HardwareCentral - The Best, the Worst, and the Ugliest: 2008

The Best, the Worst, and the Ugliest: 2008

E.G. for Example: The Year in Review

January 5, 2009
By Eric Grevstad

The Labs, Weather, & Sports Desk is piled high with champagne and pie. Yes, champagne and cake are the more traditional combination for a party, but it's hard to throw cake at somebody. And at HardwareCentral's annual look back at the wondrous and blunderous of the year in PCs, we throw pies with one hand while lifting a glass with the other.

To be sure, some in the crowd are gulping instead of merely sipping the bubbly -- it's been a tough year, and 2009 looks to be still tougher. It was just a couple of years ago, for instance, we were talking about a strong retail channel taking business from direct vendors, with Dell adding and Gateway switching exclusively to retail. Now Circuit City has filed for bankruptcy and shut 155 stores, while Best Buy slashes its budget and offers a voluntary separation package to nearly all of its corporate employees.

But even though you can't go to the mall and buy a $4,000 life-size statue of Darth Vader at The Sharper Image anymore, there are plenty of positive as well as negative things to note in our eighth annual wrap-up. Knowing us, you can guess that we'd start with a negative:

Read the Fine Print Award: This year's reminder that the devil is in the details was Apple's MacBook Air, the thinner-than-thin, lighter-than-light laptop whose pre-announcement brought swoons (alas, ours included) and superlatives ... until the actual spec sheet appeared. No Ethernet? Only one USB port?! A nonremovable, nonswappable battery?!?! Let's wish Steve Jobs many years of health to launch products less soaked in Apple-can-do-no-wrong Kool-Aid than this one.

Product of the year runner-up runners-up: Unlike the MacBook Air, the Lenovo ThinkPad X300 deserved superlatives; we went so far as to call it the best notebook ever. The Dell Studio Hybrid is a downright elegant small-form-factor desktop.

HP earned two thumbs up for printers: The Color LaserJet CP1518ni is a reasonably quick, compact, and well-equipped (Ethernet, PostScript, flash-card reader) small-office workhorse for $400 ($300 if you scout around), and the HP OfficeJet J4680 inkjet all-in-one is a bit on the slow side but charmed us with its petite size, standard fax, automatic document feeder, and WiFi, and bargain price ($130).

At the other end of the printer/scanner/copier spectrum, the Canon Pixma MX7600 is expensive at $400, but its innovative technology -- it applies a coating of clear ink before its five normal inks -- delivers brilliant results on plain paper. We also applaud Clickfree's no-brainer backup drives and the Microsoft Wireless Laser Mouse 6000 v2.0, a comfortable full-size variant on the pack-and-go notebook mouse.

Gillette Mach 3 or Schick Quattro?: Sometimes the third try's a charm; sometimes bad things happen in threes. On paper, AMD's triple-core Phenom X3 processor seemed to both create and fill a clever price/performance niche between dual- and quad-core CPUs (even if it is a quad with a core that flunked QA). But its real-world success has been more of a bunt than a triple.

Meanwhile, Intel has one-upped AMD processors' integrated dual-channel memory controller with the three-channel controller built into the Core i7. It's a nice fit as mainstream memory evolves from DDR2 to DDR3, but is it a gamble that this time next year we won't be buying DDR4? Is it just us, or do odd numbers sound vaguely lopsided architecture-wise? If not, why aren't we hearing about five- and seven-core CPUs?

Another thing about the numbers 3 and 4: It didn't make headlines, but it deserves to be noted that in 2008, for the first time in history, consumer PCs came with enough memory. Superstore and warehouse-club shelves sported desktops and notebooks with 32-bit Windows Vista and 3GB of RAM standard, as well as 64-bit Vista systems with 4GB.

Of course the 64-bit OS can make good use of even more memory, but those of us who first experienced Vista on a 1GB machine can be identified by our accosting mall shoppers, grabbing their lapels and shouting, "Do you realize what you're getting? Do you know how lucky you are?"

Think Johnnie Walker, not Jack: A winning move by AMD: more CPUs bearing its Black Edition label, signifying an unlocked processor and telling overclockers, "Go ahead and push the envelope." Who'd have imagined five years ago that not only loaded gaming systems but the hardest-of-the-hardcore art of overclocking would be available in retail? Give props, also, to the last of the Athlon X2s -- secretly the first of the dual-core Phenoms.

Breakout hits of the year: Last year in this space we predicted that displays would be big in '08 -- affordable prices on 22- and 24-inch widescreen monitors, clever USB adapters and laptop docks that make it a cinch to add a second or third display, hi-def HDMI output built into even bargain PCs.

Cha-ching! Chalk up another flawless forecast (yes, just like your "Wireless USB will be ubiquitous in 2006" -- Ed.) That said, we must admit that displays were only the second hottest market segment around: 2008 was the year of the netbook, which leads to our ...

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