The CuBox-i4Pro feels strangely good when you hold it in one hand. The sides are about two inches wide, and the whole thing is matte black and surprisingly light. It looks like a power adapter or a charging brick that you might have lost. Then you connect it to a monitor and put in a microSD card that has Kali Linux on it. Suddenly, you’re looking at a desktop environment that works perfectly on something that is smaller than a coffee mug.
The Israeli hardware company SolidRun, which made this device, hasn’t been talking much about consumer tech. It’s not that they aren’t doing interesting work; it’s just that they’ve always been aimed at a certain type of person. Builders. Developers of embedded systems. People like this really get excited about having Gigabit Ethernet and eSATA ports on something as small as a paperweight.
A Freescale i powers the i4Pro.The MX6 has a quad-core processor clocked at 1GHz and 2GB of RAM. No one is impressed by those numbers in 2024. It does matter, though. When SolidRun pushed this hardware, it wasn’t just for benchmark performance. It was about how efficient, small, and adaptable it was. Full Linux distributions like Kali, Debian, Android, and Yocto run smoothly on the machine, which is housed in a box that you could hide behind your monitor.
SolidRun really thought about how to connect something this small, which is what makes the CuBox-i line and the i4Pro in particular interesting. The fact that you get Gigabit Ethernet instead of Fast Ethernet is a very important detail if you’re using this as a light server or network tool. An eSATA port lets you connect external storage, and there are also USB ports, an HDMI output, and an optical audio out. The better 4X4 model came with Bluetooth 4.0, WiFi, and infrared. That’s a lot of features packed into a 2x2x2 inch frame for $169.99.
There is a way to run Kali Linux on the CuBox-i4Pro that you do every time. You don’t get images that are already made for you. You copy the build scripts from GitLab, run the shell script, and wait. After a while, you’ll have an image file that you can use the dd utility to write to a microSD card. It’s not hard, but you need to be used to being in a terminal. That was meant to be that way. This device isn’t for people who like things to be set up for them already. People who want to know why they’re building something should read it.
As the ARM single-board computer market has grown over the past few years, it seems that devices like the CuBox-i4Pro were quietly ahead of their time. The Raspberry Pi made news and became popular among hobbyists. But SolidRun was doing something similar, and some might say better: it was focusing on build quality, real-world connectivity, and developer-grade operating system support instead of trying to appeal to as many people as possible. SolidRun’s CTO, Rabeeh Khoury, said that the 4X4 launch was all about giving makers and developers who needed more space to build more performance. The framing has held up pretty well over time.
It’s still not clear how many of these units are currently being used in production, home labs, or development pipelines. But the people in the community stay together. There are still threads in forums. Kali’s ARM documentation still talks about the script cubox-i4pro.sh. When something lasts for a long time without being noticed, it usually means something about it that sales numbers alone rarely show. The CuBox-i4Pro wasn’t made to fit all needs. The people who needed it only needed it to be just right.
