According to a review by Tom's Hardware,In 1999, Apple's Power Mac G4 was classified as a weapon by the U.S. government and banned from being exported to 50 countries because its computing power exceeded 1 billion floating-point operations per second. However, Jobs turned this crisis into the most classic marketing case in Apple's history.In the summer of 1999, Jobs, who had just returned to Apple, faced the export ban. Instead of choosing to deal with it in a low-key manner, he directly shot a 30-second TV commercial.
The advertisement is set to the theme song of the classic war movie "The Great Escape", and the narration declares:"For the first time in history, a personal computer has been classified as a weapon by the U.S. government. With more than 1 billion operations per second, the Pentagon wants to make sure the new Power Mac G4 doesn't fall into the wrong hands."
At the end, he directly mocked Intel: "As for Pentium PCs, they are harmless."
Power Mac G4 does have the confidence to be banned. The first batch of G4 models codenamed Yikes!, the 400MHz entry-level model can provide floating point performance of 0.8 to 3.2 GFLOPS. The same-frequency performance is three times that of Pentium III and twice that of the previous generation G3.
According to the definition of the U.S. government in 1999, a supercomputer that reaches 1 GFLOPS is considered a supercomputer. Therefore, even the 400MHz entry-level model has triggered export controls, and the 450MHz and 500MHz models are naturally prohibited from sale.
It was not until January 2000 that the U.S. government raised the export control threshold from 1 GFLOPS to 6.5 GFLOPS, and Apple was able to resume unrestricted exports of G4.
Today, 25 years later, technology export controls are still being repeated, from NVIDIA GPUs to semiconductor equipment, and the list of target countries has been reduced from the 50 countries that year to more precise blockades, but the logic has never changed: computing power is power.
