The Cube was great, particularly once OS X came out in the following year. But even before that, iTunes was released, and with the Harman Kardon Soundsticks [1,

The Cube was great, particularly once OS X came out in the following year. But even before that, iTunes was released, and with the Harman Kardon Soundsticks [1,2] (two little speakers and a subwoofer) it was a brilliant machine for the living room. Looked great, you could work on it, surf, listen to music and watch DVDs. You could set iTunes to automatically rip CDs it hadn't ripped before, IIRC, and with the nifty mechanism it was really pleasant to pop in your entire music collection one at a time and turn it into mp3s. Rip, mix, burn [3]. And then the iPod came out in 2001 as well, and your entire collection was on the damn thing in minutes (over FireWire). Nowadays, this is all a matter of course, but back then it was way ahead of the rest. (Should have bought Apple shares...) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoundSticks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoundSticks [2] https://medium.com/@unmakr/moma-approved-harman-kardon-soundsticks-ii-teardown-f5ef983185cb https://medium.com/@unmakr/moma-approved-harman-kardon-sound... [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0ZWuhcM7t4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0ZWuhcM7t4