Apple Power Macintosh G4 Cube 15 in. (B5073LL/A) Mac Desktop

I have one friend of mine that I have known for years who is a serious ?Macaholic?. I haven?t been able to get him to come over to the darkside (PC Users) since I have known him. This helps me out because it gives me an opportunity to review Macs as well as PCs.

This weekend I had the opportunity to try out his new G4 Cube. The new tiny little innovation from Mac that looks really cool. It is a tiny little thing that measures like 8? square and is practically silent. It is hard to believe that you could get any power out of a thing this small, but I was surprised (to a point).

Now being the open-minded person I am I sat down and wanted to play around with it.

Price

My bud paid over $1,800.00 for the system (includes tax), plus $400.00 for a 17? monitor (which does not come included). This in my opinion is WAY too much money. For $2,200.00 I could have built him 2 great PC?s (monitors included). For serious Mac users this may seem like a good deal, but in my opinion it is way too much to spend on a computer that doesn?t have that many features. Read below to see what I mean.

Fist Impressions

The first thing I noticed when I looked at it was there was no 3.5? drive. I know they are old, but they are incredibly useful. I use mine all the time to back up data and the such. How are you supposed to back up stuff without one, without having to buy additional equipment?

Second thing I noticed was the power on/off switch, which is located on the top of the unit. It is a touch sensitive light switch that I hit a few times by accident, which shut the machine down on me.

It has an internal DVD/CD-Rom drive which I found very fast and very nice in the way it sucks the CD down into the case and spit it back out when you ejected it. Kind of made it seem real futuristic.

Another problem(?) I saw was the fact that it has no open bays for internal components such as a CD-RW, Zip Drive, or Tape Backup. If you wanted to add one you would have to buy an external USB or IEEE version. The G4 does have USB and an IEEE port that you can use. Of course it kind of defeats the purpose of having a small, neat unit if you have all these external peripherals hanging all over the place.

Go Speed Racer(G4) Go

The G4 uses a 450 mhz Power G4 processor; this is the equivalent to a PIII 900mhz. It is a speedy little unit I will give it that. The only major program he owns is Photoshop, and that opened up very fast. The graphics looked great and it seemed to run with no major hang-ups.

The one downfall to this unit?s speed is the fact that it only 64MBs of Ram. Since Macs are used primarily for graphic intensive programs such as, Photoshop, Autocad and the such this seems very inadequate. Of course you can add more (up to 1 gig I believe) that means even more money into this system.

It comes with a 20 gig hard-drive, which is plenty of room for normal users.

PC User Rule!!! (Just Kidding)

I myself thought this was way to expensive, way too lacking in basic features, and just way to low on Ram for it to be a good purchase. He seems to love it so who am I to impede on a mans happiness.

It just seems to me that a 900mhz PC with 64 megs of Ram and all the rest of the hardware this Mac has it would cost less than half of what this G4 goes for.

I think a lot of hardcore Mac users will probably love this and hey ?to each his own?, but for the money he spent it seems to me he should have gotten a lot more.

Quick Overview

While it is speedy and while it does look good it just seems to me that it is way over priced and it doesn?t come with enough room for upgrades or needed peripherals. I mean how do you do a simple backup of your basic files?