QuickTime and FaceTime are useful but I never thought of them as especially innovative. HyperCard, OSX, the phones, those really moved things forward independently of the rest of the industry. Perhaps I don't appreciate the software side enough.
I think the MacBook Pro 2015 was probably unrivalled as a laptop for around 6 years, in terms of build quality, specification and… sheer love. I had a work issue machine and absolutely worshipped it, so I was sad not to see that here.
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).
> They didn’t sound great but they carried so much COOL
That's the trick Apple during the second Jobs tenure was most brilliant at: turning consumer electronics into a fashion accessory. Literally, making the sound of the earphones a secondary consideration, relative to their earring value.
Live rankings currently have Mac OS X first... h... how?
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.
I want to speak up for OS X. When it came out, and for years afterward, it hit an amazing sweet spot of looks cool, runs browsers well, runs MS well, runs Adobe well, full Unix shell, added great new features every year. There is a reason it became extremely popular with web devs, as the web was taking over the economy.
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.
I'll definitely give you Rosetta, and even more so Rosetta 2. Spotlight too, at least in principle, but it has had its fair share of dodgy behavior over the years. I'm not really sure about the others.
There's certainly always been fantastic software available for Mac. However, it was almost never built by Apple. It sort of felt like someone one day needed a FireWire port, so they bought a Macintosh. Then they must have told a close friend working at Macromedia they needed some software - and it was all just inertia from then on.
HyperCard was a revelation to me in high school. it piqued such an interest in technology for me that i fully pivoted from exploring civil engineering to computer sciences.
I feel that anything that was a brand new thing in its time should rank highly: Hypercard, Apple I, original Macintosh, OS X, PowerBook 100, original iPhone.
This just shows the hold Apple has on our collective minds. No such showboating for ibm, Microsoft, Amazon or Google. May be Google and Amazon are still young relatively. IBM totally is out of tech people’s minds and they themselves think of them as a consulting company.
I'm 40. IBM hasn't been even remotely relevant to me since I was in elementary school, and only then because we had IBM-brand machines in the computer lab where we pretended to work while surreptitiously playing Oregon Trail.
I honestly don't even know what they do any more.
Whatever happened to IBM happened eons ago in tech years.
They haven't been relevant to anything user-facing at all since they sold the Thinkpad line, and their "golden age" was over by ~2000. Their hardware was awesome in the '80s and '90s, truly great stuff, but they've been mostly out of that game for about 25 years, and totally out for what, almost 20? Quite a few people on this site were born after the last piece of IBM hardware they might have appreciated was manufactured, and most of those folks may never have touched a single item of IBM's.
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.
> Microsoft's best work is also pretty damn far in the past, at this point.
I would almost reflexily agree except for VSCode. It about the most perfect piece of software (to the point where now there aren't any user facing feature updates) I've ever used, and I use it all day everyday. It's absurdly flexible, excellent defaults--it really, actually improved my view of MS from somewhere subterranean to a height of respect.
I'd include WSL, but thats kind of backhanded praise and it is frustratingly slow a lot of the time.
I disagree with "original iPad" being the highest-placed product in that line. iPad 2 should have that spot, no question. A product so successful they sold it for a really long time, plus its guts served in the also-long-lived first gen iPad mini. It was a giant improvement over the original iPad, with a crazy-long support life and outstanding performance characteristics.
I think others are ranking it not that way because of the hardware, but because of the concept and how it dramatically changed the market for tablet computers.
These subjective evals are why community reviews are garbage.
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.
I think the 4 was really where it took off. It’s remembered for the antenna PR mess, but it was the first mix of speed and features that made me and many many colleagues say “this could be better than my BlackBerry.” And it was!
I think this list is lacking without the iPod Socks. Clearly the highest rank textile product Apple ever sold, which has to put it somewhere on the master list, no?
Whatever model Classic Mac that supported the Apple ][e expansion card, Apple DOS expansion card, and Apple Unix install (getting you System 7? 8?, DOS, original Apple, and a commercial Unix) has got to be up there at least for the novelty for me.
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.
Well for me it would be the M1 macbook air - apple silicon, no fans, extreme battery life and after like 2 decades of barely changing laptop experiences whew this thing was _fast_ too. Such a small powerful thing to have it was amazing. (still have mine, going strong).
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.
In the same sense that potato chips are not a Lay’s product, because you can’t buy a potato chip, only a bag of them, and it’s not reasonable to assess the chip independently from the packaging in which it is sold, so the packaged chip is the product under discussion? Because that’s… extreme.
That's a weird comparison because if you wanted to buy just the M1 chip you are forced to buy a chassis, motherboard, screen, keyboard, memory, etc. which may cost more than the chip to begin with. Also the chip comes with zero documentation.
This is only for really old people. I entered Apple's ecosystem 20 years ago and I've never seen half of these products in real life.
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.
QuickTime and FaceTime are useful but I never thought of them as especially innovative. HyperCard, OSX, the phones, those really moved things forward independently of the rest of the industry. Perhaps I don't appreciate the software side enough.
QuickTime at the time it was introduced was revolutionary.
There’s a reason it was a standard. It made video playback available to systems without accelerator cards, allowed for synchronous DV import and more.
A lot of these technologies seem quaint in hindsight but at the time they were big deals.
QuickTime, when new, was at the forefront of mass-market digital media. The ‘Time’ part referred to synchronized video and audio playback.
Old guy here. The Apple ][+ didn't make the list! It was the first computer that I used and the product that launched the company.
I think the MacBook Pro 2015 was probably unrivalled as a laptop for around 6 years, in terms of build quality, specification and… sheer love. I had a work issue machine and absolutely worshipped it, so I was sad not to see that here.
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).
> They didn’t sound great but they carried so much COOL
That's the trick Apple during the second Jobs tenure was most brilliant at: turning consumer electronics into a fashion accessory. Literally, making the sound of the earphones a secondary consideration, relative to their earring value.
Cool idea but I am not old enough/have not have enough (any) interest in some of the older products, so I think a "skip" option would be cool.
+1. Skip would be nice.
Live rankings currently have Mac OS X first... h... how?
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.
I want to speak up for OS X. When it came out, and for years afterward, it hit an amazing sweet spot of looks cool, runs browsers well, runs MS well, runs Adobe well, full Unix shell, added great new features every year. There is a reason it became extremely popular with web devs, as the web was taking over the economy.
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.
I'll definitely give you Rosetta, and even more so Rosetta 2. Spotlight too, at least in principle, but it has had its fair share of dodgy behavior over the years. I'm not really sure about the others.
There's certainly always been fantastic software available for Mac. However, it was almost never built by Apple. It sort of felt like someone one day needed a FireWire port, so they bought a Macintosh. Then they must have told a close friend working at Macromedia they needed some software - and it was all just inertia from then on.
Damn, the number of these that I've had.
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.
HyperCard was a revelation to me in high school. it piqued such an interest in technology for me that i fully pivoted from exploring civil engineering to computer sciences.
I feel that anything that was a brand new thing in its time should rank highly: Hypercard, Apple I, original Macintosh, OS X, PowerBook 100, original iPhone.
This just shows the hold Apple has on our collective minds. No such showboating for ibm, Microsoft, Amazon or Google. May be Google and Amazon are still young relatively. IBM totally is out of tech people’s minds and they themselves think of them as a consulting company.
I believe the Google equivalent would be one of the “Google Product Graveyard” websites, sadly.
> This just shows the hold Apple has on our collective minds.
Speak for yourself ;)
I'm 40. IBM hasn't been even remotely relevant to me since I was in elementary school, and only then because we had IBM-brand machines in the computer lab where we pretended to work while surreptitiously playing Oregon Trail.
I honestly don't even know what they do any more.
Whatever happened to IBM happened eons ago in tech years.
They haven't been relevant to anything user-facing at all since they sold the Thinkpad line, and their "golden age" was over by ~2000. Their hardware was awesome in the '80s and '90s, truly great stuff, but they've been mostly out of that game for about 25 years, and totally out for what, almost 20? Quite a few people on this site were born after the last piece of IBM hardware they might have appreciated was manufactured, and most of those folks may never have touched a single item of IBM's.
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.
> Microsoft's best work is also pretty damn far in the past, at this point.
I would almost reflexily agree except for VSCode. It about the most perfect piece of software (to the point where now there aren't any user facing feature updates) I've ever used, and I use it all day everyday. It's absurdly flexible, excellent defaults--it really, actually improved my view of MS from somewhere subterranean to a height of respect.
I'd include WSL, but thats kind of backhanded praise and it is frustratingly slow a lot of the time.
I forgot about Encarta. That, Excel, and VScode are the only products Microsoft makes that I don't despise.
The results seem reasonable.
https://www.theverge.com/cs/tech/900477/apple-50-anniversary..., or click "See results"
I disagree with "original iPad" being the highest-placed product in that line. iPad 2 should have that spot, no question. A product so successful they sold it for a really long time, plus its guts served in the also-long-lived first gen iPad mini. It was a giant improvement over the original iPad, with a crazy-long support life and outstanding performance characteristics.
I think others are ranking it not that way because of the hardware, but because of the concept and how it dramatically changed the market for tablet computers.
You're right for the same reason that the original iPhone outranks the iPhone 3Gs.
These subjective evals are why community reviews are garbage.
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.
I think the 4 was really where it took off. It’s remembered for the antenna PR mess, but it was the first mix of speed and features that made me and many many colleagues say “this could be better than my BlackBerry.” And it was!
I think you're derive specificity from the data that simply isn't there. That's not a data problem, that's an interpretation problem.
The survey didn't ask about reliability, success, or functionality.
I think this list is lacking without the iPod Socks. Clearly the highest rank textile product Apple ever sold, which has to put it somewhere on the master list, no?
This is $19 Polishing Cloth slander!
Old guy, here.
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.
Whatever model Classic Mac that supported the Apple ][e expansion card, Apple DOS expansion card, and Apple Unix install (getting you System 7? 8?, DOS, original Apple, and a commercial Unix) has got to be up there at least for the novelty for me.
I have a slightly stupid take on tier lists I put together recently. A perfect chance to try it out.
https://compare.outband.net
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...
Hypercard, at 50th, is underrated. We're all here because of Hypercard.
And Apple II with its slots and Locksmith
People are INSANELY sleeping on Hypercard.
They also forgot to mention the RDF.
AirPods are criminally low on that list.
Well for me it would be the M1 macbook air - apple silicon, no fans, extreme battery life and after like 2 decades of barely changing laptop experiences whew this thing was _fast_ too. Such a small powerful thing to have it was amazing. (still have mine, going strong).
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.
Why they don't include the recently discontinued 700 USD Mac Pro Wheels?
The M1 chip is not an Apple product.
In the same sense that potato chips are not a Lay’s product, because you can’t buy a potato chip, only a bag of them, and it’s not reasonable to assess the chip independently from the packaging in which it is sold, so the packaged chip is the product under discussion? Because that’s… extreme.
That's a weird comparison because if you wanted to buy just the M1 chip you are forced to buy a chassis, motherboard, screen, keyboard, memory, etc. which may cost more than the chip to begin with. Also the chip comes with zero documentation.
If you just want a potato chip you also need to buy the packaging. It’s documentation is also lacking.
M1 chip does not have a product manager. It is an internal component.
The Lays chip has a product manager.
It was designed at Apple, and is sold and marketed and branded by Apple. What do you consider it? Apple infrastructure?
I mean you cannot go to a shop and buy an M1 chip.
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.
This is only for really old people. I entered Apple's ecosystem 20 years ago and I've never seen half of these products in real life.
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.
Watch your mouth, kid!
sorry pawpaw
HEY.
I mean, choosing the best product of the last 50 years kind of implies a certain age, doesn't it?