Well, that didn't take long; scant days after Steve Jobs wowed the Seybold crowd by introducing the Power Mac G4 as the first personal "supercomputer," people who work with actual supercomputers are reportedly bristling at Steve's latest marketing move. According to a San Francisco Examiner article, "computer industry experts" claim that the G4 is only a supercomputer by the government's long-outdated standards, and Apple's latest offering falls far short by today's criteria. When confronted with this article, an unnamed government representative stated, "if those high-falutin' scientists think our criteria are out of date, they can just pack up and move to the USSR." (Well, no, not really.)

The G4-as-supercomputer claim, as you know, is based on the processor's gigaflop performance-- it can perform over a billion floating point operations per second. According to the government, that qualifies it as a supercomputer, and as such, it's basically a weapon that can't be exported to sensitive countries. But as one might expect, the government is a tad behind in its definitions, at least according to Karen Green of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. These days, non-government types in the supercomputing field say that performance needs to be more in the teraflop level-- a trillion instructions per second, or a thousand times faster than today's G4. In fact, those same folks are lobbying the government to change the export restrictions, since, as National Science Foundation spokesman Peter West puts it, "gigaflops isn't that fast anymore."

The export restrictions won't change until January at the earliest, however, and in the meantime, the G4-as-supercomputer gambit has scored plenty of free press for Apple, and the export restrictions gave rise to one of the most clever Apple commercials in year. Apple's stock just closed over 70, yet another five-year high and very close to its all-time high. So who cares if academia claims that the G4 is a thousand times slower than today's supercomputers? Hey, all we can say is, it's close enough for government work.

Oh boy, here we go... For those of you who are starving for controversy in the Apple world of late, a big ol' hornet's nest has been kicked hard and a nasty rumor from a couple of months ago has resurfaced with a vengeance. We imagine some of you aren't entirely comfortable with this New Apple, who seems far less likely to inspire righteous indignation than in the olden days. So if you're nostalgic for those exciting times of rampant ambivalence when you could love the Mac but hate Apple (Clone Wars, anyone?), you will definitely want to get on board what we're calling the Blue Blocker scandal.

Basically, here's the skinny: a rumor arose a while back that Apple's firmware update for the blue and white G3, once installed, actually rendered the box incapable of booting if a G4 upgrade was installed. Non-firmware-upgraded blue and white systems, as well as all beige G3s, handled the G4 upgrades just fine. This has since been established as fact, but what hasn't been proven is whether or not Apple crippled the systems on purpose in order to prompt people to buy new G4 systems instead of getting third-party G4 upgrades for their G3s. If they did, then of course this is a move that rates higher on the sliminess scale than a lot of what Reigning Slime King™ Microsoft has been pulling for a number of years.

We try to keep an open mind about this, thinking that it's entirely possible that the firmware update accidentally broke the G3's upgradeability; we've heard at least once that Mac OS 9 fixes whatever got broken, though that's unconfirmed. But we considered it pretty ominous when, right in the middle of reading a thread on Apple's discussion board about this issue, suddenly all the notes got deleted. Apple's official stance on the issue is that "there is no shipping or announced PowerPC processor upgrade from Apple... and we're not aware of any documentation that indicates any Power Macintosh G3 computer was marketed as being upgradeable to a PowerPC G4 processor."

While that may sound a bit scary, it's important to keep in mind that Apple lost a lawsuit recently regarding its prior marketing of a Mac as being processor-upgradeable, so they've been very careful not to make that claim ever since. We at AtAT see a few possible outcomes to this brouhaha. First, it may turn out that Mac OS 9 does in fact fix whatever Apple broke (accidentally or intentionally) and so G4 upgrades may work just fine come October-- and the upgrades probably won't be available until then anyway. Another possibility, increasingly likely given the uproar, is that Apple will issue a new firmware update that also fixes the problem-- once they sell a few thousand G4 systems. Lastly, the upgrade companies could find their own way around the Blue Blocker; XLR8 claims they already have. Regardless, until Apple says something about this, the fans are going to get mighty mean. You can get up to speed on the whole thing at MacInTouch's special report.

Four slots in the G4? It's a well-kept secret, but it's true. And we're not talking about the Yikes! model with the three open slots and the fourth for the graphics card. We're talking about an honest-to-goodness Sawtooth-based G4 with the graphics card in the AGP slot, and four more PCI slots to fill with expandy goodness (or a five-slot box with PCI graphics). You think we jest? Hey, we're just going by what the Apple Store says. Faithful viewer Dwarka Divecha sent in this special report:

I just stumbled across something and yours was the only site I could think of that might be interested. [Ed. note: Gee, we're flattered. We think.] I was at the Apple Store, maxing out all the options (max price $18,896.00), when I realized that Apple itself has apparently decided that 3 PCI slots is not enough. Because the Apple store will apparently let you buy a machine with 4 PCI cards (5 if you count the Rage 128). It will let you get a Rage 128 with two video cards, an Ultra2 SCSI card, and an Ultra SCSI card all on one machine. Not that many people would need both SCSI cards, but there might be a few. Where would Apple put the fourth card?