John C. Dvorak:

The Computer Press Association presented Dvorak with the Best Columnist and Best Column awards, and he was also the 2004 and 2005 award winner of the American Business Editors Association's national gold award for best online columns of 2003 and 2004, respectively.

Audio and video

He now appears on Marketwatch TV and is a regular panelist on This Week in Tech, a netcast audio program hosted by Leo Laporte and featuring other former TechTV personalities such as Patrick Norton, Kevin Rose, and Robert Heron. As of December 2005, that "TWiTcast" regularly ranks among the top 5 at Apple's iTunes Music Store. Dvorak also participated in the first and only Triangulation podcast, a similar co-hosted technology discussion program. In March 2006, Dvorak started a new show called CrankyGeeks in which he leads a rotating panel of "cranky" tech gurus in discussions of technology news stories of the week.

Mevio recently hired Dvorak as Vice President & Managing Editor for a new Mevio TECH channel. He will be managing content from existing Mevio tech programming as well as hosting a new show, named "Tech5", where Dvorak will talk with another tech newsmaker and discuss the latest innovations and news.^[2]

Personal

Criticism of Apple

Dvorak has been a long time critic of Apple Inc., even goading readers with a Mac-bashing column in MacUser magazine.

On 25 July 2007, on what he called "a sad day for Mac bashers," Dvorak wrote favorably of his experiences using a Mac. He said that compared to a PC, the Mac "gets the job done, albeit more elegantly" and that "the interface is slicker than the PC's." He noted, "I sense that the OS is more solid than Microsoft Windows, but I cannot say why exactly." As for making recommendations for others, he stated that he would rather provide customer service for "most people" by "recommend[ing] a Mac with its higher price but lower hassle factor."^[6]

In 1984 he criticized Apple's inclusion of a mouse with their computers, saying “There is no evidence that people want to use these things.” In 1999, he ridiculed the iBook as “‘girly’”,^[7] saying, “It looks too juvenile— something a kid, a little girl, would like. Something you'd get at Toys 'R' Us.” For this he was slammed not only by Mac aficionados, but also by female computing pundit Janelle Brown for reinforcing gender stereotypes. In 2005 he suggested that recent good press about Apple was due to media bias, writing “With 90 percent of the mainstream writers being Mac users, what would you expect?” He later predicted that Apple would release a Video iPod in spite of Steve Jobs' denials, suggested that the Mac brand should be discontinued, predicted that Apple would switch to Intel chips, and suggested that Apple might be switching over to Windows and abandoning their Mac OS to save money.^[8]

On 9 June 2006, he explained to Dave Winer that he would bait Mac users in order to increase traffic to his website.^[9]

Dvorak has also been outspoken on Apple's iPhone, partially due to the public praise the iPhone received before it reached retail stores. In an op-ed piece for MarketWatch Dvorak said that Apple could not compete with existing mobile phone companies Nokia and Motorola.^[10] He did criticize how he was singled out as an "iPhone basher," because he pointed out that people were making judgment on a product they haven't even used yet. However, after the release of the iPhone, he said that it was a nice device.^[11]

Trivia