Steve Jobs on the Power Macintosh G3: Apple’s fast comeback
What Jobs talks about
Steve Jobs opens with updates on Apple’s turnaround and centers the talk on a new generation of Macs built around the PowerPC G3 chip. He argues that the G3 is dramatically faster than competing PCs in both benchmarks and real-world tasks.
He also stresses that Apple paired the performance gains with aggressive pricing and a family of systems designed to deliver that speed in practice: desktop, mini tower, and portable. For Jobs, the message is not just raw chip speed, but a product line that finally matches the market on both performance and value.
Jobs highlights the strong response from reviewers, customers, engineers, operations, and sales teams, and says early shipments are tracking at an annualized rate of about a million computers a year. The talk matters because it captures Apple’s emphasis on speed, execution, and a renewed sense of momentum in 1998.
Tom Crawford introduces the session; Jobs speaks throughout most of the recording.
In his words
“We started thinking different about six months ago”
“This ship was The power PC 3 developed by Motorola”
“They're much faster on integer performance and on floating point”
“Wickedly fast”
“We could not be happier”
Key points
- Apple had spent the previous six months “thinking different” and making major product changes.
- The PowerPC G3 was presented as a major performance leap over Intel systems.
- Jobs emphasizes real-world speed, including Photoshop tasks, not just benchmarks.
- Apple built desktop, mini tower, and portable systems around the G3 chip.
- The company priced the new Macs more aggressively to match the PC market.
- Early sales and reviews were strong, showing the products were resonating.
- Jobs frames the launch as evidence of Apple’s renewed momentum.
Full transcript
you you you you Tom Crawford I'm the president ceo of Mac publishing where they the publishers of Mac world and Mac weekend on behalf of the Sponsors, I'd like to welcome you all prove to be even more prophetic than I imagined There's been a year of tremendous transition for Apple and our industry The Mac second decade has proved to be far more challenging even tumultuous Than we expected and over the last year that Apple we've seen sweeping changes major staffing reorganization product shifts and a high level of uncertainty however Even with the challenges of the last year tremendous things have been accomplished
That's important. We recognize and give credit to all the success stories at Macworld Expo this week Over half the exhibitors are showing excited a founder of Apple computer I Thank you for allowing us to be here today We made a lot of progress in the last six months, and I'd like to give you some updates Tell you about some new stuff, and we got some fun stuff to demo for you. That's okay, so let's start off We started thinking different about six months ago, and The first Sign of that that people could buy we announced on November 10th, which was a Very good ship very good store Very different that I'd like to give you some updates on those things now It's been it was 51 days before the end of the quarter on November 10th, and we announced it's 57 days ago today First of all for those of you who were not We introduced a very different ship of course that ship was The power PC 3 developed by Motorola a
Incredibly sweet part of its life cycle now for the next few years and the chips if you're coming out I think we're gonna are going to toast pantyhose every step away G3 and we compare it against Intel's fastest processor class the pending twos They're much faster on integer performance and on floating point as a matter of fact an integer 44% faster and on floating point 15% faster, this is really good and When you actually do real-world stuff, we took I think approximately 60 Photoshop tasks and Ran through the one by one in an automated fashion 666 Seconds on a painting to 300 I took over 700 seconds and of course on the g3 266 So this gives you a feeling for how fast these chips are And we built these we built three systems around these chips that could really deliver the performance of the raw chip The first one was our desktop system Second was the mini tower and the third was our G3 portable, which is you know twice as fast as the fastest And so we also price these things pretty aggressive We still want to make a little bit of margin, but we really need to be Matching the prices of the PC industry much more closely. We've got that message and the response has been phenomenal for these products the review response has been great and everybody understands that these products are wickedly fast and That's the primary message
Now when we went into the quarter We were forecasting that we would sell 80,000 So great Also great And That was due to a lot of work by the engineering teams to make this a rock-solid product It was incredibly easy to build and by the operations team that worked very long hours to build these products They're a fantastic job and the sales teams and everybody at Apple worked really hard to make this possible Including a lot of our partners outside that well now what's what's really neat is if you analyze this That's a rate of a million computers a year a million degrees a year in our first 60 days and That means that although it wasn't a third of our human shipments in the last quarter We only ship them for 51 days at this rate They've already climbed over a third of our human shipments in terms of an annualized rate And I think you're going to see that continue to climb this coming quarter, so we could not be happier I'm told that there was Which brings us to a very good story we distribute our products in a lot of ways. We're large company
Transcribed from the audio with OpenAI Whisper. Timestamps link to the video above. Errors are possible.