Apple’s 50th anniversary turned into a popularity contest with a purpose: The Verge asked readers to rank the company’s 50 best products, and more than 1.6 million votes later, the result is less a clean verdict than a map of what people still love, miss, and argue about. The obvious winners rose, the cursed categories did not, and a few modern favorites got the kind of boost that only a live audience can give them.
That mix is the real story of Apple’s best products. Apple has spent decades training people to obsess over design, software, and hardware as a single thing, so asking for a top 50 list is basically inviting a thousand tiny sects to the same barbecue. The fact that there’s disagreement at the top is almost the point.
What readers pushed to the top
The Vergecast team spent the episode moving through the results from number 50 to number 11 before getting to the top 10 and comparing them with its own staff picks. Some choices lined up neatly. Others exposed the usual Apple fault lines: nostalgia versus utility, legacy versus modern polish, and the eternal question of whether a product is loved because it was good or because it changed the game first.
There’s also a practical lesson here for Apple competitors. The company’s best products were not just specs or price winners; they were habit-builders. That is a much harder thing for rivals to copy than a brighter screen or a faster chip, which is why Apple can still turn a ranking list into a referendum on taste.
Apple’s best products in the top 10
Once the ranking got into the final stretch, the conversation turned into a fairly civilized argument, which is to say people disagreed loudly but with better microphones. The hosts found broad agreement on a few marquee products, then started poking at the less obvious calls: whether recency bias distorted the list, whether some categories were unfairly punished, and whether certain Apple staples were judged more harshly than they deserved.
- More than 1.6 million votes shaped the result.
- The show reviewed the list from number 50 through number 11 before comparing the top 10 with its own ranking.
- The hosts also folded in OpenAI news, gadget price hikes, and a fresh round of ”Brendan Carr is a Dummy.”
That side trip matters more than it sounds. Apple ranking debates are really about the company’s broader cultural power: the products are old enough to have history, but current enough that every new launch can still rewrite the memory of the last one. Few hardware makers get that kind of long-tail advantage.
Apple’s anniversary still sells nostalgia
The company’s half-century milestone gives the whole exercise a neat frame, but it also encourages a very Apple kind of nostalgia: sleek, curated, and a little self-congratulatory. That is exactly why these lists work. They expose which products became tools, which became symbols, and which became both.
If Apple fans keep fighting over printers, iMacs, and the latest must-have device, that probably means the company is still doing something right. The more interesting question is whether the next 50 years produce another product lineup that people feel compelled to rank at all.