Apple 50th Anniversary: The Verge Launches Community Ranking of Best Apple Products
Five Decades of Innovation
As Apple approaches its 50th anniversary, The Verge has launched an interactive community project inviting users to rank the best Apple products from the last half century. The initiative uses a modified ELO algorithm to aggregate individual pairwise preferences into a comprehensive community ranking.
How the Ranking Works
Rather than requiring each user to submit a full ranking of 50 products, the system breaks the task into bite-sized comparisons. Users are presented with two randomly paired Apple products and asked to choose their preference. Each choice modifies the ELO scores of both items—the reward for beating a top-ranked product exceeds that of beating a lower-ranked one.
This approach, originally developed for chess rating systems, has been adapted to dampen the effects of major upsets. Over thousands of user interactions, the system converges on a statistically robust community ranking that reflects collective preferences.
The Apple Product Legacy
Apple's 50-year history spans from the original Apple I computer in 1976 through the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Vision Pro. The ranking covers transformative products like:
- The Macintosh (1984) that popularized the graphical user interface
- The iPod (2001) that revolutionized portable music
- The iPhone (2007) that defined the smartphone era
- The AirPods (2016) that mainstreamed wireless audio
- The M1 chip (2020) that initiated Apple Silicon
Cultural Significance
The project captures more than just product preferences—it reflects how Apple has woven itself into daily life across multiple generations of technology users. The ranking exercise also serves as a historical retrospective on five decades of consumer technology evolution, with Apple products serving as milestones marking each era's defining capabilities and design philosophies.
As votes accumulate, the resulting ranking will offer a unique data point on which Apple products have had the most lasting impact on users and technology culture.