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.