"At PC World, we spend most of our time talking about products that make your life easier or your work more productive. But it's the lousy ones that linger in our memory long after their shrinkwrap has shriveled, and that make tech editors cry out, 'What have I done to deserve this?' Still, even the worst products deserve recognition (or deprecation). So as we put together our list of World Class winners for 2006, we decided also to spotlight the 25 worst tech products that have been released since PC World began publishing nearly a quarter-century ago."
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2005-07-06
Apple was the first to create anything that even resembled a laptop
Incorrect. There were computers which were arguably laptops available for nearly half a decade before the Mac Portable came out. For example I personally remember my dad, a journalist at the time, having one of the Tandy Model 200 laptops in the mid eighties.
Member since:2006-01-11
'Tandy Model 200 laptops'
Except for one thing: storage. Try balancing the Tandy Model 200 with its external cassette drive on your lap at the same time. If you're going to try to sell the idea of fold-up design = laptop, then you could also look to all sorts of pocket computers even before then, however I won't join in on counting those as laptops.
A point of clarification: when I said resembled, I didn't just mean form-factor, I also meant functionally. For instance: the Osborne 1 had the functionality, but not the form-factor. The Epson HX-20 was just a glorified word processor. The IBM 5155 lacked the form-factor. If anything, the Compaq SLT/286 was really the only laptop that could be considered a laptop before the Apple Portable. It is my personal opinion though, that the Apple Portable was the first to truly conform to the image of a laptop as we know them today. The Compaq was missing just one piece of the laptop puzzle that the Apple had: a trackball. If you wanted to use a mouse on the Compaq, you had to plug it in externally, giving rise to the same problems as external storage: where do you put it on your lap? Today, every laptop comes with some form of trackpad or TrackPoint built right in.
Member since:
2006-01-11
The PC World author shouldn't have been allowed to write a retrospective article on "worst products of all time." Apple was the first to create anything that even resembled a laptop, and for that, he wants to criticize it presumably based on today's standard for portability.
If the size of a computer followed Moore's Law, laptops should only be 0.0019 inches thick today starting with 4 inches in 1989. If that sounds unreasonable, so does calling 4 inches thick in 1989 too thick. Some of today's desktop-replacement laptops, like the Toshiba Qosmio, weigh over 9 pounds. That's not a huge leap from 16 pounds considering a 16 year technological gap.