I remember when Apple unveiled the first ever MacBook Air. That was one of Jobs’ all-time greatest presentations, and it was a huge step forwards that still influences the laptops we use today.
Also missing… the white Apple earphones that came with the iPod! They didn’t sound great but they carried so much COOL for most of the noughties.
I think FaceTime ought to do well here too. That’s done more to bring the 1980s vision of “everybody will video call all the time” into reality than anything else I think (I know Apple weren’t the first, but they made it ubiquitous).
Apple make so so much wonderful hardware! They always have. Their software on the other hand is near universally awful. I love my Macbook, but my gosh, I do not love whatever the latest flavour of macOS is that Apple have decided to throw on their update servers this year. It just so happens that I also enjoy Unix, so I spend a lot of my time in a terminal - but Apple don't get to claim credit for that!
EDIT: OK. It just refreshed and is now showing Mac OS X as 36th over all. Crisis of faith averted.
A closed local firewall blocking all inbound by default. Spotlight indexing. Time Machine backups. Flexible screenshot tools. Print anything to PDF. Lots of useful trackpad gestures. And after Intel, we got Rosetta, Boot Camp, easy Windows virtualization like Parallels, etc. That’s all off the top of my head, but for sure OS X had Microsoft on their back foot for years. Gates used to yell at his team about it.
Hardest choice for me:
Apple Extended Keyboard 2 vs TiBook.
Had both, Used AEK2s for a decade or more, still have the TiBook with Myst on it.
I honestly don't even know what they do any more.
Whatever happened to IBM happened eons ago in tech years.
Microsoft's best work is also pretty damn far in the past, at this point. All my fond memories of them are pre-2010. I loved a lot of what they were doing with various little software projects in the '90s (encarta! All kinds of weird experiments and little programs and games!) but that seems mostly gone now. I expect any list like this for them would be a handful of old pieces of software and HID items from the '90s and '00s (remember when they made really good mice and pretty good keyboards?), but dominated by a complete inventory of everything the xbox division has built to the point that it'd look more like some kind of gaming-focused list.
I'm not sure Amazon has built enough non-terrible user-facing stuff to make a top-50 list. Or a top-25. Or a top-5 that's not just a five different Kindle models. Their entire Fire line sucks, which just leaves Alexa. Not enough meat to make a meal like this out of, I think.
Google's list would be hilarious because it'd mostly look like a copy of that Google Graveyard site.
Plus Mac OSX Mavericks. Guess the last really nice OS launch that simply did fixes and perf improvements (memory compression, ...) instead of slowing the machine down or adding friction. these were the days when people would look forward to a new mac os, not fearing another bullshit.
https://www.theverge.com/cs/tech/900477/apple-50-anniversary..., or click "See results"
Personally I think the 3GS is a better product. I know a few folk who returned their original iPhone because the headphone jack didn’t allow their headphones to connect, and there were obvious limitations that weren’t addressed until the 3GS
The iPhone was revolutionary no argument. But that doesn’t mean later revs were not better products for their time.
The survey didn't ask about reliability, success, or functionality.
This ranking is fun and the as-of-now results mostly track.
1. Original iPhone
2. M1 Chip
3. Original iPod
4. Original Macintosh
5. Mac OS X
Though I’d put them in a different order.
It started as a shower thought on how to rank arbitrary items and ended as a janky web app written by a backend luddite who refuses to use frameworks. So here it is, a better tier list... Or not, it sort of sucks in practice.
For fun, Here is my order.
https://compare.outband.net/compare/app/compare.html?pop=app...
The best you can do is buy a product with the chip in it. But that product may not be what you wanted.
You cannot unsolder the chip because it is useless as it comes with no documentation whatsoever.
Calling the chip a product is wrong.
At best it is an implementation detail.
I'm surprised that The Verge went ahead with this, but knowing the state of things, I'm sure they coded some guy's idea and never thought about the (tiny) demographic interested in this.