The Heat of the Moment

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May 23, 2025 at 8:54 AM by Dr. Drang

As part of a flurry of posts on Daring Fireball yesterday afternoon, John Gruber said something that really seemed directed at me. It was a sort of throwaway comment in the post about Apple Stores:

And the big partners, like CompUSA, absolutely sucked at showcasing the Mac. Their demo machines were frequently broken.

I was the reason one of those demo machines was frequently broken.

It was in the early 2000s, and there was a CompUSA near my office that I visited frequently. This was during my eight-year Mac hiatus, but I was still interested in what Apple was doing. I kept tabs on the state of the hardware and on OS X to see if and when it was time for me to return from the Linux wilderness.

One of the Macs my local CompUSA had out on display in its Apple ghetto was a G4 Cube. I had read somewhere that they ran hot, so one day I put my hand a few inches over the Cube to feel the convective flow rising out of the top grille. The machine immediately overheated and shut down to protect itself.

Let me be clear (as clear as the Cube). I didn’t put my hand on the grille—it was at least 3–4 inches above it. But that was enough. And from that day forward, every time I passed that Cube, I put my hand above it and caused a crash.

So in my own way, I was part of the success of Apple Stores.

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