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on the weakening iMac sales as an opportunity to criticize Apple or warn about latent problems that were beginning to have a bigger impact, such as Apple falling behind Dell in the education market, which the Mac had long dominated. That’s because the tech-beat reporters were competing to hype up Steve’s next big thing, his new revelation, his latest magic trick—a computer called the Cube, which Steve unveiled at July’s MacWorld in New York. It wasn’t a true cube—the see-through plastic casing had greater height (9.8 inches) than width or depth (both 7.8 inches)—but the symbolism was obvious: It hadn’t been enough that Steve saved Apple; he was seeking vindication for his efforts at Next, where his previous Cube was an aesthetic wonder and critical success but also an overpriced miscalculation resulting in an embarrassing commercial flop.

It turned out that the new Mac Cube was all of these things over again—déjà vu with a vengeance.

As an object of design it was impressive in its breathtakingly miniature dimensions, its stark minimalism and its appealing translucence, even if many people thought it looked its size and shape made it look like a box of facial tissues. Technically it had some nice twists, too. Unlike other PCs, the Cube didn’t have a fan to cool it down; instead, it was cooled by convection using a “heat sink.” Steve had always hated the noisiness of computer fans. Eons earlier, during his first run at Apple, he instructed his engineers to eliminate the fans, though in that early stage of the PC’s development there wasn’t a viable alternative. So the engineers put in fans anyway but they were carefully never to mention the word “fan” in case Steve overheard them, fearing that he would respond with rage. Instead, they would say “bananas” as a code word, as in: “How are you coming along with those bananas?”

Steve epitomized stubborn persistence, and now, in his third decade in the business, he finally had another elegant cubical computer without a fan. The critics rushed in with praise. Newsweek’s Steven Levy, one of the most experienced and respected computer journalists, wrote about the Cube with gushing admiration, calling it “a Zen Kleenex box with a kick of Jackie Chan.” Levy expressed a bit of concern over the high price—$1,800 for the Cube and another $1,000 for a flat-panel display to go with it—but still he concluded: “It looks like the coolest-looking computer ever just might keep Steve Jobs and Apple sailing along—until the next product launch.” Business Week’s Peter Burrows echoed the effusiveness, writing that the Cube “has all the earmarks of a machine that might give Apple’s strong growth another shove uphill.”

Apple confidently predicted that consumers would buy 800,000 Cubes, but initially the sales were shockingly slow given the enthusiastic coverage. Some insiders thought that it was just a temporary and solvable supply glitch: Apple didn’t have enough flat-panel monitors in stock to go along with the Cubes, so many of the most interested buyers were waiting before spending. But as weeks passed it turned out that the problem was more fundamental: Aside from a small cadre of hard-core Apple fans and design aficionados, the Cube didn’t have a sizable market. It was too expensive for young people and home consumers. It wasn’t powerful enough for the graphics professionals and hotshot creative types who needed and would willingly pay for the latest top-of-the-line systems. It was stuck in the no-man’s-land of the middle.

Aesthetically, too, the Mac Cube was a case of Steve Jobs repeating the mistakes of the Next Cube. Steve’s great successes came when he catered to the masses with the cuddly approachability of the original Macintosh and again with the playful exuberance and flashy colors of the iMac, but with the two Cubes he ignored this pop sensibility and reverted to his own sense of style—austere, rarefied, minimalist, cold, refined, the understated taste of an aloof elitist. The iMac seemed to prove that Steve had learned from his past, but then in his runaway success he yielded to hubris