CuBox-i4Pro Review: A 2-Inch Computer That Refuses to Be Ignored

The CuBox-i4Pro has an almost unyielding quality. It is a tiny, dark cube that is hardly wider than a stack of business cards that sits on a desk like an afterthought, but as soon as you plug it in, you realize it isn’t attempting to be cute. It’s attempting to be helpful. This distinction is more important than it might seem.

The Israeli company behind it, SolidRun, has been discreetly shipping these cubes for years, gaining a small but devoted following among security researchers, hobbyists, and those who spend their weekends with a soldering iron. The top model in the lineup, the i4Pro, is powered by a Freescale i.MX6 quad-core processor with 2GB of RAM—modest specs by today’s standards, but surprisingly powerful for the type of work it typically draws. As you watch it operate, you get the impression that the engineers were concerned about the little details.

The case is a minor delight in and of itself. A feature not found on most boards in this category is an infrared receiver and transmitter on the front face, along with smooth black plastic and ports arranged logically around the back. It feels planned rather than put together. And for that reason, the CuBox-i4Pro is frequently mentioned in discussions about lightweight Linux experiments, low-power servers, and home theater setups.

However, the romance somewhat wanes when an operating system is installed on it. Newcomers have never been treated well in the ARM ecosystem. Bootloaders don’t always work together, compatibility is fragmented, and kernels must be aware of the precise subarchitecture they are operating on.

For example, writing a U-Boot image to the microSD card, debootstrapping a base system from an x86 machine, and then crossing your fingers during the first boot over a serial console are the steps involved in installing Debian on the i4Pro. It’s not insurmountable. Simply put, it’s not the smooth, plug-and-play experience that Raspberry Pi owners have become used to.

The board is officially supported by Kali Linux, but even there are limitations to the experience. Because the CuBox-i4Pro build script hasn’t been updated to the latest system, builds occasionally fail unexpectedly. Users must clone the Kali ARM build-scripts repository from GitLab and create the image themselves; there is no pre-built image available for download. That’s a low cost for security researchers and penetration testers. It’s a wall to everyone else.

Nevertheless, there is a subtle sense of satisfaction when the i4Pro boots up for the first time, with the green LED catching and the serial terminal scrolling kernel messages. These machines might be an example of something the industry has partially forgotten: that small, well-made, hackable hardware doesn’t have to apologize for itself. The news focuses on the Raspberry Pi. The CuBox continues to appear in the workshops of those who actually complete projects.

It’s not flawless. Internal bandwidth limits the Gigabit Ethernet port to about 470 Mbps, which seems like a minor betrayal for a $130 box. There are inconsistencies in the documentation. For hardware this venerable and well-respected, the community is smaller than you might anticipate. However, Debian boots. Kodi runs smoothly. It won’t complain even after years of sitting behind a TV. It’s difficult to ignore the CuBox-i4Pro’s failure to catch fire as SolidRun most likely intended. And yet, for some reason, it remains.