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Comment by scott_s | Hacker News Reader

Curious - people have long drawn parallels between Apple and Nintendo's aesthetics for hardware and strategy, but I never realized how close the G4 Cube (July 2000) was to the Nintendo GameCube (September 2001). I still think the GameCube is the most aesthetically pleasing console.

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Yeah, for all the love the G4 Cube gets, the Gamecube was much, much, smaller, had more efficient cooling, similar specs (minus the disk drive), and was 1/10th the price.

The 1T-SRAM and EDRAM framebuffer caches in the Gamecube were also much more interesting on a technical level. Considering how poorly Aqua ran on the Mac's of that era, the Gamecube's 3D hardware probably would have been better suited to OS X than Apple's own.

It's a far superior design imo.

the Gamecube was much, much, smaller, had more efficient cooling, similar specs (minus the disk drive), and was 1/10th the price

How many people ran Photoshop or did desktop publishing on a GameCube?

Honestly, Resident Evil 4 was far more computationally intensive than anything Photoshop does. It's applying thousands of texture filters and transformations in real time and then mapping them to polygon surfaces with lighting transforms.

It's all software, some of it just costs more.

GameCube’s design wasn’t just intended to fit the use case of packing it up to take it to grandma’s or to your friend’s dorm room on another floor, it also communicated that that was something you could/should do with it. Great design.

More hardware needs to have handles. I really can't think of any moderately large product that wouldn't be improved by a simple handle

And good handles.

The “cheese-grater” Power Mac G5/Mac Pro had handles. Which are great on a 42-pound chunk of aluminum…except they had sharp edges, and you sure felt that.

(I hauled my 2006 Mac Pro between 3 different apartments. I remember.)

Yeah, the handles on those G5/Mac Pros are downright painful. The current Mac Pro also has handles, and they're round this time!

I'm partial to my Onyx Nintendo DS Lite. Wow was that thing sexy, especially after looking at the original DS!

Unfortunately they age terribly. The edge where exterior plastic meets internal plastic always gets filled with horrible hunk, ruining the look.

I am thinking if they made a larger / Taller HeatSink Apple TV it would actually be a MacCube.

May be even a Wireless Charger on Top so you could charge your future mouse, Apple Watch and iPhone on it.

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