Originally published at: https://tidbits.com/2026/03/30/a-fun-but-flawed-approach-to-ranking-apples-top-50-products/
In honor of Apple’s 50th anniversary, The Verge has come up with a fun, though inherently flawed, approach to identifying the best 50 Apple products. They write:
For any one person, ranking 50 items can be a long and tedious process. For a community, however, it’s markedly easier. Rather than have each user submit a full list, we can break down the rankings into bite-size components, then recombine them once we have enough votes. Here, we’re using a modified ELO algorithm to do just that.
With ELO, each item has a starting score, which is then modified in every paired matchup. The change in points is based on the score of the other item in the pairing; beating the top ranked item will come with a higher reward than beating the lowest, and the same in reverse applies to the penalties for losing. (ELO was originally developed for chess, which has more robust victory conditions than ‘user preference,’ so we’ve tweaked the standard version to dampen the effects of major upsets.)
All of which means that every time you make a choice between any two of the items on our Apple Top 50 list, you’re making a contribution to the overall community rankings. Thanks!
As much as I enjoyed casting vote after vote (it will continue as long as you want to play) in the nostalgically designed Web app—I’ll click for the SE/30 over Final Cut Pro or the M1 over the AirPods Pro any day—the comparisons quickly started to feel strange.
To start, the list contains just 50 products, resulting in a highly idiosyncratic selection. For computers, the list begins with the Apple I, which essentially no one answering the survey will ever have seen, and goes through only the 2012 “slim unibody iMac,” leaving aside most Macs released in the last 14 years. It includes a whopping seven iPods, but only four iPhones: the original iPhone, the iPhone 4, the iPhone 5s, and the iPhone XS—why not the iPhone X, which introduced Face ID? Software is weirdly represented by just HyperCard, QuickTime, Final Cut Pro, Mac OS X, iTunes, GarageBand, and FaceTime—no Safari, Mail, or Photos. The only service included is Apple Pay, leaving aside the App Store, iCloud, Apple Music, and Apple TV. And where does the M1 even fit in the list?
Thinking about when these products came out shows that recency and nostalgia biases will play a huge role, as will memory. I loved my SE/30 and PowerBook 100, but it’s hard to imagine a millennial voting for them—or even knowing what they were—over current items like the AirPods Pro and Apple Pay. Even those of us who have been around long enough to have lived through the product history will have trouble remembering details about particular PowerBooks or iPods.
But the core problem is that different people will interpret “prefer” differently, and even the same person may shift their criteria depending on the pairing. When choosing between the iPhone 4 and iPhone 5s, you might think about the introduction of Touch ID. But what mental framework even applies when the matchup is Apple Pay versus the ImageWriter II? Are we voting for personal nostalgia, historical importance, commercial success, technical achievement, design excellence, or cultural impact?
Ultimately, you shouldn’t get exercised if your favorite product of yesteryear is ranking poorly—sorry, Apple Extended Keyboard II fans. With no consistent criteria, the rankings are essentially noise dressed up as data. At least apples and oranges are both fruit.
Who can build a better pairwise comparison approach that would draw on a much larger selection of Apple products, compare them only within categories, jog memories by briefly setting the time frame and important facts for each, and ask a consistent yet open-ended question, such as “Which of these products was more important?”
