The new G4 was capable of ‘over 1 billion calculations per second’ and was three times as fast as Intel’s Pentium III at the same clocks, it was claimed at the time.
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In the summer of 1999, the U.S. government put export restrictions on Apple’s newly launched Power Mac G4 desktop tower systems. Being capable of a claimed performance of “over 1 billion calculations per second” meant these stylish ‘graphite’ translucent designs were “classed as a weapon” and thus routinely banned from export to 50 nations worldwide.
Though Apple naturally sought to get the restrictions lifted , according to contemporary reports, its new interim chief executive officer, Steve Jobs, didn’t miss a great marketing trick. Check out the resulting 30-second nugget of marketing gold in the video we have embedded.
“For the first time in history a personal computer has been classified as a weapon by the US government,” narrates the voice over, backed by the theme tune from the classic war movie The Great Escape . “With the power of over 1 billion calculations per second the Pentagon wants to ensure that the new Power Macintosh G4 does not fall into the wrong hands.” Jobs didn’t miss a chance to belittle Intel with the closing line “As for Pentium PCs, well they're harmless.”
As a reminder, the first Power Mac G4 machines, codenamed Yikes!, did indeed wield envious compute power at the time. They were marketed as offering up to double the performance of their G3 predecessors and triple that of Pentium III PCs clock-for-clock. Low End Mac recalls “The 400 MHz Yikes! (a.k.a PCI Graphics) offers 0.8-3.2 gigaflops (billion floating point operations per second) performance; by government definition in 1999, it was a supercomputer.”
Jensen Huang slams 'stupid' analogy comparing GPUs to nuclear weapons
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Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/apple-made-marketing-gold-from-the-power-mac-g4-supercomputer-export-ban-in-1999-pentagon-banned-sales-of-the-400-mhz-g4-in-50-countries-when-it-launched-and-became-the-first-pc-to-be-classed-as-a-weapon#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com/subscription
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