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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."
Are Windows XP and OS X really "gadgets" though? When I think of gadgets I think of physical things, usually. Maybe I'm just out of touch with the times.
No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.
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!
Canon Digital ELPH (2000)
Apple PowerBook G4 (Titanium) (2001)
Microsoft Windows XP (2001) / Apple Mac OS X (2000)
Apple iPod (2001)
TiVo Series2 (2002)
Motorola RAZR V3 (2003)
PalmOne Treo 600 / 650 (2003 / 2004)
Microsoft Xbox 360 (2005)
Apple iPhone (2007)
ASUS Eee PC 900 (2008)
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.
If you said the 80's I'd say Rubik's Cube, Simon, and other toys. If you mean useful tools and not just novelties, the 80's is when the PC became more than just a hobbyist device. You had early brick cell phones but they truly came into their own in the 90's. Likewise, laptops went from being novelties to useful and only became more awesome in the 00's.
I think setting a round number to meet is kind of dumb. What if there weren't ten notable devices?
I think that the ipod and iphone are probably the most significant devices but not just for what they are but for what they presage. Ipod's music on the go is nice but Apple breaking into the music industry and becoming a major distributor has a far greater impact on the landscape. Iphone put a crack in the usual walled garden arrangement of US carriers and is showing competitors how to do things. Handheld computers have been around for ages but the ipod/phone is bringing us to the point at which there's enough market saturation to change the way we do things.
When I was a kid, only us geeks had computers. You went to school and you looked for other freaks and outcasts. That's where you were likely to find other computer people. And we used computers for the usual geeky stuff, socializing over BBS, playing games, and being geeks. With the arrival of the internet, non-geek households started getting computers. And the early social scene really sucked in the rest of the youth audience. By the time I was in college, everyone had their own computers. And the more ways there were to socialize on them, the more popular they got. Yeah, in the past you had phreakers who were into phones for the tech of it and you had teenage girls who spent just as much time on the phone but only for gossiping with friends. Still, the phone had an impact on society, the way people live.
I bring up the social sites because the phones are providing as much functionality on them as a standard computer. And all of this is having an impact. A lot of people in my age range are going without cable tv, they can download whatever they want to watch. They are dropping landlines since the cell does everything they need. Traditional media channels are going to get boned. And all of this will have a cultural impact.
I can shop on my phone. I can download podcasts, videocasts, tv shows, music, books, audiobooks, access the net, and this is only the beginning. I think we're seeing the beginning of the destruction of mainstream media. Yeah, many have made that call before but I see it happening. Change comes with the youth and ends when the old generation dies off. AM radio is on its last legs. I don't know anyone who listens to FM radio anymore, not anyone under 50. MTV continues to be a joke and sets no trends anymore. Authors are cutting deals directly with Amazon to publish on Kindle. Podcasts and videocasts are gaining wider audiences and network/cable television continues to flounder with their broken advertising model. The shows may have a huge audience but the Neilsen ratings cannot account for it. 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.
Everything I'm mentioning above I think is setting the stage for uncontrolled culture. It took big bucks to fund mass media back in the day. Now any yabob on Twitter can reach an audience in seconds that would make William Randolph Hearst get wood. And the cost? Nothing! They say never pick a fight with a man who buys ink by the barrel. How much worse does it get when the electrons are free?
Now it's possible that the audience won't fracture that much. Give kids free reign in a supermarket to eat anything they want and you know they're heading to the candy section regardless of how well the veggie section is stocked. Give the masses unfettered access to all media and they might end up gravitating back to the old celebrities or create new celebrities who will take the place of the old. It might still be possible to shape and mold public opinion as easily as before. But I have a gut feeling things could turn out differently in the 21st century. If the 20th century was defined by mass media, the 21st could be defined by what comes next.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
And it will find the nearest Starbucks for me and tell me if they're open.
Yeah! Why isn't GPS on that list?
Engadget mentions that the TiBooks solidified the presence of the widescreen display in notebook computers.
This isn't particularly accurate or true, as the TiBook's screen was only slightly wider (1.5:1) than the standard 4:3 (1.33:1) aspect ratio that has been ubiquitous on NTSC TVs and computer monitors for decades. These laptops appeared fairly square and unremarkable.
For whatever reason, the 15" aluminum PowerBook appeared a bit wider, particularly in the final generation of the model, although the aspect ratio evidently stayed the same. The 17" version always had a wide screen (1.6:1), although all of these fell short of the cinematic 16:9 (1.77:1) ratio also used in 1080p displays.
The 12" PowerBooks always had a 4:3 display, and were IMO some of the most impressive laptops Apple's ever produced, as they were the first laptops to successfully cram a full-featured machine into a tiny chassis without any major compromises. I might be biased, of course, as I'm typing this comment from one such machine -- even for an Apple product, the 12" Powerbooks retain a cult-like following.
If you wanted to ascribe any one model for being a forebearer to widescreen laptops, you'd have to go with the 17" Aluminum powerbook, the MacBook, or any of the PC industry's less-successful early experiments in this field.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
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.
I think what bothered me with the 360 making the list versus the PS2 is the fact that Engadget editors measured the 360 based on Live, which is a service, NOT a gadget. Gmail was awesome, didn't make the list... neither did DropBox or a bunch of other ways to communicate data. The Dreamcast pioneered the whole console gaming internet thing a bit earlier in 1999 before the PS2 literally nailed the last piece in its coffin in 2001. Microsoft merely took the online idea and threw more money than Sega had to make it happen. Microsoft merely took Sega's evolutionary dead-end and sparked it back to life. PS2 should get honors for standardizing DVD playback, moving forward game based storage to DVDs, and generally offering a baseline standard for what "next-gen" should of been back in 2000. Wii... should get an honorable mention because Nintendo took a dated and... well not a hot selling platform (GameCube) and MacGuyver'd it into something that would sell and drive Nintendo back into a profitable home console platform. The DS came in the wake of the dying PDA craze in 2004 before multi-touch. The pen/stylus setup probably was a risky direction to take since... say the Sony Clie was pulled out during the same time. DS proved that touch-based inputs could work for a massive audience... sparked the direction the Wii took. Today, we have Microsoft and Sony trying to catch up with their motion based interaction setups. Apple and other handheld makers have introduced touch-capable devices on everything under the sun. DS was engineered by people that liked neat things and this happened to be a hit. I mean, TWO screened handhelds seemed a bit unrealistic too. The DS success made Sega's VMU and Nintendo's GBA-GC two screen system link ideas feel like they didn't go to waste. Supplemental screens work if they're designed in every system.
Dammit, people. The decade runs through 2010. 2001-2010. Next year is the end of the decade. Not this year.
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
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 remember visiting Japan for the first time in 1999. Of course I wandered in to a video game arcade to check out the scene. I laughed at the poor Japanese and their imitative video games - look, that guy is just touching the controls in the exact way that the machine tells him to! What a retarded game! It's no game at all, he's just mindlessly copying what the machine tells him to do in exact sequence...no more "fun" than working on an assembly line. A children's game, really...we had the same thing called Simple Simon when I was a kid...these Japanese video games even have the same four colors. I mean, there could at least be a dozen colors or something, make it difficult. And the controller shaped like a guitar? Oh man, how pathetic: if you're going to be cool and play the guitar, be cool and learn the goddamn instrument, it ain't that hard. Only Japanese people, with their tolerance of tedium and their relentless drive to copy, could possibly "enjoy" such a "game".
This Christmas, I'm passed out from wine, and when I vaguely become aware, I hear these overplayed classic rock tunes accompanied by clicking. I go out, and sure enough, three family members are staring at the TV, imitating the colors on the screen, each lost in his own world with no communication. Just this eerie clicking, accompanied by this sound that I identified from when I was in marching band and the drummers had practice pads. There is no talking, no rocking out, no jumping around the room flailing at an ax like Eddie Van Halen on coke. Their faces are stone masks of concentration. The song finishes, and my family grins at each other, "Wow, we sure had a fun time interacting. What a great game that brings us together!"
Shows you how much I know. I also thought "Magic: the Gathering" was a stupid game because it was so wildly unbalanced. Who would want to play that, a game where you can win not by superior skill or even dumb luck, but simply by spending more money than your opponent?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
It would be more interesting looking at influence instead of favourite. I am not normally a look backwards type person, but almost everything that we think of as key to this decade is influenced by this simple tool (or in this case do to intent weapon).
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.
These were the first iPods with the modern Click Wheel interface only and full USB 2.0 interface support.
What does that mean? I had the very first iPod. All it had was a click wheel. In fact it was better than a few later generations, since the wheel actually turned and thus gave more feedback.
As for "full USB 2.0 interface", well that was nice for Windows users but a step back from the Firewire400 the original sported. It allowed the original iPod to load songs just as fast as any later USB 2.0 model, and made 5GB of storage practical instead of a chore.
Everything that made the iPod what it was was there from the start - iTunes, fast transfers, click wheel interface, easy UI. I don't think saying any later generation made it "come of age" makes that much sense, apart from the move to support Windows users as well which was key to growth.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I do believe that the writers at engadget have shown gross negligence for overlooking the significance of this decade's most important gadget: The Fleshlight.
The Nokia N900 is the first { Linux + X11 + phone } that works nicely (OpenMoko was a poor attempt), and it's Debian based! (Maemo).
The one gadget that DID define the decade.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Just saying.
I fail to see why people should stop working if a file server fails.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
This compilation is really short-sighted, though they seem to have gotten a few things right.
I definitely agree, though, that the RAZR did a lot to force manufacturers to slim their phones, despite it being a pretty mediocre phone on its own. I also agree that the Treo 650 was basically responsible for putting smartphones on the map for most people, though the Blackberry popularized push e-mail to the point of making it an expectancy for most people nowadays.
More soberly, I would say the IED is the gadget that most "defined the decade" as Engadget's headline touts.
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"?
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.