So has Steve's infamous Reality Distortion Field™ worn off yet? Because, you know, it was running full blast during Tuesday's Seybold keynote address; at one point during the proceedings, we got a reading of an unprecedented 7.6 on the Jobs Scale using our patent-pending Distort-O-Meter. (No, you can't borrow it. Stop asking.) That's not to say that some of the things he said weren't true, since the RDF is often employed to further enhance the intoxicating effect of even perfectly true good news. But it does mean that it behooves us all to take a step back from the heady G4 announcement, breathe deeply, and take another look at some of the more iffy claims that were made. In particular, let's talk about the awe-inspiring performance of the new G4 processor beating at the heart of Apple's new clear, silver, and "graphite" pro machines. While you're right to be excited-- very excited-- about gigaflop performance, there are some caveats to keep in mind.

A gigaflop represents a billion floating point operations per second, whereas most common computing tasks seem to rely on integer performance instead. And from what we can piece together from various stuff floating around the 'net, the G4 has integer performance roughly on par with that of the G3, scaled for clock speed-- nothing to sneeze at, but not nearly the kind of overall performance improvement implied by Steve. That may be the point Intel plays up when the company eventually tries to counter Apple's claims that the G4 is "2.94 times faster" than the fastest Pentium III; set a 600 MHz PIII against a G4 both performing a word count on a massive Microsoft Word document, and we bet the PIII will win hands down. (We hope we're wrong.) Plus, one of the biggest speed-boosting features of the G4 chip is the "Velocity Engine," the vector processor that Motorola calls AltiVec-- but AltiVec can't do its job unless an application is written to use it. And while adding at least minor AltiVec support is as easy as recompiling (taking real advantage of the technology involves coding specifically for it), what are the odds that Microsoft is ever going to let Office run faster on the Mac than on a Wintel? Yeah, right.

"But AtAT," we hear you saying, "what about all those great demos that Steve performed live? That 600 MHz Pentium III-based Compaq system got its butt whipped." Well, yeah, but as faithful viewer Tom Kepler points out, a CNET article quotes ABN AMRO analyst David Wu as saying that "there are lies, damn lies, and demos." Those demos all involved AltiVec-enhanced applications (Photoshop 5.5) and/or processes that rely heavily on floating point operations. We're not saying that Office is everything (heck, we don't even use it ourselves), but you shouldn't expect the G4 to be three times faster than PIIIs across the board. For Photoshop? Sure. For various science and engineering applications? You bet. For mind-bending 3D games? Almost definitely, though Steve didn't show any at Seybold. But for the average user, don't expect to finish your work day in a third the time of your PC-using colleagues if you get a G4. Not that we're trying to talk you out of buying one, by any means-- in fact, we'd rather talk you into buying one. Preferably, for us. If only we had our own Reality Distortion Field to exploit...

Gigaflops are huge. Shipping a personal computer capable of performing a billion instructions per second puts Apple in the history books yet again. As Apple Distinguished Scientist Dr. Richard Crandall put it during the Seybold keynote, the G4 performs an instruction in the amount of time it takes light to travel one foot-- so by the time the calculation is finished, the light from your G4's monitor hasn't even reached your eyes yet. Astounding, right? But with great power comes great responsibility, as Uncle Ben used to say, and that brings us to the Power Mac G4's export restrictions. For those of you who watched the keynote, you'll recall that, by government standards, the G4 ranks as a supercomputer because of its gigaflop performance. That's great for marketing (not to mention end-user experience), but it throws a monkey wrench into the works when it comes to selling G4s overseas. The U.S. government actually classifies the gigaflop G4 as a weapon ("munitions," we believe), making it illegal to export to certain "sensitive" countries, for fear that they'll use it against us.

I actually ran into this export restriction several years ago in a pre-AtAT capacity. The company I was working for, which sells software running on high-end Unix workstations, had a customer in China-- and when I tried to ship the system over there, I was informed by the export department that we couldn't do it. Hewlett Packard actually had to create a whole separate Unix workstation with a crippled processor that was "slow enough" to ship to China. In fact, once I couldn't even ship a CD-ROM with Unix on it to Australia without applying for special permission because the government classifies Unix as a "controlled substance." For some reason, the same restriction didn't apply if we installed that same Unix from the CD-ROM onto a computer's hard drive and then shipped the computer instead. So if you're puzzled by the "no G4s in China" rule, remember, we're dealing with the U.S. government, here; things don't have to make total sense.

Now, while Apple will lose sales in China, Iraq, etc. as a result of the government's export restrictions, we imagine they'll more than make up for it with the scads of G4s they'll sell due to their marketing exploitation of the G4's "munitions" status. For those of you who haven't seen Apple's new G4 commercial (which declares Pentium PCs to be "harmless"), Mac OS Rumors has posted a QuickTime version. Personally, we at AtAT think it's Apple's best and most effective in quite a while-- probably better than all the iMac and iBook ads, incidentally. And if the government is going to restrict the G4 as a weapon, then isn't it an appropriate lemons-to-lemonade move on Apple's part to use that very restriction as a marketing weapon against the competition? Meanwhile, if Saddam Hussein wants a G4, he's going to have to hit the black market.

Hey, let's back up a minute and revisit that whole Reality Distortion Field thingy. We actually watched the entire Seybold keynote all over again via streaming QuickTime 4, and we have to recant yesterday's allegations that Steve was being a "Sneaky Pete" by implying that all the Power Mac G4 models had the high-end features of the Sawtooth motherboard. He does, in fact, make a distinction between the "Yikes!" Yosemite-based G4s shipping now and what he called the "high-end" G4 models due in several weeks, just as faithful viewer Farokh asserted. It's subtle, but it's there. However, the RDF was apparently in full effect when Steve announced the 400 MHz models as "shipping now," because as far as anyone can make out, it isn't.

According to a Mac Observer article, excited customers who went to place an order at the Apple Store found themselves staring at a quoted 30-day delivery time. Obviously "now" is a new Apple code word for "in about a month." An update to the Mac Observer article claims that the 30-day notice has now been removed from the Apple Store, implying immediate delivery. Strangely, when we went to check after reading the article, an order we put together for a low-end G4 still retained the 30-day delivery schedule. But if you call the Apple Store's toll-free number, the live phone operators are reportedly claiming that the 400 MHz models will be shipping in ten days. That's better than thirty, but still doesn't qualify as "now" in our book. And this is all for the Apple Store; the resellers out there seem to be telling people they won't have any G4s for at least a month or so.

Of course, we've mentioned weird Apple Store delivery times in the past, most recently with iBook orders. Whereas Steve just claimed publicly that the iBook would ship "in a couple of weeks," faithful viewer Ivan Hooker points out that the Apple Store delivery time is now listed as 45 days, which we just verified. And the AirPort card is still listed as shipping in 70 days. Strange things are happening to the space-time continuum...