Rank the 50 best Apple products
theverge.com
theverge.com
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
While they were groundbreaking, as actual products they kind of sucked (eg too little RAM, missing very key features, etc). The original made for great demos, but the second or third iteration was actually the great product.
The Mac Plus was where things really took off for the Mac, the iPhone really hit its stride with 4, the iPad 2 was way better than the iPad 1, etc.
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.
I stand by my interpretation. Who is going to prefer the OG iPhone to the refined and improved version? Nobody that I knew at the time.
> Rank Your Top 50
> Help us pick the best Apple products of the last 50 years! Just choose which of the two randomly paired options you prefer.
This is explicitly invoking a context of historical importance. Some of these products are 50 years old, not available, and completely obsolete. A reader would be silly to interpret this as a survey to construct a buyers guide.
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.
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.
Speak for yourself ;)
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.
A/UX didn’t run on the original LC (68020, no MMU) but it may have worked on later LC series machines.
Edit. LC 630 DOS Compatible wasn’t Nubus, but it was a different PDS type than the original LC
And I get that the Apple DOS and Apple U/X performance on this machine might not be very good. Early 90’s computers and needing to be wrangled to even support normal, supported operations and configurations wasn’t uncommon.
Apple never made a x86 DOS card for the LC PDS. Maybe a third party like OrangePC did, but I can't find a definitive confirmation online.
The only Apple II card was the Apple IIe card (LC PDS). All the machines with a LC PDS had only a single slot, so even if there was a DOS card you wouldn't have been able to use it and the IIe card simultaneously.
According to this thread, A/UX never supported any LC model due to significant hardware differences from the supported IIs and Quadras: https://68kmla.org/bb/threads/is-there-a-known-understood-te...
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...
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.
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.
The Lays chip has a product manager.
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.