Now that the Reality Distortion Field is starting to wear off a little, fewer people are trying to sell their kids on eBay to finance a new G4 Cube and more are starting to ask, "why?" As in, why on earth did Apple create the Cube? Why is it so unexpandable? Why is it marketed towards graphic professionals, when with a few tweaks it could have been an excellent monitorless iMac or business-targeted system? And most importantly, why is it almost exactly eight inches on a side?

Well, believe it or not, Newsweek got to the bottom of the Cube mystery in a short interview with Uncle Steve. In an unguarded moment, Apple's mad genius iCEO let slip that the Cube is actually a "brain in a beaker." (Okay, so he said it's like a brain in a beaker, but we all know what he really meant.) And there you have it: the grisly truth.

Yes, folks, the Cube doesn't house a tightly-miniaturized Power Mac G4 system as the specs would have you believe. Those out-of-the-sleeve Cubes demonstrated at the Expo, with the RAM expansion slots and the AirPort slot and all that? Those were decoys-- pure skunkworks meant to throw us off the trail. When the Cube actually ships in three weeks, there won't be anything inside but a living, pulsating, human brain suspended in life-preserving fluid and wired up to do your bidding. Apple's betting that, since the Cube is so unexpandable (and it's being marketed at artsy types who generally aren't into tweaking their hardware), no one will ever bother to try and open it, thus keeping the brain's existence a horrifying secret. Think about it: how big's your brain? It'd fit in an eight-inch Cube enclosure just about perfectly, we imagine.

So where's Apple harvesting all these brains for the "million" Cubes it plans to sell? Well, did you happen to notice how hard Apple was recruiting new employees last week? The company had not one, but two recruiting "hospitality suites" set up to shmooze the potential talent and get them to come work at Apple. We've been to the east coast Expo every year since 1994 and we've never seen such a thing before. Now why, pray tell, would Apple be recruiting so aggressively all of a sudden-- unless it's for parts? Mwaahahahahahaha!