It’s that time of year where we venture down into the basement of the mighty Macworld industrial complex, to run maintenance tasks on the complex coal-burning machinery that runs our web site. Yes, it’s true, not all of the mole-men we employ to stoke the cruel fires of the dot-com serv-o-tron get out alive, but the ones who do are reinvigorated and will be ready for a new year of hardship in 2010.
As a part of our cursory inspection of the web serving equipment—it’s really just spraying some windex on the side of the machine and rubbing it off with a damp cloth—we receive an annual gift from our bug-eyed web workers. It’s a list of the most highly trafficked stories of 2009 on Macworld.com. Ignore the stuff scrawled on the back—all of that “send help” and “trapped in terrible working conditions” are the mole-men’s idea of a joke. But here’s the list they sent:
Review: 27-inch Core i5 iMac (with Core i7 option). Our review of the new high-end iMacs, the fastest Macs we’d ever tested, outdistancing the Mac Pro.
Sending and receiving MMS on your iPhone, with a little help from your friends. A workaround from the sad days before iPhone 3.0 brought MMS capabilities to us all.
Review: Mac Mini with Snow Leopard Server. Big interest in the Mac OS X Server configuration of the Mac mini.
Review: MacBook Pros (13-inch, Mid 2009). The conversion of the 13-inch MacBook to a MacBook Pro spurred interest in this product.
Review: Snow Leopard. Everyone wanted to know about Apple’s latest Mac OS X update.
Review: AirPort Extreme Base Station. An examination of the changes to Apple’s wireless hardware.
Review: iPhone 3GS. The fastest iPhone yet sold in the millions, and that demand fueled the demand for our review.
A Windows guru spends two weeks with a Mac. A Computerworld story about Preston Gralla’s experience running a Mac for two weeks.
Cut and paste, MMS highlight iPhone 3.0 improvements. A recap of the new features in the iPhone 3.0 software update, from when it was first announced.
Review: Quad-Core and Eight-Core Mac Pros (2009 editions). Readers wanted the skinny on the latest update to the Mac Pro line.
Eight great iPod hacks, mods and tricks. This story was published in early 2006, but readers (presumably Google searchers!) were interested in finding out how to hack their iPods.
Apple announces iPhone 3.1. The iPhone 3.1 update was announced in September and sparked interest.
Review: Time Capsule. A peek into Apple’s combination base-station and backup drive.
Apple releases iPhone Software 2.2.1. Remember when iPhone 2.2.1 was a big software update? (It happened in January.)
15 iPhone 3.0 features we’d like to see. Back in March we made a list of features we wanted to see as a part of the iPhone 3.0 announcement, which was forthcoming. From my calculations we were about 60 percent fulfilled once the real announcement was made.
First Look: Safari 4 Beta. An eagle-eyed look at the public beta of Safari 4, from February.
Mac OS X Hints: Show all files in the Finder. A Mac OS X Hint from 2006, presumably popular with web searchers who want to display hidden files in the Finder.
Installing Snow Leopard: What you need to know. Smart folks approach any OS update with caution; this article provided solid advice about what to look for.
11 major new Snow Leopard features. A peek into the most important features of Snow Leopard by Macworld’s staff.
Review: Mac mini (Early 2009 edition). The Mac mini was rumored to be dead, but it was updated twice during this year and its appearance on this list shows that it’s not dead yet.
In addition to these stories, our live coverage of Apple product-release events generates massive amounts of traffic. Our most popular Apple event in 2009 was Phil Schiller’s Macworld Expo 2009 keynote, followed by the 2009 WWDC keynote, the September 2009 iPod event, and Apple’s financial-results call from January 2009.
We also run slideshows on Macworld.com, as you’ve probably noticed. Among the most popular slideshows in 2009 were the winners of Macworld’s Best of Show Awards for 2009, a list of smaller feature changes in Snow Leopard, and a list of the fall’s most promising cameras.
From everyone here at Macworld, have a happy new year. We’ll see you in 2010! (Unless you’re unlucky enough to be one of our mole-men, in which case, get back to work, you.)