PC World magazine on Wednesday issued its 2006 Hardware Company of the Year award to Apple, which had five products land on its list of the 100 Best Products of 2006: the iPod nano (#4), Boot Camp (#10), the Mac mini (#35), the iPod (#36), and iTunes (#43).

Intel's Core Duo processor, which is found in Apple's MacBook Pro, Mac mini, and iMac, was the number one product. AMD's new Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core processor came in second. Craigslist, Segate's 160GB portable hard drive, Google Earth, Adobe Premiere Elements 2.0, Canon's EOS 30D digital SLR camera, and YouTube.com rounded out the top ten.

Of Apple, the publication had this to say: "With a huge RD budget and a single-minded despot running the show, Apple once again introduced products that made everyone else look bad. ... We continue to hope that some of the Cupertino crowd's design ideas will trickle down to the rest of the tech industry."

Yahoo! earned Web Company of the Year honors, thanks to its ability to move "far beyond being a mere search engine ... Google may get a lot more attention, but Yahoo has been getting more things accomplished," the editors said. Adobe was Software Company of the Year, thanks to its ability to ship "stellar US$100 apps that regular folks can use."

Finally, Sony merited Worst Company of the Year. "We get the feeling that Sony doesn't trust people," the editors wrote, citing the rootkit music CD fiasco as well as the PlayStation 3 and Blu-ray delays "due to difficulties implementing a second copy protection scheme ... All this from the company that virtually pioneered copying with the Betamax."

Addressing the question of why PC World issues these awards in the middle of the year, editor-in-chief Harry McCracken explained: "For eons, we doled out trophies during the midyear PC Expo show. The show died, but the awards still flourish. Call them 'The Best Products at This Particular Moment,' if you prefer..."