News

Apple Named 'Hardware Company of the Year;' Wins Five World Class Awards

Wednesday, May 31st, 2006 at 2:50 PM - by

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..."

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iBill said:

member since 23 Feb 2005 with 511 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Wed May 31, 2006 3:18 pm

I'd rather that AAPL be named "stock of the year" instead..

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A guest said: (hide)

Wed May 31, 2006 5:22 pm

they also had a buncha products in the worst products of all time category (mostly honorable mention):

20th anniv. mac

the imac puck-mouse

the pipin

the mac portable (though i think the fact that it was one of the first should out weigh, no pun intended, a worst product nod)

the rokr

...i guess you win a few, you lose a few

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Tiger said:

member since 17 Jun 2003 with 904 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Wed May 31, 2006 6:03 pm

Rokr, not theirs.

The rest now how old?

Oh, and don't you feel sorry for Sony?

NOT!

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A guest said: (hide)

Thu Jun 01, 2006 12:49 pm

Quote
Guest wrote:
they also had a buncha products in the worst products of all time category (mostly honorable mention):

20th anniv. mac

the imac puck-mouse

the pipin

the mac portable (though i think the fact that it was one of the first should out weigh, no pun intended, a worst product nod)

the rokr

...i guess you win a few, you lose a few

Yeah, its called taking chances, and its why Apple not only has had some real turkies, but many of the BEST and most ground-breaking products out there... the original Macintosh, iMac, iPod, iTunes, etc. etc.

I only wish the rest of the industry would take more chances and up the innovation quotient the way Apple has.

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A guest said: (hide)

Thu Jun 01, 2006 4:22 pm

I got a chance to actually use a 20th anniversary mac about 2 months ago, after only seeing pictures and it in person once behind a glass cabnet.

It is such a beautiful machine, they could seriously gut the insides of it and release a new mac that looked identical to it and it would probably sell like crazy. It was extremely easy to open up and pull the drive out of or install new ram or repair. It had a built in TV tuner, Component video capture, and FM tuning. It sounded amazing... with the bose subwoofer and speakers built into the side... way better than any system I've seen without crazy 5.1 surround speakers. The cable management was totally cool, all of the cables you'd expect for power, audio, etc.. all went through one thicker cable to the subwoofer, then from the subwoofer to the wall power. It had a trackpad that was removable from the keyboard so you could set it anywhere, instead of a mouse. It also had USB built in and very thin. The guy who owned it had loaded OS 9 on it so it was running really smoothly.

Anyhow, my point being that it was absoultely gorgeous especially at the time. It came out about a year before the first iMac was released in 1998.

It was out of the price range of most people, but I wouldn't say it was one of the worst products ever. No one says sports cars like a Lambourgini or Ferrari or even a high end BMW are the worst products released just because they cost more than most of us can afford.

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A guest said: (hide)

Thu Jun 01, 2006 9:27 pm

Quote
Guest wrote:
It was out of the price range of most people, but I wouldn't say it was one of the worst products ever. No one says sports cars like a Lambourgini or Ferrari or even a high end BMW are the worst products released just because they cost more than most of us can afford.

I'm an owner of a 20th Anniversary Mac (TAM). And while it does have many of the features you claim, it was also deeply flawed.

The TV tuner and other media extras were nifty, but otherwise the innards bordered on out-of-date right from the day of release. The machine had an old, slow 604 processor, just as Apple was preparing to introduce the G3. The innards were, for some reason, nicked from a Performa (!) desktop, not a laptop, and things didn't fit so well -- in particular, there was no networking card! Adding Ethernet meant purchasing an expensive, hard-to-find card for an expansion slot, which then required replacing the computer's back with an (included) "humpback" panel that erased the unit's clean lines. Even for the time, the hard disk was small and the CD-ROM drive slow. And although the USB iMac appeared soon after, the TAM most definitely does NOT have USB, only the clunky old Apple connectors. (If you saw USB on a TAM, it was a user mod.)

You're right that the Bose speaker system was amazing, and was really the machine's power feature -- and biggest failure. That pristine sound system had a wiring flaw that caused many owners' TAMs to break out in pristine static and screeches, and the problem often persisted after fixes. Mine went to the shop three times for sound system repair (all on Apple's dime, fortunately).

In the end, the TAM was definitely a fitting look forward to the gorgeous future of Apple design -- but was unfortunately saddled with the company's hardware innards of yesteryear. Not a "worst" product, I agree. Just an unhappy example of cool concept whacked by poor execution.

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