Aside from the obvious, what's the difference between the cube and slab from a practical standpoint? My only encounter with NeXT hardware was an early cube at a tradeshow.
I know it's a bit of a strange and ambiguous question, but I'm looking for reasons to avoid acquisition fever.
Hello Bill: The processors are the same .... Cubes had 16 simm slots 64Mb max verse 8 slots 32Mb until Turbo Boards which both had 4 72 pin slots maximum 128mb
Expansion capability of Cube as you can add in a CDrom , the original Optical Drives in Cubes have always been problematic as it was bleeding edge tech ,
Cubes have expansion slots which allowed for 3rd party development , the most useful being the NeXT Dimension board , years ahead of its time as you could configure them for upto 64Mb of Vram
no other video cards approached this until the late 90's ... also with the dimension brought dual screens and color and you can add upto 3 dimension cards ;) The Cubes were generally thought of as the server as well , no difference on the software side . Coolness factor of the Magnesium cube and legacy of Tim Berner's lee inventing the World Wide Web using one.
Slabs are cool in terms of Space savings on the desk amazing how much they fit under the hood . Cubes usually sat on the floor !
Agree with Robs list, except "Cubes usually sat on the floor" ;)
I know there's a picture of Steve Jobs with the cube behind a monitor on his desk and it looks HUUUGE.