The Cube was a marvel of design in so many ways and so easy to open and work with, the only real issue was the hardware of the day was not powerful enough.
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Apple Working on Two New Mac Pro Desktops, One of Which Will Be Reminiscent of Power Mac G4 Cube
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I know it's a quibble, but... I'm getting tired of that conceptual image. The "less than half the size" miniMacPro is really less than one-quarter the size of its larger sibling.
It's true, a Cube-sized Pro would be similar in size to the size of the conceptual image, but this is basic solid geometry, folks.
If you halve the height (20.8"/52.9 cm including feet and handles), halve the depth (17.7"/45 cm) and perhaps even halve the width (8.58"/28 cm)... 3189 cu in/59,248 cc vs. 357 cu in/7420 cc. So let's not halve the width - 714 cu in/14,840 cc - seems about 25% of the size to me.
It's true, a Cube-sized Pro would be similar in size to the size of the conceptual image, but this is basic solid geometry, folks.
If you halve the height (20.8"/52.9 cm including feet and handles), halve the depth (17.7"/45 cm) and perhaps even halve the width (8.58"/28 cm)... 3189 cu in/59,248 cc vs. 357 cu in/7420 cc. So let's not halve the width - 714 cu in/14,840 cc - seems about 25% of the size to me.
The cube failed because it was over priced. For just a little more, you could get a full sized PowerMac G4 with more power and better expandability. They didn’t sell enough of them to make it worth keeping around, and the cracks in the acrylic enclosure didn’t help.
I converted my Power Mac G4 Cube into a Macquarium 
Sorry, saved photo from FB so the res is terrible.
Sorry, saved photo from FB so the res is terrible.
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Pushing the handle and lifting it out felt like something out of Star Trek. I loved it and I think mine is still somewhere in my shed. But yeah, performance was not its strong suit.
Darth Tulhu
macrumors 68020
Yes, sorry, I meant since 2011/2012-ish, when they started soldering/gluing everything down.
Sounds great, but it's gonna make it even more difficult now to sell my 2019 Mac Pro. Been trying since October. No one seems to want them, so I'm stuck with it. I need the cash, not a machine I can't use anymore (the pandemic destroyed my business).
Don't they already have that? A faster than anybody core?
What they need is more of them, it's the only thing intel has got to hold itself.
And that is surely coming along with the extra versatility (GPU, TB, etc...) the M1 currently lacks.
Software that is not parallellizable won't be any slower on a chip with lots of cores. On the contrary, it's possible such a chip will have 8 or 16 high speed cores for single-threaded processes, and then 64 or 128 for applications that benefit from having many threads.
I always had a soft spot for the design of The Cube, I was sad to see that it never really gained traction.
Perhaps they'll revisit Hartmut Esslinger's early Apple computer and tablet designs
Like the Baby Mac:
Perhaps they'll revisit Hartmut Esslinger's early Apple computer and tablet designs
Like the Baby Mac:
It is my favourite too. I used to drool over it in the store, but couldn’t afford it then..... now I can
For my daily use the macpro is overkill so something between a mini and full pro is ideal. Really I will buy no matter what it looks like, but a cube is a cherry on top.
It appears the rounded corners on everything is going, hence a cube makes more sense in the aesthetics.Can't wait to hear the next rumor about the trashcan coming back. It's matter of time at this point, reading those "news"
I never minded the trash can though.
How upgradable will the Apple Silicon Mac Pro be? Maybe it will be an option for the people who want some expandability but don’t want to shell out $5,000+.
Also interesting to hear that they may keep the Intel Mac Pro- I was wondering how they would replace a Xeon (and more importantly, compete with high-end discrete graphics), but didn’t Apple say they will replace all Intel systems by 2022? So I’m not sure how this fits in.
Also interesting to hear that they may keep the Intel Mac Pro- I was wondering how they would replace a Xeon (and more importantly, compete with high-end discrete graphics), but didn’t Apple say they will replace all Intel systems by 2022? So I’m not sure how this fits in.
"Professional" workloads are precisely the ones you can just throw more cores at. Graphics, audio, and compilation are all highly parallelizable, and if you're supporting 8 cores, you're already supporting 128 cores. (It's glibly said that in computer science, there are only three numbers that matter—0, 1, and Infinity.) It's simple, user-facing, interface-related tasks that are hard to parallelize and which benefit most from having individually faster cores.
I liked it too,very futuristic butT just too big and not very mobile as the mac mini could be. It was def much better than the current cheesegrader, which is least appealing to me..
With so many people stuck at home and less people using laptops atm this would be a very good system for people wanting some expandability. A couple of memory slots, a couple of SSD slots and a upgradeable GPU couple be in the picture. Take the Mac Pro and cut it in half of specs and you got a mini desktop with some expandability. And a Gaming monitor at 240hz and with support for VR.
Rosetta 2 exists for a reason. It assists with the transition period. Moreover, Apple will provide legacy support for years on Intel machines, as will software developers, but there comes a time when you must make the change. I did business to business sales for all the major studios, post production houses, photography studios in LA and time and time again I saw them fall behind because they refused to adapt to new technology. They would end up spending 2-3x as much when they finally upgraded than had they made smaller incremental updates as they became available. Also, Adobe and other major developers have already translated their software to work with and take advantage of Apple Silicon.
It’s well past time for Intel to start building modern CPUs with no 16-bit/32-bit CPU support, if they have any hope of getting their process issues sorted out. Holding on to the legacy cruft is slowly killing them.