PC Mag awards reward the hard-hit
One of the most respected junkets in the business, the awards lived up to a reputation for iconoclasm by handing the honours to several firms that certainly haven't had banner years.
AMD may not have been able to make anything like the number of chips it would have liked but that didn't stop its K6 processor walking away with the most prized bauble of the lot: the award for Best Product.
Similarly, if one company has hit the news for all the wrong reasons this year it is Apple, which picked up Best System for its futuristic, limited-run 20th Anniversary Macintosh, as well as a Runner-up in Best Product for another technology it helped define: the IEEE 1394 interface standard, or FireWire as it was better known when it first came to light.
Despite picking up the promising Texas Instruments mobile PC division 10 months ago, Acer has never been a top three player in portables but that didn't stop it collecting the laurels for Best Portable System, edging out IBM.
Similarly, NCR is not the first name in PC servers but the venerable US firm got the nod for its WorldMark 4300 SMP box.
All the awards can be seen on ZDNet today.
(PC Magazine is a sister publication to ZDNet News.)