UK awaits G4 Cube discount and speed bump

Although Apple cut $300 from the G4 Cube in the US on Friday, there's no word yet of similar discounts being made available to UK buyers. To make matters worse, US punters have the option of a high-end G4 Cube as standard that isn't available through the UK store.

Unless Apple follows through quickly in the UK with a definite statement, G4 Cube sales could grind to a complete standstill as propective buyers wait on the likelihood of saving themselves £200.

The new, top-of-the-range G4 Cube simply has a 32Mb Radeon graphics card as standard - it's an option on the US site - bumps the memory up to 256Mb, and has a 40Gb as opposed to 30Gb hard disk. It sells for $2799 before discount at the US Apple store. However the model isn't available from Apple's UK store.

As we reported last week, Apple's US offer is conditional on buying one of the latest Apple monitors with the Cube - the 17inch CRT, or the 15inch or 22inch flat panels - and the mail-in offer applies to all purchases from now until December 31. Full details are here. This sparked the suggestion in at least one Mac forum that existing G4 Cube owners should take their recent purchases back to the store, then buy it all over again to claim the rebate.

A San Francisco retailer confirmed that as many customers had been buying Cubes without the new monitors, despite the attraction of the all-in-one cabling which supplies power and USB to the monitors.

Then again, he said they'd be selling pretty well in spite of Apple's recent statement that Cube sales had not come up to expectations. Which only goes to prove that you should never take anything that happens in San Narcisco to be representative of anything, really. ®

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