Technologizer

The 20 Greatest Tech Underdogs of All Time

Thursday, November 5, 2009

Rocky. The Chicago Cubs. Charlie Brown. Avis, back when its whole schtick centered on being America’s #2 rental car company. America loves its underdogs–and the technology business has always been home to a disproportionate number of exceptionally lovable underdogs. They may never achieve market leadership, but without them, the tech in our lives would be [...]

Windows 7 PCs: Slow Going

Thursday, October 29, 2009

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Yesterday, I wrote about the fact that Microsoft is now stripping crudware off Windows 7 PCs and selling them with its own lower-impact software suite. Here’s evidence of why that makes sense: British computer magazine PC Pro has published “The Crapware Con,” an ambitious report on the third-party software that PC manufacturers pile on top [...]

Microsoft Sells Crud-Free PCs

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

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Whenever anybody asks me for my take on Windows 7, I share my largely positive reaction, but am careful to insert a note of necessary gloom: If PC manufacturers lard up Windows 7 machines with adware, demoware, and various other forms of unwantedware, they’re going to ruin a good thing. Turns out Microsoft apparently has the [...]

Classic PCs vs. New PCs: Their True Cost

Sunday, October 25, 2009

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You’re familiar with Moore’s law. You know all about the accelerating pace of information technology. Regardless, you’re still amazed at how many gigabytes you can fit in your pocket these days. Remember how your first computer’s entire hard disk only held 20 megabytes? You could accidentally swallow a thousand times as much data now if [...]

The Worst PC in America: Found!

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

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Reynaldo Rivera’s 2006-era MacBook Pro has lost its screen, not to mention a few of its keys. Its trackpad and optical drive don’t work. Its mouse is held together with tape, and he uses a battered copy of Dante’s Inferno as a mousepad. It outputs video to a 13-inch standard-def CRT TV–and must do so [...]

The Worst PCs in America

Monday, October 19, 2009

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Some PCs are born crummy. Some achieve crumminess. And some have crumminess thrust upon them. Those are my conclusions after judging our Worst PC in America contest, in which we asked you to tell us about really rotten personal computers–with the lure of a snazzy HP Envy 13 laptop to be awarded to the most [...]

Our Quest for the Worst PC in America Ends Today

Friday, October 16, 2009

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Over the past couple of weeks, members of the Technology community have been gracing this site with words, pictures, and videos about some truly terrible personal computers. But it’ll all end tonight at 5pm PDT, when we stop accepting entries in our Worst PC in America contest. We’ll then pick an, um, winner based on both [...]

Tell Us About Your Bad PC, Win a New Laptop

Monday, October 12, 2009

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Our search for the single most embarrassingly lousy computer in our great nation continues! We’ve received some great nominees so far, which you can check out here. But I’m hoping that more of you will fess up to owning truly crummy machines, especially since we’ll pick one person who enters the contest to win a [...]

Recession Slams PC Industry, Shipments Shrink

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

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PC shipments are set to decline for the first time since 2001, iSuppli said Tuesday. The call reverses an earlier one which had said the industry would be able to eke out a small gain for the year. In any case, it appears that the severe recession is at fault for the pullback. A four percent [...]

The Race for Unplanned Obsolescence

Friday, June 26, 2009

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[NOTE: Here's a post that first appeared in our free T-Week newsletter, which you can subscribe to here.] I’ve been thinking a lot about PC components lately–the obligatory, the optional, and even the controversial. That’s because I’ve been doing a series of comparisons of Windows PCs and Macs, and most of my comparing involves running down [...]

The Commodore 64 vs. the iPhone 3G S: The Ultimate Showdown

Sunday, June 21, 2009

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Sad news: Apple has rejected a Commodore 64 emulator for the iPhone. It’s not surprising, and arguably not an utter outrage given that the iPhone developer agreement expressly forbids emulators, and the C64 app’s creator knew that when he began work on his brainchild. I’m still unclear on how a Commodore 64 emulator–one fully licensed [...]

Fifteen Classic PC Design Mistakes

Sunday, June 14, 2009

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There’s no such thing as the perfect computer, and never has been. But in the personal computer’s long and varied history, some computers have been decidedly less perfect than others. Many early PCs shipped with major design flaws that either sunk platforms outright or considerably slowed down their adoption by the public. Decades later, we [...]

The Greatest Half-Decade in PC History

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

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The personal computer revolution is roughly thirty-five years old, which means that been through seven half-decades so far. To me, the most interesting one is the first half of the 1980s–when PCs were really getting going, and hadn’t yet become commodified through compatibility. Almost every new one was an experiment, whether it was wildly successful [...]

Patentmania! Personal Computers of the Early 1980s

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

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The first few years of PC history were its stone age–the era when any signs of life whatsoever were history-making. The period from 1985 to the present, as amazing as it’s been, has been one of consistency and compatibility. Which is why I think of 1980-1985 as the most interesting half-decade in PC history. Almost [...]

My Most Memorable Computer Was…

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

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Got a moment to get all nostalgic over old electronic equipment? Over on Twitter–where I’m @harrymccracken and a feed of all Technologizer stories is available at @technologizer–I tweeted thusly: @harrymccracken Of all the computers you ever owned or used, which meant the most to you? I’ll run the most fun responses on Technologizer and give credit. More than [...]

Is Apple’s 17-Inch MacBook Pro Expensive? Round 2: The Competition Goes Consumer

Tuesday, April 7, 2009

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Last week, I tried to conduct an objective price comparison of 17-inch Apple’s MacBook Pro and similarly-equipped Windows laptops. After I did, my friend Steve Wildstrom of BusinessWeek pointed out one basic problem with such comparisons: They’re impossible. By which he meant that there’s no way to do one that’ll strike everybody as sensible and [...]