My personal best time was 63 seconds.
I owned both official and knock-off cubes, and I found the official cube far superior, merely for reasons of coloring, and also solid construction; it was smoother and it was much less likely to explode in my hands as I cubed at top speed.
I spent inordinate amounts of time in the upstairs bathroom lubricating my cubes with a big tub of Vaseline. My parents never confronted me or even seemed to wonder what I was doing in there; I suppose it was still a bit too early for us to worry about anything morally questionable. But I did go through a lot of Vaseline.
I actually sold Max's family the Red speed cube that you can see him using as a kid in the Netflix documentary "The Speed Cubers"
I have that same cube (model / color) on my desk right now as its one of my favorites.
It was exciting to see the cube in the documentary and to be sure I went back through my order history and found the order.
It was really fun to be part of the speed cubing / puzzle cube community during that time.
Also, not everyone will solve every scramble the same way, since there's an element of decision making involved there, and future steps depend on previous ones.
All the people solving in seconds aren't even using the same methods, so some will be better at planning while they look at the cube before the start, some will have faster motor skills.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God%27s_algorithm
[1] https://jperm.net/3x3/cfop
And any position can be solved in as few as 20 moves, aka “God’s number”
