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."

The list

[xaosflux]

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)

TiBook

[moosesocks]

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.

The decade isn't over yet!

[Osty]

Dammit, people. The decade runs through 2010. 2001-2010. Next year is the end of the decade. Not this year.

Re:The decade isn't over yet!

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it was the tenth year of the ninth decade of the twentieth century.

Re:The decade isn't over yet!

[Moredhel27]

not entirely ... that interpretation is strictly based on ordinal numbering, which isn't necessarily valid here decade simply refers to 10 consecutive years while it does make sense to use ordinal numbers to denote a decade the most common and easily understood usage for a 'decade' is the collection of years with the same tenth ie, 60's, 70's etc

Re:XP and OS X?

[X0563511]

Widget is a "window gadget".

It really has no appropriate use outside of a UI... but yea, people use it anyways because it sounds cool.

Re:XP and OS X?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong. The term "widget" has existed for far longer than any real computer technology.

Re:The decade isn't over yet!

[harlows_monkeys]

Dammit, people. The decade runs through 2010. 2001-2010. Next year is the end of the decade. Not this year.

2001-2010 is a decade. So is 2003-2013. Or 1998-2007. However, the decade generally means a set of years such that floor(year/10) is constant for all years in the set. Or, as the New Oxford American Dictionary says in one of its definitions, "a period of ten years beginning with a year ending in 0".

Yes, I know, you are going to say something about there being no year 0. That has no relevance whatsoever to how we choose today to group our years into a disjoint set of decades.

Re:XP and OS X?

[trickyD1ck]

here you go: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/widget [reference.com]

Or, as Wikipedia has it: "An indefinite name for a gadget or mechanical contrivance, esp. a small manufactured item"

Re:The iPod?

[TheRaven64]

And none of that was there with the original iPod. It did, however, have a 5GB 1.8" hard disk, which was what defined the new market. Prior to the iPod, everything had either used flash (and only had up to about 128MB of space; enough for one or two albums) or used 2.5" hard disks (and been very bulky). The other novel thing about the iPod was the use of FireWire, which meant you could sync at a decent speed. Other players used USB (USB2 did not exist yet) and so were very slow.