The Nintendo Gamecube's unveiling closely coincides with the release of Apple's Power Mac G4 Cube, which is also in the shape of a colored plastic box. Rumors of Steve Jobs trying to copyright the cube and shutting down all websites which prominently feature boxes or cube-like entities are starting to appear on various newsgroups. How this will affect Nintendo is currently unknown. What we have here is an example of how the general public just wants computers to be simpler and easier to use. I mean, it's a box.
People are familiar with boxes.
We all grew up to know and love boxes. It's not what's inside systems these days that sells, it's how the thing looks. If we could find some way to make our systems look like a perfect sphere without worrying that our key demographic would try to use them for basketball practice, we'd do it.