Could it really be true? Has the Cube officially reached the end of its line? Nobody questions the fact that, while it's piled up a ridiculous number of awards and rave reviews, the Cube is the computer that everybody loves but woefully few people actually want to buy. Underwhelming Cube sales contributed significantly to Apple's recent quarterly loss. First Apple heaped on rebates in hopes of bringing Cube sales to critical mass, and when that didn't work, the price was slashed in January. When even that proved not to be enough, the Cube's sticker price was hacked down again last month, with a low-end model costing just $1299-- a full $500 (or 27%) lower than the price point at which it debuted only eight short months ago.

Unfortunately, it seems that neither price cuts nor new features like internal CD-RW drives and nVIDIA graphics cards could turn the Cube into a commercially successful product. We had always assumed that since the Cube was obviously Steve's pet project (even more so than the iMac, we'd wager), it'd always be around, whether it made money or not. Alas, we may have been wrong, and evidently Steve is exercising some measure of financial responsibility; as faithful viewer The Amazing Llama pointed out, MacUser can "exclusively reveal that Apple's Cube development team has been dissolved." It the reports are true, then the twenty-five visionaries who brought us the Brain in a Box have indeed been torn asunder; some are now working on other projects, and others were flat-out laid off.

But wait-- what's this? MacUser claims that despite the development team being scattered (thus dashing any hopes of a redesigned Cube 2), Apple does plan to keep selling the current design-- and periodically upgrading the same chassis with "faster processors and bigger storage devices." So the Cube lives on... maybe. The same article claims that Cubes proved so utterly unsellable at retail that Apple actually had to buy back three million dollars' worth of the wacky little devices from CompUSA, who apparently found the critters less popular at the checkout counter than lint brushes at a nudist colony. Maybe we're underestimating Steve's willingness to bleed for art, but if the Cube is selling so poorly that Apple has to buy them back from resellers, we can't imagine that it'll stay in the product line-up for much longer.