While there are many reasons to love the Power Mac G4 Cube, those of you who truly enjoy listening to music while you work can compose a solid list of benefits all your own.

First and foremost, the G4 Cube has no fan, so you’ll encounter no annoying background noise to distract you from the music you’re playing. Every G4 Cube also boasts an all-digital sound system—from the 10-watt-per-channel digital Tripath amplifier to the handsome pair of Harman Kardon speakers.

Then there’s iTunes. Digital music the Macintosh way, iTunes lets you manage your music experience with incredible ease—tune in to hundreds of digital radio stations, convert your music collection to MP3s, create playlists by the score, and download your favorite tunes to portable MP3 players.

And, of course, if you order your G4 Cube with a CD-RW drive, you can also burn your own audio CDs with traditional Mac point-and-click simplicity.

Students must have routine access to computers. Teachers and administrators must have clear goals for what they hope to accomplish. And schools need to support teachers with professional development.

Those—according to David Dwyer, Apple’s Director of Education Technologies—are key if schools are to effectively incorporate computers in the classroom.

And if they do, he says in this interview on “The Futures Channel,” the rewards are great: “Many studies have demonstrated that you will see a 15 percent rise in basic skill achievements compared to classrooms that don’t use technology.”

Special effects sequences—like Anakin Skywalker’s pod race in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace—are very expensive to produce; so expensive that studios want to know they’re going to work (and what technological hurdles they’re going to have to overcome) before they even undertake them.

So they’re using QuickTime—and other video and animation products— on PowerBook and Power Mac computers to create “animatics,” animated QuickTime storyboards that allow filmmakers to “previsualize” special effects sequences in ways not possible with static, 2D storyboards.

“A lot of people think that QuickTime is great for playing back or for distributing content,” says David Dozoretz, who led the four-person animatics team on Phantom Menace, producing 8,000 to 10,000 QuickTime movies for the film, “but we use it for some pretty high-end creation as well.”

Your school has a wide range of Mac systems running everything from Mac OS 8 to Mac OS X. How are you going to manage network and Internet access for all of those client computers while accommodating the various needs of students, teachers, and administrators?

At your university, computers running the Mac need to interact seamlessly with others running Windows, UNIX, and Linux. How will you maintain a secure network environment while still providing a comprehensive suite of network services to your campus?

You run a busy design firm, streaming live QuickTime multimedia content, hosting and constantly updating web pages (both internal and public), letting colleagues and clients share files in real time. With so many people depending on your network, how do you make certain that it’s available 24/7, 365 days a year?

We’re just two weeks away from a very important date for Apple—March 24. That’s the day Mac OS X goes on sale at retail locations the world over.

Thrilled at the prospect of delivering our groundbreaking new operating system to you, we’d like to mark the occasion by inviting you to attend Apple In-Store Events hosted by select resellers all over the United States and Canada.

Visit a retail location near you the weekend of March 24 to celebrate the arrival of Mac OS X and experience our new OS for yourself. You’ll also see the new iMac, Power Mac G4 Cube, Power Mac G4, and PowerBook G4 computers. And we’ll be demonstrating iMovie and the latest version of iTunes.* Want to see how easy it is to create a Desktop Movie or compile a Playlist of your favorite tunes?

Comic book artist and writer Scott McCloud is an explorer. His newest work, a book-length treatise called “Reinventing Comics”—drawn on a Wacom tablet hooked to his Power Mac—examines the medium’s future in that digital frontier known as the web.

“I think the great opportunity for digital comics is breaking out of the page,” he explains, “taking those 3,000 panels and laying them out at once in a huge landscape.”

And to get him to that brave new world, McCloud’s hitched his wagon to a Power Mac.

“I just love my Mac,” he says. “It’s where I work every day. And it’s transparent to the extent that what I see on my screen and what I think about on my screen is the work I have to do. That’s the way it should be.”

Scanners, printers, digital cameras, bar code readers, graphics tablets, portable MP3 players, joysticks, external storage (hard drives, floppy drives, Zip drives, CD-RW drives), modems—you name the category and there’s almost certainly a collection of peripheral devices that connect to your Mac via USB. (Take a look: the Macintosh Products Guide lists over 900 USB products.)

Why has USB become such a popular way to connect peripherals to the Mac? Because 99.9% of the time, it just works. Plug the device into one of the USB ports on a Mac, and it shows up on your desktop, ready to go.

So what do you do when your scanner, camera, or MP3 player doesn’t automatically appear?