When you hold the CuBox-i for the first time, it seems almost silly. It’s a perfect little cube, about two inches on each side, and weighs about 91 grams. It fits in your palm like a polished paperweight. It does not hum. It doesn’t get hot. Inside this tiny case, there’s a machine that can stream full 1080p video while using less than three watts of power. There’s no fan, no noise, and nothing else that would suggest it. That’s the kind of thing that makes you look twice and then ask questions.
The first CuBox came out in December 2011 from SolidRun, an Israeli company that makes the CuBox series. They were selling it at the time as an open-source developer platform for embedded systems, which wasn’t the most exciting idea. But the gadget quietly got some attention, in part because SolidRun said it was the first desktop computer on the market that was built on the Marvell Armada 500-series SoC. That is an important claim, even if most people didn’t pay much attention to it.
With the release of the i1, i2, i2eX, and i4Pro in November 2013, SolidRun made a huge step forward. These boxes all ran Freescale’s i.MX6 processors. The CuBox-i1 was the most basic model and cost $45. That price wasn’t a mistake. It was a sentence. Kossay Omary, CEO of SolidRun, said, “We want to let everyone do whatever their imagination drives them to do.” It seems like he meant what he said. It is a great deal to pay $45.00 for a computer that runs Linux, supports Android 4.2, and connects to your TV via HDMI. It makes sense to be skeptical, but the specs are still valid.
The CuBox-i is interesting for more than just its size and price. It’s the variety of things it could become. SolidRun’s CTO, Rabeeh Khoury, said that the device was a platform that could be used for anything you could think of, including embedded use, multimedia, education, cloud computing, and personal projects. That’s a pretty big claim, but the hardware pretty much backs it up. For example, the i4Pro model has a quad-core ARM processor that can run at up to 1.2GHz. That won’t be able to replace a workstation, but it’s more than enough to run a media center or learn how to manage Linux.
The CuBox-i also has an open-source community that is really active. When the series first came out, ports of major Linux distributions were already under way. XBMC, which is now called Kodi, quickly became one of the most popular ways to use them. Later, in December 2014, SolidRun released the CuBoxTV, which was basically a version made just for running Kodi on OpenELEC. It’s a smart way to narrow your attention. Some people only want a cheap, quiet box hooked up to their TV and don’t need a developer platform.
It’s still not clear if SolidRun ever really got into the mainstream consumer market. The CuBox-i has a strong following among developers and hobbyists, but it hasn’t become as well-known as Raspberry Pi. That doesn’t mean it’s a failure; different tools work better for different groups. One idea that is harder to argue against is that computers don’t have to be big, loud, or expensive. The CuBox-i showed that a two-inch cube can do real work while using only the power of a wall outlet to stay cool and quiet. There’s something quietly appealing about that in a world where electronics keep getting bigger and hotter.
