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Give or Take 30 Days (9/1/99)
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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...
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SceneLink (1757)
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And Now For A Word From Our Sponsors |
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 9/1/99 episode: September 1, 1999: The G4 is blisteringly fast-- but is it really that much faster than a Pentium system for everyday tasks? Meanwhile, it's "No soup for you!" to unfriendly countries around the globe as the U.S. government restricts the export of the munitions-class G4, and while Steve said the 400 MHz G4s are "shipping now," that phrase apparently means something slightly different on his home planet...
Other scenes from that episode: 1755: Your Mileage May Vary (9/1/99) 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... 1756: No G4 For Saddam (9/1/99) 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...
Or view the entire episode as originally broadcast... | |  |
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