It was the summer of 2000. Other than Apple’s iMac computers (still in their fruity color phase) personal computers were pretty much big boring beige boxes. Computing testosterone was measured by how tall your tower was, which trumpeted your ability to expand and upgrade. Never mind the fact that most people never even added more RAM.

These “towering infernos” (and how long is it until they remake that film – never would be too soon - but, I digress) were kept out of sight at knee level to hide their “rugged good looks” and minimize the howl of their roaring fans.

In July of 2000 Steve Jobs stood on a stage at the Macworld Expo in New York City and introduced, with great pride, the Macintosh G4 Cube. An entire, powerful computer, housed in an 8”x8”x8” Lucite-enclosed cube (about the size of four stacked Mac minis). For it’s time, it was a revolutionary engineering feat. To insert a CD or DVD, you “dropped” the disk into a slot on the top of the Cube. When the disk was ejected, it popped up very much like a toaster.

The Cube had no fan – it was cooled convectively. The warm air rising through the Cube’s thermal vent decreased the pressure of the surrounding it, causing cooler air to be drawn in through vents in the Cube’s base.

Apple won many design awards for the Cube, but there was one glaring problem with it. Very few people bought it. Perhaps it was the price: $1799 before adding a monitor. Some questioned the Cube’s relative lack of expandability. For whatever reason, within a year Apple quietly “suspended production of the Cube indefinitely”, after selling about 150,000 units.

Not that the Cube wasn’t a capable and stylish computer. Heck, a I know of several Cubes still looking good and serving their masters right here in Bath. And, you know, if you saw one for the first time, you’d think it was new this year.

This year, in fact on Monday of this week, Steve Jobs stood on the sidewalk on Fifth Avenue in New York City and introduced, with great pride, a “flagship” Apple Retail Store in the shape of (you guessed it) a cube. Well, actually, the entrance to the store is a clear 32-foot glass cube with a luminous Apple logo suspended in the center. A glass spiral staircase (or a futuristic glass tube elevator) takes you down one floor to the showroom floor.

Once below ground, the Fifth Avenue Apple Store is pretty much like the 145-plus others. Workshops on pro and consumer software applications run all day. There’s a Genius Bar, staffed with experts that can answer your questions or do minor repairs on-site. Over 300 employees speak twenty different languages. However, unlike other stores and taking a page from another prominent New England retail store, Apple’s Fifth Avenue store will be open 24/7, 365 days a year.

Excessive? You bet. But, hey, it is “the En-y-cee”.

So, Apple’s Cube has gone full circle, from a computer that few people walked out of the store with, to a store people walk into to get a computer. How times change.

In other computer retail store news, Dull, er, I mean, Dell Computer announced this week that they’re going to test the retail waters again with two test stores in the Dallas and New York City areas. Unlike Apple Stores, you can’t walk out of the Dell stores with a new computer – you can plunk down your credit card and get a Dell in a couple of days in the mail. Yawn.

© 2006 Peter F. Zimowski