30,000 readers of CHIP, one of Germany's biggest PC magazines, recently selected the 20 best IT-products of 1999. In the category, "Best PC Systems", the winners were:

First Place: Apple Power Macintosh G3/450-MHz-PowerPC-G3/128 MB RAM,/9 Gig SCSI HD

Second Place: Waibel ICW III/500/Pentium-III-500-MHz/128 MB RAM, 9,4 Gig HD/DVD

Third Place: Dell Dimension XPS /T550 Pentium-III-550/128 MB RAM

According to a report by CHIP's Patricia Mueller, Over 30.000 readers selected the best products for the year 1999 in twelve hardware and eight software categories. CHIP notes that industry representatives who attended the winners announcement ceremonies at Munich on October 19 were "surprised of the election results."

The following is translated from the German:

"Chip readers decided: The blue & white Power Macintosh G3 from Apple defeats all PC systems. That is a small sensation, Apple for many years had no role in reader elections but nevertheless was a player this year. In other categories the election results were less surprising."

Unfortunately, the PowerBook did not place in the Notebooks Category; where the top three winners were the IBM ThinkPad 770 mit PII/366, the Dell Inspirion 7000 Professional, Toshiba Tectra 8000.

3COM's Palm won the handheld category; Agfa won for scanners; and Olympus took the digital camera category.

CHIP Online has also posted a review of the iBook (in German), which pretty much covers the same ground as other reviews have. I was amused tho note that they refer to the iBook with handle deployed as " handbag mode."

CHIP PC also noted critically the absence of infrared, video-out, and SCSI ports and PC Card slots, as well as an obligatory PC magazine reference to the missing floppy disk drive.

However, they refer to the iBook's styling as a "design coup" which not only serve its intended purpose of attracting attention, but is also "durable and functional."

Summarizing, CHIP magazine says that in terms of performance the iBook must take a back seat to nobody -- either its Mac siblings or the Wintel competition. They sugest that anyone looking for a durable, efficient Notebook and who is not concerned about iBook's connectivity and expansion shortcomings will be well served by the "impudent" iBook.

Charles W. Moore

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February 08, 2012