Best Tech Products of the 2010s
Settle it: two at a time →Judged here on what they changed rather than on spec sheets: hardware and software that shipped between 2010 and 2019 and left the category around it different afterward. Entries qualify by reach, by design decisions competitors were forced to copy, or by opening a market that barely existed before. The top of the list belongs to the products that did all three, where the imitators showed up within a year and never quite closed the gap.
Nobody has ranked this yet · 15 items
How the opening order was chosen
The opening order is the order I added the items in. Every ballot moves the ranking from there.
A defensible order starts with how much of the following decade each product dictated, then breaks ties on scale. That is what makes the top contentious: the iPhone had been on sale since 2007 and arguably belongs to the previous decade, while the Model S and the Echo defined categories that barely existed but sold in far smaller numbers.
Global Ranking
Announced alongside the iPhone 7 in September 2016, the same week Apple deleted the headphone jack, and shipped that December after a delay. The W1 chip replaced Bluetooth pairing menus with proximity handoff, and the stemmed white shape went from widely mocked to widely copied inside two years.
Sales opened April 24, 2015, Apple's first new product category since the iPad. Series 4 added an electrocardiogram sensor in September 2018, with the FDA-cleared reading switched on that December. Estimates put Apple ahead of the entire Swiss watch industry on unit shipments by 2019.
The 2013 Phantom moved aerial photography from a helicopter budget line to a backpack, built a consumer category no American company ever cracked, and left a sameness behind it as the cost: every travel film now opens with the same slow pull-back over a coastline.
Amazon announced the Echo in November 2014 as an invitation-only curiosity for Prime members, then opened general sales in June 2015. Its far-field microphone array, able to pick a wake word out of a noisy room, was the real advance, and it pulled Google and Apple into smart speakers of their own within three years.
It launched in October 2010 as a filter app for making phone photos look deliberate. By decade's end it decided how restaurants plate food, how hotels build lobbies, and how cities light their landmarks. Its defining move was defensive, lifting Stories from Snapchat in 2016 and winning on distribution, which tells you the ideas were running out even as the reach kept growing.
Dismissed at the January 2010 reveal as a big iPhone. The joke aged badly, since the netbook was dead within a few years and every rival scrambled to ship a tablet of its own. The lingering cost is software: the hardware outgrew its phone-derived operating system long ago, and the laptop replacement Apple keeps promising never quite arrives.
June 2010 brought the iPhone 4 and its 326 ppi Retina display, and seven years later the iPhone X traded the home button for Face ID at a $999 starting price. The 2014 iPhone 6 generation was Apple's biggest seller to that point, pushing the company into the large screens it had publicly resisted.
Released March 3, 2017 at $299 with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild available on day one, arriving straight after the Wii U's commercial collapse. Its hybrid design, a tablet that docks to a television and splits into two Joy-Con halves, merged Nintendo's handheld and console lines into one platform.
Oculus shipped the Quest on May 21, 2019 at $399, tracking the visor and both controllers in six degrees of freedom with no external sensors and no PC attached. Setup dropped from mounting base stations around a room to drawing a play boundary on the floor.
Priced at $35, the Model B went on sale February 29, 2012 and took both distributors' websites down under first-day demand. A UK charity built it to get children programming; it became default hardware instead for hobby robotics, retro-gaming boxes, and industrial prototyping.
Reviewers treated the 2011 original as a sight gag, a phone the size of a face. It won the argument anyway, since Apple's grudging move to big screens with the iPhone 6 in 2014 was the point conceded three years late. The Note 7 recall in 2016, with units banned outright from US flights, remains the scar on the line.
Opened in preview in August 2013 and generally in February 2014, built out of the internal chat tool at Tiny Speck after its game Glitch failed. It reached the NYSE in June 2019 through a direct listing rather than a conventional IPO, by which point channels and threads had become the default shape of office software.
A purist could keep it out on a technicality, since Sweden had it in 2008, but the July 2011 American launch is when music stopped being something you buy and became something you rent. Artists carry the cost, paid a sliver of what a sale once returned, while the playlist economy rewards background listening over albums.
Deliveries began in June 2012, and Motor Trend named it 2013 Car of the Year, the first electric vehicle to take the award. Over-the-air updates that added features after purchase, Autopilot among them in October 2015, reframed the car as a platform rather than a fixed object.
Watching the car crawl toward you on a map reset what people expect from every service, and the taxi medallion never recovered. The decade of growth ran on two subsidies it never resolved, investor money covering part of the fare and drivers classified as something other than employees.