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

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In a turbulent conflict-shaken world rife with geopolitical rivalry, tech export bans seem increasingly prevalent. However, history provides some context, and some fun in this case, as industry watchers rightly highlight that computer technology export bans are nothing new. Here we look back at the Apple Power Macintosh G4 export ban from 1999, and Steve Jobs making marketing gold from the situation.

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.”

The 400 MHz model was the entry-level model at launch, so as well as it being banned from export the faster 450 MHz and 500 MHz were also off the menu if you lived in one of the countries on the export control list at the time. Bill Clinton’s administration raised the gigaflop threshold for U.S. export controls in January 2000. Then, with the threshold raised to 6.5 GFLOPS, Apple could again begin unrestricted G4 exports.

History repeating

The latest tech export controversy headlines revolve around the recently launched version of the Anthropic Claude AI model, dubbed Fable. We have also widely reported on hardware bans, with Nvidia GPUs probably the most notable example. However, western governments have also sought to restrict exports of semiconductor tools and software to places like Russia, China, Iran, North Korea etc.

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