From Google Glass and fidget spinners to iPhones and the Tesla Model S.
(The Verge) The story of technology in the 2010s is the story of gadgets going from the corners of our lives to everywhere all the time. The tools to create and consume culture are omnipresent now, offering us incredible new capabilities but also demanding that we care for them more than any consumer products in history. We mind their temperamental batteries, we twist in space to improve their wireless signals, we ask them to listen to us — but not too much.
Gadgets in the 2010s were shaped first by the furious race to win the smartphone wars and then a furious race to create new kinds of hardware once it was clear that Apple, Google, and Samsung would dominate phones. And that hardware was tied to software and services like never before — every light bulb the endpoint of a cloud service, every speaker imbued with the voice of the data center’s soul.
USB-C was inflicted upon an unsuspecting public; our headphone jacks were taken away.
My favorite thing about gadgets is that they are intensely revealing: each one is a semipermanent encapsulation of a company’s trade-offs and priorities, and once they’re shipped, there’s no more PR spin or influencer marketing to hide behind. The processors are fast or they’re slow. The keyboards are reliable or they break. The battery lasts a long time or it dies.
Sometimes, the batteries explode.
And when gadgets work — when they really work — people do fantastic and unexpected things with them. So many of the gadgets on our list are important not because of what their creators wanted to accomplish, but because of what people accomplished with them. That’s always been the story of technology, and the 2010s were no different.
Gadgets are back, now and forever.
—Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief, The Verge
To view the list, click here.
Posted in: Mobile Device Management
