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

My girlfriend recently purchased a Mac G4 Cube for her personal use at the beginning of her senior year of high school. Now, I've never been a big fan of Macs, but I didn't want to discourage a dedicated Mac user, so she went ahead with her purchase, and I believe she got a student discount which made it a few hundred dollars cheaper than the usual price of around $1,800 for the entire system. When it first arrived in the mail, we noticed that the advertising had been a little bit deceptive - she thought she had been getting the flat panel monitor (which was actually a lot more expensive), which would have saved a lot of space on her small desk, and it turned out that she got a flat-screen monitor that looked cool, but was rather huge. Well, this is the G4 cube - the hard drive itself doesn't take up a whole heck of a lot of space. So we let Apple's mistake (or perhaps our misunderstanding) slide. We hooked it up and started playing with it, and everything seemed okay at first - but it didn't take long to unearth a few more mistakes Apple had made with this thing.

Within the first few days of having her new toy, we began to notice that it would shut itself down at seemingly random times. At first, we thought this might be due to the startup/shutdown mechanism on the top face of the cube, depicted by a little light underneath the surface, which gets activated with the slightest touch. Maybe a fly was landing on it when we didn't notice, or maybe somebody was breathing on it wrong, but whatever the case, she'd be in the middle of writing an important paper or whatnot, and the computer would decide to either shut itself down, or go to sleep and take an inordinately long time to wake up again. There were a few times when she would wake up in the middle of the night to a loud "Bong!", only to realize that her ever-so-fast-and-brilliant computer had started up on its own after being manually shut down before she went to bed. Clearly this wasn't good - Apple had made a mistake in manufacturing. Okay, we can understand - these things happen. So she sent it in for free repairs, and got it back within a couple days, supposedly good as new.

Ever since then, it hasn't been shutting itself down, but it has crashed an exceptional number of times. I don't like to assume that inanimate objects can bear a grudge against me, but this is the closest I have ever come to doing so. This is the G4 we're talking about - supposedly the fastest personal computer available on the market, considered potentially threatening enough in its status of "super-computer" that we can't sell it overseas, and it can't even run Internet Explorer without barfing half the time. Seriously, we have never made much demand on the machine's memory. It came with only 64 megabytes of Ram - we installed some more because that was pretty lousy, and there are more than enough gigabytes of space on the hard drive (we have barely scratched the surface, the most memory being taken up by about a half gig of mp3's), so what gives? I can understand that your average Joe can be fairly inept when it comes to computers. But with a computer this up-to-date, I would think your average Joe would have to be processing files that demanded huge amounts of memory, or hooking something up completely wrong, or whatever, to constantly crash the computer. Perhaps we still have a dud, but what are the chances Apple would give us a lemon twice in a row?

Crashing isn't the only complaint I have about this overblown toaster. Sure, it's cute and tiny and quiet, but what's with Apple not including a floppy drive anymore? Does my girlfriend really need to invest in a Zip drive or CD burner just to transfer a 3-page paper that takes up a few hundred kilobytes of memory from her computer to and from any of the other machines on campus? And what's with a mouse where the entire surface appears to be a clickable button, but only certain areas of the mouse actually respond to being clicked? Or how about the fact that when the computer crashes, neither the button on the front of the monitor that one normally uses to start up the machine nor the hyper-sensitive button on top of the cube work to restart it? The only way to do so at that point is to reach underneath the cube and find a tiny button which does the job, inconveniently located next to another tiny button that you're apparently not supposed to press unless you are a hardware programmer and you really know what you're doing? (I'm not, which is why I'm not even sure of its specific function. I guess that's made clear in the manual, but my point is that such a button should not be placed right next to another button that I have to press far too frequently.) How much ease of use does Apple need to sacrifice to make their computer systems look cute? This is already putting aside my minor quibbles with the Macintosh operating system (which I won't rant about here because it's not unique to the G4).

Apple has really goofed on this one. The particular machine that my girlfriend purchased may be an extremely unusual case, but for crying out loud, they're advertising this thing as revolutionizing the world of personal computers. Don't make me laugh! If you really want to revolutionize the world of personal computers, make hardware and an operating system that's intuitive to use instead of focusing on making the exterior look trendy (I'm not saying that Windows is the epitome of "easy to use", but it certainly is a whole lot simpler). You shouldn't have to be an expert or have to constantly be on the phone with tech support to figure out why your cute little machine isn't accomplishing anything near what its publicity proclaimed it would.

In all fairness, it does come with a DVD player, which hasn't managed to crash the computer yet. But plenty of PC's have done the same.