Editorials @ Applelust

The beauty of a beast: Cubes were from Mars, iBooks are from Earth (with a note on "Son of Pismo")

What could be more ironic than this? I’m sitting late at night in my office, and going crazy for the first PowerMac Cube in my life. It arrived just three days after Apple killed the product, but mine is very much alive. I’m mourning, but at the same time I’m overjoyed; and I’m writing a requiem for something that is more like a newborn child to me right now than a departed old man.

The Cube has been sitting on my desk for only a few days, but it already has an undeniable impact on the way I relate to a Mac and the work I do on it. Suspended by its clear outer case and apparently floating a few inches above my desk, this eight-inch hexahedron encompasses not only an entire Macintosh but also, virtually, my work and my ideas that live inside it. It seems to be distancing itself from the mundane reality of our everyday lives. It thinks, looks and acts differently from the rest of the world, and urges me quietly to do the same. And I mean quietly. Its elegant, simplified looks and its silence exude a certain air of dignity.

Its effect on people is an experience you wouldn’t want to miss. Co-workers who come by are struck by its beauty, but they are clueless about what it is. They don’t believe me when I say it’s a computer. Our IT manager laughed at the idea of getting a Cube... until he first saw it. "That’s what a computer should look like," he finally commented.

However, these were not the reasons why we chose the Cube. Very simply, I needed something more powerful to replace my beige G3, and the Cube was the cheapest solution. That was it.

So why did the Cube have to die, and why do I sacrilegiously mention the iBook in the title of this eulogy? I believe we’ll be able to see the Cube’s failure quite clearly in light of the iBook’s success, and I’ll get to the point in a minute.

Wrongly accused

But first, let me set the record straight and tell you what didn’t cause the failure of the Cube, despite the sheepish yet mistaken consensus of the Mac web.

1. The Cube didn’t fail because of any confusion whether it was a consumer or a professional product

Despite the popular misconception, the Cube was undeniably and very clearly a professional machine, and not a consumer appliance. Want proof? Look at a few details then:

a) The Cube was called the PowerMac Cube. It wasn’t called the "iCube", suggesting a consumer product, and neither just the "Mac Cube" or the "Cube Mac", alluding to a neutral stance in the consumer vs. pro divide. Instead, its name very clearly placed it as a variant of the pro desktop line.

b) Its graphite color scheme almost exactly matched the PowerMac minitower’s. Consumer machines, i.e. iMacs and iBooks came in entirely different colors; even the Graphite iMac SE was significantly different.

c) It came with a G4 processor. Even as of now, only professional Macs have G4 chips, consumer machines all ship with G3s. The AltiVec unit that mainly differentiates the G4 from the G3 is mostly used in multimedia applications, further hinting at professional usage.

d) The iMac is touted as an all-in-one wonder, whereas the Cube is everything but that. The iMac is about simplicity and ease of use. It is marketed as a very friendly, appliance-like computer that doesn’t require any kind of obscure computer literacy. And it starts with the hardware. When you assemble an iMac, you connect a total of four plugs: both ends of the power chord, the keyboard, and the mouse. The Cube, depending on the type of monitor you use, is set up by connecting seven to ten various plugs. It’s definitely for someone who knows what he’s doing. If you carry your computer, you need to move three pieces with the iMac: the Mac, the keyboard, and the mouse. With the Cube, you also have a brick-sized power adapter, a large and heavy monitor, a sound amplifier and two orange-sized speakers to move around, or a total of eight pieces that take two or three rounds. With Apple, things like this matter.

Unfortunately, the Mac web is still full of the completely misguided sentiment that fails to realize where a Cube could be used and how it, as a computer, stacks up.

2. It had nothing to do with a product matrix, despite the Mac web’s fixation on this fallacious point

The extension of Apple’s product matrix that the Cube brought about was actually a great idea. There had been a large gap between the iMac and the PowerMac, in terms of price, features and performance, and the Cube filled it very nicely — except, of course, for the initial price.

The iMac’s small screen, relatively slow processor, and limited RAM expandability have always made it unsuitable for professional use, while the PowerMac minitower has been a very high-end machine with features that not everyone needs: its expandability through PCI slots isn’t a necessity for all professionals, and Gigabit Ethernet is just another feature that gives Apple an excuse to keep prices high, as few networks comply to that standard yet.

Professionals who only want to pay for what they really need, which is raw power, could obviously benefit from a G4-based, strippeed-down professional machine that is placed between the iMac and the minitower.

And the Cube was placed right there. If you looked at Apple’s product matrix diagrams, it was there in the middle. If you read Apple’s PR, it placed the Cube between the iMac and the PowerMac. Everything fell into place, except, again, the initial price. The revised entry price of $1299 corrected this problem perfectly, but unfortunately, the Cube's bad perception remained in people's heads. We can partly blame the media for that, as Macworld UK’s Jonny Evans points out in his (otherwise sadly mistaken) opinion piece. Anyway, now people have started to mourn for the Cube, and begun to realize what they’ll be missing, but well, too bad. They should have done some thinking before it was too late.

3. Flaws didn’t kill the Cube

The Cube had flaws: cracks (or were they mold lines?), and an overly sensitive power switch. Did this cause its demise? Yeah, right. The Titanium PowerBook gives you static electric shocks; the new iBook’s "delete" key comes off at will; the iMac DV couldn’t keep DVD audio in sync; the previous version of the iBook had its mold lines in addition to a data corruption problem; yet none of these products had to be discontinued. The Cube’s flaws are negligible and even ridiculous compared to some of those, yet they made the ill-fated computer the beating boy of the Mac press.

We Interrupt our Broadcast: Another Cube Spotted with Cracks. Exclusive Report: Puzzled Designer Unintentionally Puts Misbehaving Cube to Sleep, Loses Ten Seconds of Billable Time

The press crucified the Cube for of its minor glitches partly because the Cube was viewed as a luxury product, one that warrants a different type of criticism than an ordinary computer. When the price dropped to the perfectly reasonable level of $1299 that no longer contained a luxury premium, people’s perception wouldn’t change. First impressions of an expensive and flawed computer prevailed even when there was less and less truth in these points, and the Cube was written off.

Think Not

What killed the Cube, first and foremost, was idiocy: mainly Apple’s idiocy for pricing it $500 higher than what most customers would have paid for it, and then the sheepish idiocy of the press. The Cube was indisputably placed between the iMac and the PowerMac, and Apple erred fundamentally and irreversibly when it placed its price far outside that range. Apple thought customers would pay a $500 bonus for style, overlooking the perception that people who choose Macs already pay a considerable Apple bonus, which nowadays includes the price of the design.

This wasn’t always the case, though. The original iMac was an entirely different story; that machine can be said to have survived on looks only. My first piece on the Cube, which appeared here on Applelust site back in the August of 2000, drew the following parallel between the Cube and the 1998 iMac:

The iMac had lousy graphics, tinny speakers, an awful CD-ROM drive, an awkward cover for its USB slots; no restart button, no FireWire or anything to replace SCSI, and no floppy drive (and few USB options available at the time to substitute it). It had a very cheap fuzzy plastic look, and it was not that cheap after all.

[...]

Which brings us back to the Cube. For less than $1,300, it would be the top choice Macintosh, nay: the top choice computer for a lot of people. [...]

But what's the hurry? Apple must have invested a lot of R&D, time and money into the Cube. They want returns as soon as possible. And why is it wrong if they address the insane first? The best thing about the Cube right now is its coolness. [...] Sell an overpriced Cube to a lot of the insane, the fashion maniacs, the die-hard Apple followers, generate revenues, and then, after a year or so, when OS X has been around for a while and has become the server OS choice for many, let the Cube sell at $1,299. Let it make sense then.

As you see, back then I thought that it might work for Apple to charge a "coolness" premium for the Cube for a limited time. In my opinion, it could have worked if the premium had not been that excessive, and they hadn’t expected so many fanatics to shell it out: they produced much more Cubes than they could sell, and the rest is history.

It turned out that Apple had spoiled us, and we started to take breakthrough design for granted: the great-looking Pro Keyboard and the classy Pro Mouse can both be considered luxury items, yet Apple ships all desktop Macs with those accessories at no extra charge. The elegant translucent and Graphite color schemes of the PowerMac G4 and the Apple Studio Display were a great departure from the much-ridiculed cheap plastic looks of the blue-white G3 tower and its accompanying monitors, yet their price points remained the same. Even the 1999 iMac’s translucent enclosure, complete with slot-loading drives and Harman-Kardon speakers, is quite classy and elegant compared to the original version’s garish, fuzzy, toy-like looks, and it came with a price cut, not an increase. To summarize, Apple has made elegance and style a standard on all Macintoshes, and lost the ability to charge more for looks. Good looks are a requirement, period.

When the price of the Cube was reduced all the way to $1299, it was already damage control. However, it also marked the correction of the Cube’s single most important, or maybe single, problem. I expected the press and the general public to jump on this new price, and start endorsing the Cube as a great product for professionals on a budget. Well, it didn’ happen. Instead, the press kept whining about cracks and a "lack of a market" as if it hadn’t noticed that the Cube was no longer a millionaire’s toy: it was cheaper than the iMac SE, for crying out loud. The press had inertia. It couldn’t change its perception in order to keep it in sync with reality. Did I mention idiocy?

Another fallacy that helped kill the Cube was the repetition of the following tired, old, fallacious clich�: that the Cube actually costs at least a thousand dollars more than its list price, since you need to buy an Apple TFT display with it, otherwise you’re ruining your Cube experience. Can I say "bullshit" on this site?! Remember: you’re on a budget. Youdon’t buy fancy monitors if you buy the Cube for its use rather than as a fashion statement. Let me tell you a secret: I use my Cube with an ancient Hitachi monitor that has been lying around in the office forever. And guess what: the Cube is still beautiful as it sits next to this monster. If I replaced the monitor with an Apple Cinema Display, it would be even more beautiful, but then my desk wouldn’t be good enough. We should probably buy a mahogany table, and move our office to a studio-style apartment in New York for a truly heightened Cube experience, all in the range of about twenty million US dollars. Again, idiocy. Professionals could use the Cube for work even if it was ugly, but it isn’t; it stands out with its beauty from any environment.

The Cube is a killer product for $1299, and I’m really sad to see it go. I also feel lucky for having one of the last ones sitting on my ugly desk, next to a dusty, beige monitor.

Whether Apple learned from its mistake, and why I mentioned iBook in the title of this piece

Imagine for a second the following scene. It’s last year’s Macworld New York, and Steve Jobs announces, and I quote, that "There’s one more thing." Suspense heightens. You know that something great is going to happen, something unexpected and possibly controversial. And Steve speaketh:

"Our product line has consisted of four cells: a consumer portable, a consumer desktop, a pro portable and a pro desktop. Today, we’re changing that."

And imagine Apple’s iCEO unveil a new, never-before-seen, striking feat of engineering and miniaturization, a beautiful, luxurious, innovative addition to Apple’s product matrix... a mid-range... Laptop! The IceBook.

"This is the smallest full-featured laptop on the market today, and it can be yours for only $2699!"

What, you say, is it a bit too expensive, costing more than the PowerBook G3? (Remember, we’re in the year 2000.) Yes, but look at its beauty and compactness! See how portable it is, and how you can take it anywhere, and turn heads!

Still, you argue, this $2699 IceBook would be a controversial machine. Probably just as controversial as the Cube was.

Maybe this is why this has been fiction. Apple didn’t ship this machine.

Or did it?

The new iBook is about as classy, as elegant and as great an engineering feat as the Cube; so much so that many speculate that it was originally intended as the "CubeBook", or the elusive sixth spot in Apple’s temporarily revised product matrix. However, Apple chose to ship its great new laptop as the new iBook, at the basement-low price of $1299.

The 2001 iBook could have claimed critical acclaim and won awards, just as the Cube did, at a much higher price point. However, by pricing it competitively, as if it were just a normal laptop with the features you’d expect, Apple has made sure that people will line up in crowds to buy this machine. Hopefully, this signals a new trend: engineering breakthroughs will come standard on all Macs.

By this logic, we can speculate that if Apple introduced the Cube now, it would ship at a competitive price. Possibly $1299 in the first place. We have yet to see how well Apple has learned its lesson; product announcements are around the corner.

Take the red pill: the Product Matrix will have you in 2001

If some persistent rumors are right, Apple will, ironically, introduce a "mid-range laptop": the "Son of Pismo" or "SoP" at Macworld New York on Wednesday, July 18.

The general reaction to this rumor is another typical example of what I call the Product Matrix Status Quo Knee Jerk Reaction Syndrome that is so rampant among the Mac web’s pundits.

According to the rumor, Apple wants to fill the gap between the high-range iBook (that sells for $1799) and the entry-level PowerBook ($2599) with a mid-range portable that should sell for around $2000 and sport features resembling those of the PowerBook G3, or Pismo. This rumored portable, in a new-style enclosure, of course, would address the requirements of those who need a bigger screen than the iBook’s 12.1", need an IrDA port and a PCMCI slot, a drive bay, and the ability to spawn another monitor; but still find the Titanium PowerBook too expensive, and can do without its exclusive features.

The reaction to this rumor has been a very predictable fear of "Cannibalizing iBook and PowerBook sales", the inevitable "Ow, they’re destroying the product matrix", and even less justifiably, a solemn warning against a "Cube-style disaster".

Again, this is idiocy. In case someone didn’t notice: the Cube was a disaster because it placed a product between two others in every aspect except the price, which was outrageously high instead. The "Son of Pismo" is supposed to be priced according to its place in the product matrix, not in defiance of it, as was the Cube.

And as for cannibalizing sales: of course. Again, computer buyers need choice. Maybe some people will choose the (supposed) SoP over the PowerBook ("cannibalizing" its sales as the scarecrows like to say), but this will probably be balanced out by buyers who wouldn’t have afforded a TiBook and wouldn’t have chosen an iBook, and thus wouldn’t have bought anything if it weren’t for the Son of Pismo. (At least, not from Apple. Perhaps a second-hand Pismo, generating no new sales for Apple, or even a Wintel laptop. You know, there are two types of Apple laptops, and thousands of types of Wintel laptops). As for cannibalizing sales of iBooks: again, people who can only afford an iBook will not buy the more expensive SoP. And for those who do choose the SoP over an iBook: if the rumors are true, the SoP is based on old technology and old parts, thus possibly yields high profit margins. After all, have you never seen a salesman talk someone into a more expensive product?

Apple’s analysts and commentators think too much of product matrices. A product matrix is actually something that only the manufacturer, i.e. Apple should be concerned about, but never the customer. The customer wants to know whether a product offers what he needs, and whether the price is reasonable. No potential customer has ever been heard offering this reason for not buying a computer: "Sorry, it performs really well, and its price is right; but it just doesn’t fit into your product matrix."

I find it funny how the Mac web dwells on a simplified product matrix as the greatest achievement for Apple, and how everyone whines as soon as something gets just slightly more complicated than before, like the 1999 iMac coming in three different models. The standard comment was, "That is so confusing!" Everyone warned Apple not to complicate things even further and revert back to the era of Amelio or Spindler when obscurely named (or rather numbered) Mac models proliferated.

Hogwash. The Mac is a computer, and the Mac Web should learn this simple truth. Mac buyers are computer buyers, and computer buyers need choices. How are three iMac models supposed to confuse anyone? It works like this. If you don’t want to burn CDs or have a choice of colors, buy the cheapest iMac. If you do, buy either of the two others, the more expensive one is more powerful. That’s it. If this confuses you, you’re too stupid to own a computer. (While the choices were somewhat more complicated with the DVD models in 1999 and 2000, the decision boiled down to three easy questions: "Do you want to play DVDs? Do you want to attach a digital camcorder? And finally: what color do you want?")

You see, having choices is not all bad. Additions to a product matrix can work beautifully, especially if they’re well thought out, and the prices are right. Excessive fear of cannibalized sales leads to reducing your choice of products to say, one: the Apple General Mac. G4 processor, built-in LCD monitor, semi-portable. Take it or leave it. I hope Apple won’t take that path.

Andr�s Puiz

András Puiz is a Hungarian native. He first met the Mac at a DTP job in 1997, and as a result, he has vowed to minimize his contacts with all forms of Windows. He is the proud owner of an iMac DV. He has worked for IT-related publishers and consultants as a freelance writer and translator, as well as holding full-time jobs with project management, database development and print production duties. He is also a programmer wannabe, using FileMaker as his main development platform, to everyone's ridicule and horror. As a college dropout-but-hopefully-going-back-there-to-finish-soon, he's studied mathematics and teaching English as a second language. Andras is working on a site called "Mac Thought Crime" (technical problems won't allow a link now).