March 27, 2026
OK Boomer meets iPhone Boom
Rank the 50 best Apple products
Boomers vs Gen Z brawl over Apple’s GOATs — and demand a skip button
TLDR: The Verge is crowdsourcing the 50 best Apple products with a chess-style scoring system. Comments split between “this is for old people” and nostalgia, with calls for a skip button and fights over what’s truly innovative, while iPhone, M1, and iPod dominate early shout-outs.
Apple just turned its fanbase into a swipe-to-vote arena, using a chess-style score to merge everyone’s picks into one top-50 list. The comment war? Generations colliding. Younger voters say they’ve never even seen half these relics and are begging for a SKIP button. One blunt verdict: “only for really old people.”
Purists are feuding over what actually changed the world. One camp shrugs off QuickTime and FaceTime as “not especially innovative,” crowning HyperCard, Mac OS X, and the original iPhone as the real disruptors. An “old guy” strutted in with a confident top five: iPhone, M1 chip, iPod, Macintosh, Mac OS X — and admits he’d reshuffle the order.
Meanwhile, a calmer voice says the standings “seem reasonable” and drops a See results receipt. The side-plot: a jab that The Verge shipped a coder’s pet project without considering who actually remembers Apple’s deep cuts. Memes followed: “Gatekeeping, now with Elo,” and “Press F for HyperCard.” Love it or hate it, every click nudges the leaderboard — and the crowd wants its say, plus that shiny SKIP button
Key Points
- •Readers help rank Apple products from the last 50 years via pairwise comparisons.
- •Each comparison updates item scores using a modified Elo rating system.
- •Items begin with a starting score that adjusts after each matchup.
- •Beating higher-rated items yields larger score gains; losing to lower-rated items incurs larger penalties.
- •The Elo approach is tweaked to reduce the impact of major upsets, reflecting user-preference dynamics.