PCI slots
The Cube was fine the way it was for the market it was directed to. It was not a bad machine at all. The only problem was that the market for the Cube (small footprint/head turner/ultra quiet) was too small. I believe the G4 tower is the accepted high end Mac but does not add that much more than the Cube for the needs of MOST users. For SOME pro users and high end gamers though, the PCI slots of the tower are necessary.
Adding PCI expandability/drive bays would not have been the answer to higher Cube sales since I don't come across PCI expandability as a tech very often unless the client is a gamer and likes to have the latest video cards and sound cards all the time. Yet many gamers I know are happy with their cards but will buy a new machine, or build one, by the time they find their cards outdated. And by that time, the faster processors, higher amounts of RAM, improved cache, etc. for a much cheaper price draws them. In my opinion, that's the better deal...sell the old machine and get a new one instead of spending high amounts of money on sound and video cards (same goes for processor upgrades). So why buy upgrade cards for the PCI slots, new drives for the drive bays, or processor upgrades, or for that matter, any expensive upgrades?
Answer: fun fun fun!
I have to admit, as a techie, I don't always take the cheaper route myself and it's fun to experiment with the PCI slots/drive bays...even if there is very little improvement to a system. Soemtimes it's fun to just see how far one can push an older machine. There are those that spend over $1,000.00 for a dual G4 450 upgrade and toss it into an older machine which can't take full advantage of it anyway, change the cards for another several hundred, and load it with older more expensive RAM. Why not buy a 733 tower for $1699.00? The answer...because it's fun...guilty, sinful fun!
I have a 1996 Mac that was made for a 1MB video card, 16 MB of RAM, and have only a foppy and CD-ROM drive all running with OS 7.5. It has been upgraded with a then $700.00 2 MB video card in one of the slots, filled with a Zip 100 in one of the drive bays, had the RAM quadrupled for a very high price, had the OS updated several generations, and now the machine runs Photoshop 5.5 with no problem. A used G3 would have made more sense and been cheaper. I would not call filling the PCI slots and drive bays that practical, but it's a fun challenge and that is what a G4 tower can be several years after it becomes obsolete...it has those PCI slots/drive bays. A couple of my major clients (fortune 500) with thousands of machines simply rent and don't waste the money on purchasing machines or PCI cards. Renting is cheaper and more practical if the organization has more than 20 machines. I have never seen or heard of medium to large pro clients ever utilizing PCI slots/drive bays.
But back to the Cube. Do you think those PCI slots/drive bays are really that much more "practical" and "important" for most G4 tower users that they steered away from the Cube for that reason?