Digital Home Thoughts: Cool New Product Features from 2006

"It may take a village to raise a child, but that’s a trivial task compared with the act of bringing a new electronic gadget to market. Marketers determine what the masses want, product managers guide the design, engineers bring the thing to life — it’s a lot of cooks. No wonder so many people across the country are, at this very moment, staring at newly unwrapped electronic holiday gifts in utter bewilderment. Even so, brilliant ideas sometimes make it off the drawing board, past the layers of lawyers and onto store shelves. Sometimes, a delicious idea is part of a triumphant overall product. Other times, the flash of greatness is wasted on a turkey. Here, then, is my second annual Top 10 List — not of the greatest tech products of the year, but of the greatest ideas, individual features, that surfaced. It’s a little tip o’ the egg nog to the great thinkers whose ideas made it out of committee."

This article is a nice rundown of some of the interesting innovations we've seen in the last year. One of my favorites is Apple's magnetic breakaway power cord for laptops. Not only is this a great idea to prevent a trip over the cord from pulling the laptop to the ground, but it is also a nice way to prevent wear and tear on the rather fragile pin that the AC adapter plugs into on most laptops. I'm particularly fond of this as I just had a laptop go out because the pin broke loose from the inside of the laptop after being plugged and unplugged probably over a thousand times in the last few years.