This is Susan in front of her Apple Macintosh "Cube" at home. The machine is packed into the crystal clear plastic cube (about 20x20x20cm, 6.4kg). For 3000 Euro, it gives you a G4 processor with all the graphics you may need (ATI Rage 128bit). It runs at 450Mhz (which is 800MHz Pentium equivalent), has 512MB of memory, 30GB hard disk, DVD/CD player (slot on top), two FireWire ports (400Mbit/second), two USB ports, 100Mbit Ethernet, 56kbps modem.

It comes of course with a keyboard and optical mouse, and has NO fan, so it is very quiet. It also includes digital audio with speakers from Harman-Kardon (you have to hear this to believe it!). Further included in the price is a digital flat-panel screen 1024x768 (but you can plug in normal monitors or even the Apple Cinema display (1600x1024) too). Because digital screens do not scan, they are very good on the eyes.

It runs Mac OS X, which is based on BSD Unix on top of the Mach microkernel. But it has the Aqua graphical user interface. You can extend the memory to 1.5GB and you can also put in an Airport card which gives you radio access to Ethernet and modem should that be desired.

Software includes iMovie for digital movie editing (your digital video (DV) camera plugs directly into the FireWire port!), QuickTime, AppleWorks (word processing, data base, spreadsheet, drawing, fax), Internet Explorer/Netscape. It can run Microsoft Office 2001, all the Adobe stuff, and even a Virtual PC which emulates a Pentium processor if you still would want that... :-)