pitch has been largely a waste of time. People who care about the supercomputer hype, gigaflops, and so on, are not likely potential Cube customers. Such people are going to buy Power Mac G4 towers. The Cube's real sales potential is with people like me who want a small, reasonably fast alternative to using a PowerBook mostly as a desktop computer.

As an aside, I think one of the keys to this market is getting LCD flat panel monitor prices down out of the stratosphere, something that is happening this year. A reasonable combo price on a Cube/flat-panel display should help boost sales potential substantially.

The smartest thing Apple could do with the Cube, is to stick in the fast, cheap, IBM 750cxe 700 MHz G3 chip, and drop the price by another hundred dollars or two. However, it will be interesting to see what they will do with those 3000 Cubes repurchased from CompUSA.

Charles W. Moore

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