iCandy - the best Apple concept mockups. Despite the huge number of 3d rendered mockups of Apple products on the web, few even come close to genuine Apple design. The exceptions seem to be Isamu Sanada and Yann Le Coroller, who between them account for the majority of well executed 3rd party concepts. Here are our favorites, and why we chose them. Vote for yours.

Here are clips of some of Steve Job’s legendary speeches. From the original introduction of the Mac to the triumphant return to Apple from the iPod to the iPhone launch and the famous Stanford speech after surviving cancer. People are expecting something great as a follow up to last years iPhone sermon. Vote for the all time best.

If you want to re-model your home in the style of an Apple store, here are links to the suppliers of the actual items they use.<p /><p />The designs of the Apple stores may not be particularly original in terms of architecture, however they break new boundaries in retail design with an attention to detail that is normally only found in major public buildings. The principal inspirations for Apple&#x2019;s interiors range from Norman Foster&#x2019;s Mediatheque in Nimes, with its central glass staircase and I.M. Pei&#x2019;s entrance to the Louvre which is the inspiration for the fifth avenue store. Although the cube itself (particularly when it was shrouded in black) is more like the Kaab at Mecca, proving that Apple is a religion after all.<p /><p />Many of the fittings they use, such as Erco lighting are used by people like Pei and Foster (where I used to work) and the exterior panels are made by the same firm that provided the panels for San Francisco&#x2019;s greatest modern building - the De Young Museum.

The Oobject Rotten Apple Award. To mark this week&#x2019;s 10th anniversary of the death of the Newton we have picked some of the products from Apple, that we&#x2019;d rather forget.<p /><p />We could have picked many more from the years when Jobs was in the wilderness and Apple attempted to be market driven rather than design driven, under Sculley. Reactive rather than pro-active. One problem, the gallery would have been a sea of similar, anonymous items. For the Sculley era machines, assume that we mean every product in the range.<p /><p />(update: Apple&#x2019;s earnings are just in and they are blow-out. After hours trading shows that as of today, Apple is worth more than IBM.).<p /><p />Vote for your all time worst product.

Cheap hi-fis sometimes come with lots of flashing lights and buttons, sound terrible and are difficult to use. Expensive ones often to come with not much more than an on/off switch and volume control, and sound great.<p /><p />One of things that happens in a mature market is that people go for quality rather than quantity - what this means in technology is less features and better design. Apple is the first technology company to go mainstream with a minimalist, mature-market design ethos, but there are others. Here are our current favorite (non-Apple) minimalist gadgets. This is a chart that we will be continually updating, over time. Vote for your favorites:

Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie used to be comedy partners. But Hugh Laurie has become more famous than Fry in the US by not shaving and doing a passable American accent in &#x2018;House&#x2019;.<p /><p />This week Fry fought back by combining celebrity and Apple worship. He created a web supernova by starting a Wordpress blog and writing a 6500 word essay on smartphones. This has had Mac heads&#x2019; sphincters winking with excitement, because Stephen Fry actually knows what he&#x2019;s talking about. He bought the second ever Mac in the UK, after Douglas Adams, giving him an Apple Erdos number of 1.<p /><p />(update: looks like Stephen Fry&#x2019;s blog is currently &#x2018;fried&#x2019;. so we&#x2019;ve posted a cache of his smartphone post under his entry in the chart.)<p /><p />Here is a list of geek-hero Apple users, vote for your all time favorite for our hall of fame:

The iPhoney award.<p /><p />There were enough iPhone and iPod rip offs, that we found when searching for general copies of Apple design, to warrant their own chart. To celebrate the announcement of the merging of the iPod and iPhone line up, here are the iPhoneys. Vote for the most blatant.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery then Apple is getting it in spades.<p /><p />For those that worry about Apple blazing a trail for others to copy less expensively, its not that simple. A product like the iPhone is heavily tooled rather than fabricated. The hole for the headphones is actually drilled. To do this, Apple have hogged the world&#x2019;s supply of the type of high tech, multi-dimensional machine tool needed.<p /><p />While companies like Nokia may copy, they may not be able to get the same build quality, even if they want to. Vote on the most blatant copy and post tips in the comments.<p />