Here's a story that didn't make it into Steve Jobs in Exile. An audience member at the
@ComputerHistory Museum asked whether the Apple G4 Cube (pictured below, released in 2000) was a sequel to the NeXT cube.
In my book interviews, I put that question to Jon Rubinstein (known as Ruby), Steve's hardware chief at Apple, and his answer was no. "It wasn't another [NeXT] Cube. It was completely different," he told me.
Ruby designed the G4 as a high-end machine for professionals. The idea was to put the powerful parts in a small cube, and let anyone who needed to add extra parts plug in a separate box for them. His reasoning was that most people who bought the big tower computers rarely bothered to add anything inside them anyway, so why make everyone pay for a big box?
Jony Ive, he said, "did a phenomenal job on it." The project taught Apple how to work with clear plastics, touch-sensitive switches, and fanless cooling -- designs used for later products -- and the G4 Cube now sits in the Museum of Modern Art.
The mistake: Steve retargeted the G4 from a professional product to a consumer one. "It was way too expensive for a consumer product. And so that was a failure," Ruby told me. He recalled it as the only failure of his nine years at Apple.
There's one connection to NeXT, and it's about Steve, not the design. Steve liked the idea of computers that carried little storage of their own. The NeXT Cube was built that way, using a removable optical disc instead of a normal hard drive (the hard drive was an optional add-on). Ruby didn't believe in that approach. "The Apple [G4] Cube always had storage in it, because I wouldn't do a product without it," he said.