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Ten Gadgets That Defined the Decade
Corpuscavernosa writes "As 2009 winds down and we try to come up with new and clever ways of referring to the early years of this century, there's really only one thing left to do: declare our ten favorite gadgets of the aughts and show them off in chronological order. It's arguable that if this wasn't the decade of gadgets, it was certainly a decade shaped by gadgets — one which saw the birth of a new kind of connectedness. In just ten years time, gadgets have touched almost every aspect of our daily lives, and personal technology has come into its own in a way never before seen. It's a decade that's been marked the ubiquity of the internet, the downfall of the desktop, and the series finale of Friends, but we've boiled it down to the ten devices we've loved the most and worked the hardest over the past ten years. We even had some of our friends in the tech community chime in with their picks on what they thought was the gadget or tech of the decade."
Engadget's justification is rather lame
but Microsoft's audacious approach to charging people to play online with Xbox Live Gold actually ended up as the console's greatest strength, and a key to its staying power
Charging people wasn't its strength. Its strength was it was the one online service that didn't totally suck. Lets see, Nintendo's online service lets you play with friends if you send them a random string of letters and numbers as a "friend code", won't let you type messages on most games, oh and the one game that would have had online as a killer feature, Super Smash Bros. Brawl, the online mode is so messed up because it compensates for lag on one player's end by making the entire match laggy for everyone. Yeah Nintendo sure raised the bar high. PSN is good, but has too many flawed features. For example, PlayStation Home. The idea is good, take human avatars to a new level, the implementation is flawed. It is nothing but ads.
Engadget also manages to glance over the RRoD issue that plagued early Xbox owners.
I mean, is Microsoft buying Engadget off? The 360 as the console of the decade? Hardly. The 360 as the console of this generation? Possibly. But not the console of the decade, not by a long shot.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Hey Slashdot, when we get stories like this, just list out the gadgets from the article in the story summary that you submit to slashdot.
No one reads the article half the time. And usually, (not the case here) the story is split up among 3 or so pages, with the last page just a page of ads or links to other stories.
So, slashdot, what do you say? :D
In the last 10 years, portable GPS navigation has become ubiquitous in cars.
They're so cheap nowadays that I got one as a gift.
I'm sure there's one that could be pointed to as the breakout device.
/I still have in the car paper maps for ~5 States
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Sometime in the mid-90s the guy I was training and I were having a discussion about the future of technology while we were driving down the road in rural south Texas. I had a bag phone and an IBM Model 70 portable (lugable). He had a Zarus. We both carried pagers. A big part of the conversation was about how someday, we wouldn't need to carry all that crap just to do our job. We both knew that someday all of this stuff would be a single device. Just not a clue what that device would be or how it could work.
Today, about 15 years later, we still work together. I carry a Palm Treo and he has a iPhone. Different job, but mostly do the same thing, just not consultants anymore. I don't think either one of us could do our job without these gadgets. The ability
to ssh into our systems is key to our jobs, and it doesn't really matter what device we use anymore. The gadgets are getting to be more than just a convenience for both of us. They almost define our function in the job. Even if we're out of the office, we still take care of issues, now, not when we get back.
The gadgets have raised expectations for a lot of positions. If I still worked like I did back in the 90s, people would be waiting either until I got there, or got where I could hit a phone line and modem. Now, with the internet (ultimate gadget) and a smart phone, I can fix most problems at 70mph running down the road (as a passenger, of course, not going to break any laws, ha). And that's become almost an expectation.
So, yes I kind of see this as the decade of the gadget, but the gadgets mostly control us.
God help us all.
The one killer "gadget" of this decade is price. Everything is cheap. Back in 1999, even a cheap desktop would have cost you a lot of money. Today, you can buy a new desktop with HDMI out for $200. You can buy a cheap laptop for $300, or less if you catch a good sale. An iPod touch that would have cost you over $1,000 back in 1999, now is a typical Christmas gift. HDTVs are now cheaper than their standard def tube equivalents were. Storage is now dirt cheap, back in 1999 1 TB of HD space would have cost a lot of money, yet now many desktops ship with that much. RAM is cheap with a gig of RAM costing no more than $15. Software is even cheaper, back in 1999, your choices were either to buy (or pirate, but again, it being 1999 it was a lot harder to pirate it than it is now) Windows, or get an expensive Mac. Today, you can have Linux which is actually easy to use and detects most hardware quickly and easily. Torrent sites are also a killer "gadget", the ability for decentralized downloads have made things much easier to download than back on shady Usenet groups. Openness has also shown to be a quickly rising killer "gadget" with an explosion in open or simi-open phones such as Android, WebOS and even Symbian is opening up.
I think the 2000s will be remembered for cheap (in both meanings of the word) tech.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Uh.... scuse me, but how or what did XP define? Maybe someone could shed some light on how XP represents such a leap ahead that it warrants being called a "decade defining tool"? Basically it's Win2k with more color.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
From the article:
If you had found me right after I'd installed OS X Public Beta for the first time in 2001 and told me how dramatically the OS would change over the next decade, I'm not sure I would have believed you. There was a gigantic difference in feel between installing Windows XP and OS X Public Beta -- with XP you got that fun sense of having a whole new computer, fast and ready to take on whatever you could throw at it, while with OS X you just sort of stared at the huge icons and wondered, "Now what?" It was clear Apple had a lot of work left to do -- although by 10.3 or so I'd deleted my Classic partition and wasn't looking back. But hold up: OS X 10.3 looks and feels dated by today's standards, while XP looks and feels like... XP. Where Apple did an fantastic job of relentlessly improving and iterating OS X over the past decade, Microsoft set the bar so high coming out of the gate that the biggest threat to Windows 7 is the installed base of XP users who are still happy with their machines. That's pretty amazing. - Nilay Patel
This guy/gal needs to have their head examined. Even talking about the mere aesthetic nature of XP vs. OS X 10.3 (Panther), I can't see where he's coming from in the least:
OS X 10.3 Panther image vs. Windows XP. I'm sorry, but I fail to see how XP looks anything but "dated", the hideous colors/theming aside. 10.3 looks, even now, clean and fresh compared to XP. (Technologically, XP is way behind 10.3 in many ways.)
All I can read there is rabid fanboyism. Sorry, but "staying the same" for the better part of a decade, when you're the computer giant's flagship product, is not a benefit in any stretch of the imagination.
As for their list... not sure why/how the Xbox made the list instead of the Wii. There's nothing special about the Xbox 360, whereas the Wii is a "game changer". Hell, and even Windows Mobile devices (which, aside from the slick Marketing functionality and App store, has been largely comparable for many, many years) should top the list over the Treo.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
2000 was so last millennium also, but welcome to post modernity where 10 "gadgets" include 12 things: 2 of them were not in this decade (OS X and Canon Digital ELPH) and 2 are not even gadgets (OS X and Win XP).
Bad Panda! No Bamboo for you! In matters of importance ACs will not be responded to. Want to say something critical,OK
To claim that Windows XP coming out of the gate set the bar so high that people won't upgrade to Windows 7 is such BS and complete sucking-up to Microsoft. Until SP2 came out, Windows XP was a nest of security problems that made using it nearly impossible. Wasn't that also the time when Firefox got started because IE was so horribly insecure and pop-up infested? It had so many services turned on by default. Anyone here remember the "net send" pop-ups? That was possible with the default install of Windows XP prior to SP2, IIRC. One thing XP established is the habit of waiting for at least SP1 to come out before switching. Even after SP2, I still switch the theme back to Windows 2000 Classic. I don't know where they got the idea of XP being such a spectacular winner out of the gate. Windows 2000 was revolutionary in the Windows world in terms of stability and user friendliness. Windows XP, until SP2, felt like a step back. For a long time, I avoided the "consumer" line of Windows (ME, XP, and Vista) and prefer to use their "server/enterprise/workstation" line (2k, 2k3) because of the lack of bloat and higher level of security.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
I think we're seeing the beginning of the destruction of mainstream media... AM radio is on its last legs. I don't know anyone who listens to FM radio anymore... Podcasts and videocasts are gaining wider audiences and network/cable television continues to flounder with their broken advertising model.
I doubt it. What's happening is that podcasts and internet media are becoming "the mainstream media" - we only need to see what has happened to slashdot over the years to see how easy it is for the alternative to be subsumed into the mainstream.
It will all come full-circle, and FM radio may become the bastion of non-mainstream media with community stations and the like, while podcasts and online streaming come to epitomize corporate big media.
This is why Family Guy got cancelled only to shock Fox by being a top-selling DVD of all time. They had no idea the kind of reach that show had and brought it back.
Yeah, there's some decidedly non-mainstream media right there... wait, what?
... and then they built the supercollider.
It defined the end of the Win 9x line. For the first time most people's PCs became relatively stable. For those of us that were Linux or Unix users, it wasn't a big deal, but for the average user it was very significant. Windows XP, unlike the 9x line or Vista, focused more on being a stable operating system than being an application. After the optical mouse and the old 1980s Olympics game, it might be the best product Microsoft ever released. And for Microsoft, it was probably their hardest business decision: build an operating system that people won't feel they need to upgrade from or lose angry customers to Linux and Unix derived lines (like Mac OS X).
It defined the end of the Win 9x line. For the first time most people's PCs became relatively stable. For those of us that were Linux or Unix users, it wasn't a big deal, but for the average user it was very significant. Windows XP, unlike the 9x line or Vista, focused more on being a stable operating system than being an application. After the optical mouse and the old 1980s Olympics game, it might be the best product Microsoft ever released. And for Microsoft, it was probably their hardest business decision: build an operating system that people won't feel they need to upgrade from or lose angry customers to Linux and Unix derived lines (like Mac OS X).
Win2k never happened.
Sorry, but the product that married the stability of the NT line with the flexibility and compatibility of the 9x line was Win2k. If any product deserves the "decade defining" title, it's Win2k. But not XP.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Win 2k, like the rest of the NT line, was only targeted at businesses. The vast majority of PCs at the time of Win 2k were loaded with OEM versions of Windows 98 or Windows ME. Windows XP was the first of the NT line that was targeted at general consumers (and the computers were sold with Windows XP Home edition).
you're being pedantic and not even correct. The reasons centuries and millennia are starting with the year xxx1, is that they are numbered ("the fourteenth century", "the third millennium"). Because they are numbered, they have to start on a year that actually existed, 1CE generally, or any multiple of 1000 /100 on top (+) of that.
No one numbers decades. If we did, it would be OK to call this decade the 201st and make it start on Jan 1 2001. But in reality, we don't number them, so we can make them start anytime, the simplest being to apply a 'floor' function.
The LCD display.
The only thing that's really changed is that we have finally gotten rid of CRTs.
Everything else is just a bigger or smaller version of stuff we already had.
Most of our new toys are finally possible due to cheap and tiny displays.
Sorry, but the product that married the stability of the NT line with the flexibility and compatibility of the 9x line was Win2k. If any product deserves the "decade defining" title, it's Win2k. But not XP.
The Win 9x line wasn't dead when Windows 2000 was released. Windows Me was released later. Additionally, Windows 2000 wasn't a consumer operating system. It was sold to businesses and power users. There was no home edition. Finally, I would say Windows NT 4.0 met the same requirements that you claim Windows 2000 met. With this in mind, both Windows 2k and Windows XP are only updated versions of Windows NT 4.0. The only significant difference is that Windows XP was sold to consumers with the home edition, while Windows 2000 wasn't. Thus, Windows XP made incredible market penetration and was the first time that most consumers had a stable Microsoft operating system. This is where its significance lies.
IMHO, Windows 2000 is the "unsung hero" of this. XP provided new window decorations, a DRM stack (Trusted Audio Path), activation (for non VLK copies), a few EncFS improvements (no need for a recovery agent, multiple users have access to a file), and shadow copies. However, it didn't change the game as in fundamental OS mechanics like moving from a DOS "shell" to a true 32 bit protected mode OS has done.
Windows 2000 provided essentially the OS we are sitting on now on most Windows installs. The server side gave us Active Directory, IPSec, a decent privilege/ACL model mostly inherited from NT, user rights (user with versus without admin privs), decent crash protection (especially compared to 9x/ME). The workstation edition gave us a full 32 bit executables, additions onto a decent journaling filesystem, innate separation of users (versus the kludgy .PWL files from the 9x era), and so on.
XP is a decent OS, and has weathered the test of time, and this by in its own right gives it mentioned, but it would gain recognition for being evolutionary, not revolutionary. Windows 2000 was revolutionary both on the client and server sides.
No. Sorry, but no.
NT4 sorely lacked two core features that pretty much shot it for the consumer market. Namely, DirectX support past version 3.0 (IIRC) and USB support. Not to mention the fairly poor support for "legacy" products, i.e. products that didn't really care too much for MS programming standards, which basically meant that NT4 was entirely unsuitable as a game platform, which was (and still is) a core application for home PCs.
Win2k offered all of that (nearly every game that ran on a Win9x machine ran on 2k) and thus was the first true blend between the NT and the 9x line.
What I have to give you is that there was no "home" edition of 2k, which suckered far too many into using ME. This again, though, I blame on the way 2k and ME were perceived, especially by the relevant media who pictured 2k as the "office" system and ME as the "consumer" product.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The one gadget that DID define the decade.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
XP is the first product of MS that has computer professionals revolted when its End of Life announced, you know instead of usual celebrations...
Just saying.
I fail to see why people should stop working if a file server fails.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Engadget? I'm going to go out on a limb and make a wild guess: 6 out of the 10 are Apple products, and the only Microsoft product will be presented only in comparison to an Apple product.
Xbox won't make it but Wii will.
The USB flash drive won't be on the list because there's no brand name for them to pimp.
You are welcome on my lawn.
More soberly, I would say the IED is the gadget that most "defined the decade" as Engadget's headline touts.
I will concede to your point that netbooks have made a more immediate dent than I thought, and especially to my fault in including the VAIO in that list (they were pretty high-end shit, should've included the Thinkpad X series instead). However...
USB Pen drives are not an invention of this decade. They all but killed floppy drives within their first year.
Incorrect; first commerical USB drive was released in 2000, and increased in popularity as USB became more common. You can't tell me that it wasn't the proliferation of cheap "jump drives" that pretty much blew floppies out of the scene; if you were part of the crazy, you would have seen that transition happening pretty quickly.
The iPod Nano and Shuffle are just descendants of the original. The original iPod, of course, is from 2001. It deserves its position on the list.
That's correct, but parent items aren't the only ones that can set trends. The iPod changed how people listen to music, but I remember MP3 CD players being popular for years after the iPod was released mostly because of its huge price point. It was the iPod Mini, followed by the Nano and shuffle, which helped not only reduce the price on the hard-disk based player, but also made it affordable enough for it to become a household name.
Google didn't turn the search industry on its face when it came out either. These things take time (just like netbooks, which I will concede I was wrong on, but is still very much in its infancy and hasn't really proven to be anything but a really cheap notebook at this point).
The Blackberry was the first smartphone to get attention.
Horribly incorrect. While celebrities were toting around Treo 650s and showing them off, Blackberry devices were still ugly, useless for most people outside of those that needed their work email (much to their chagrin) and very limited in functionality. It wasn't until the 8700 that they started to gain a foothold in the consumer smartphone space (and even then, it was still limited relative to the Treo, but was much more stable). More notably, it was the Curve and Pearl that really helped RIM supplant Palm's old, tired and unreliable devices.
I'm picturing your parent poster as some Roman nerd yelling at everybody that they shouldn't be celebrating the onset of Year 10 since Jesus Christ was born only nine years ago.
And I'm picturing an older, wiser Roman tapping him on the shoulder and pointing out that:
1) They're not using the birth of Jesus as the basis of their time system yet.
2) When the A.D. system is implemented, it will be miscalculated and land the birth of Jesus in 4 A.D.
3) Jesus wasn't born at midnight on January 1st. And the winter solstice isn't at that time either. So it's clear that the moment chosen to increment the year counter is arbitrary anyway.
4) If we use your definition of "decade", then what are we going to call the decade that includes the year 1985 A.D.? "I Love The 80's Including 1990 But Not 1980"?
Thanks for posting the list. Unfortunately it only made me want to read the article to see what the hell they were thinking.
First of all, I think they were wrong by narrowing down things to specific models. That led to three of the spots being taken up by cell phones. This should have been a list of what types of gadgets defined the decade. After reading all the posts here, and thinking a bit about it, here's what I've come up with:
Digital Cameras - No more having to get your film developed, though this did lead to the downfall of Polaroid. And the digital camera was made possible because of...
Flash Memory - Both USB and cards, this allowed a lot of storage in a small space with low power requirements. The idea goes all the way back to Star Trek, though it took a bit longer to become reality than automatic doors. This also enabled...
iPod Nano and flash MP3 players in general - While disk-based players were pretty revolutionary on their own, flash memory players were small, had no moving parts aside from the controls, and had much better battery life. In a package smaller than most TV remotes, you can store hours of music with enough battery to play it most of the day.
The Xbox - The Xbox was the first game console with an Ethernet port built in. In an era when broadband was rapidly becoming important, none of the other consoles of the day had built-in Ethernet. The worst was that the Dreamcast's Ethernet module was canceled as soon as it was released, making it rare as hell, and it also wasn't supported very well. Xbox Live set standards on how a game console should interact with the internet, and the current generation of systems all have some kind of online support. The Xbox also started the trend of large amounts of storage in a console with its now laughable eight megabyte hard drive.
DVD - Killed off tape as a format for pre-recorded video. Video tapes and players will wear out with use, but a well-cared-for DVD will last forever. "Be Kind - Rewind" is sooo '90s. Sorry, Sony fanboys, Blu-Ray is nowhere near as much of an improvement over DVD as DVD was over VHS.
Tivo and the DVR in general - Killing off tape as a format for video time-shifting, thanks to digital video compression, big hard drives, and regularly updated schedules. And, oh yeah, it can pause and reverse live shows and skip commercials. DVR use is now an important part of television ratings.
Wireless Networking - WiFi freed us from needing a wire to connect to the internet. This helped with the rise of...
Laptops - This was the decade in which laptops took over from desktops. They range from netbooks (which themselves haven't quite become a fixture of the decade) to enormous desktop replacements. But they couldn't have been so important without...
Cheap LCD displays - Sure, they were around in the '90s, but they were small and expensive. Making them big and cheap has led to the near-extinction of the CRT, and the only people crying are graphic artists who appreciate the color precision of CRT and people who like to play gun games on old video game consoles. They've even been killing off the plasma display.
Cell Phones - More specifically, handheld cellphones. They've made the pay phone nearly extinct. Nobody noticed when the pay phone went up to 50 cents a call.
DSL/Cable Modem - Hey, my list goes to eleven. DSL and cable modems freed the internet from the analog phone network. Always connected, and sometimes even with an assigned fixed IP. I've had fixed IP DSL since early 2000. This basically killed off the dial-up BBS overnight. The much higher speeds, combined with MP3 audio and MPEG video, made first Napster, then Bittorrent possible.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
This gadget did quite a bit to define the decade as well.
Cheers!
Sean
The Eee PC showed that there was a market for small, cheap computers (netbooks). I would be hesitant to say Asus invented the netbook with the Eee PC (mostly because of the XO children's laptop), but I don't think it would be totally wrong to say so either. They sold beyond anyones wildest expectations then, and continue to do so today, likely singlehandedly making the difference between unrecoverable losses and bare minimum survival revenue for some computer manufacturers in the current world economy. It basically spawned an entire processor line within Intel (Atom). No doubt it belongs on the list in my mind.
Android on the other hand is just: 1. Google positioning itself to ensure it will not be locked out of the smartphone/mobile ad space, and 2: Setting the bare minimum baseline for what a smartphone OS can be while still being able to compete in the market. Compared to the multitude of other smartphone platforms it has been pretty non-notable technologically in every aspect *but* its availability to manufacturers and users.