The Most Influential Gadgets of All Time

Almost nobody owned one; influence and sales are separate questions. The first machines were introduced on March 1, 1973 at Xerox PARC, and its article calls it the first computer with a graphical operating system. A bit-mapped portrait display stood upright like a page, worked by a three-button mouse, and it helped popularize the raster graphics model for all output, text included.

Off-the-shelf parts and a published design meant anyone could build a compatible box. Model 5150 arrived on August 12, 1981, and its lead sentence does the arguing: the basis for the IBM PC compatible de facto standard. The Intel 8088 CPU was a cost-reduced 8086, chosen for price over power. Every machine cloning that architecture sits downstream.

Two days after the "1984" advert aired, the machine went on sale, and its article calls it the first successful mass-market all-in-one desktop personal computer with a graphical user interface, built-in screen and mouse. A Motorola 68000 processor drove 128 KB of RAM, cramped even then. The Alto proved the idea; this is where a shopper could buy it.

No stylus, no keypad, and a 3.5 in multi-touch display doing every job. It reached American shops on June 29, 2007. Wikipedia's smartphone history article credits it, together with the Android devices that followed, with popularizing the slate form factor and ending keyboard-focused platforms. It also sits at rank 3 on Every iPhone, Ranked: the same item on two lists, on purpose.

Six C batteries, no sound at all, white shapes on a black screen. Magnavox released it in the United States in September 1972, and the lead sentence runs one clause: the first commercial home video game console. Players place plastic screen overlays on the television to supply color and scenery the hardware cannot draw for itself.

Unlike the home microcomputers preceding it, this one was sold as a finished consumer appliance rather than as a kit, assembled or otherwise, and the article draws that comparison itself. Designed by Steve Wozniak and first sold on June 10, 1977, it ran a MOS 6502 processor. VisiCalc shipped here first, and firms bought the machine to run it.

Cartridges are the whole argument. Sold from about September 1977 as the Video Computer System, it popularized microprocessor-based hardware and games stored on swappable ROM cartridges, which is software sold apart from the machine and still how consoles work. The Television Interface Adaptor chip built each picture one scan line at a time, so programming it was brutal.

Private listening in a public place starts here. The metal-cased blue-and-silver TPS-L2 personal stereo went on sale in Japan on 1 July 1979, described as the world's first low-cost personal stereo. Its article credits the line with promoting individualized music consumption, which is the polite way of saying it taught everyone to tune out the bus.

Thirteen years before the word caught on, here was one. Consumers could get it through BellSouth Cellular from August 16, 1994, handling calls, fax and email on a touchscreen with stylus and no keypad at all. The article hedges the claim carefully: it has retrospectively been referred to as the first true smartphone. Right shape, wrong decade for the parts.

Introduced on September 15, 1998 with 32 MB of internal memory, roughly half an album, plus a SmartMedia slot for more. Its lead calls it the first commercially successful portable MP3 player. The record industry sued, and on appeal the Ninth Circuit held that the Rio's space shifting was fair use, which is the ruling that made every player after it legal.

Buying a book with no shop and no computer involved is the change here. Devices in the line browse, buy, download and read e-books over wireless straight from the Kindle Store, and the original arrived in 2007 with an E Ink electronic paper display and Whispernet on 3G. A reader carrying its own bookshop was new.

A cylinder that listens and does almost nothing else. The first generation shipped in 2014, 9.25 inches tall, with a seven-piece microphone array built to catch a wake word from across a room. Wikipedia's smart-speaker article names it the first commercial smart speaker. Useful or sinister depending on your mood, but the category did not exist before it.

Test-marketed into a wrecked industry, launching in New York City on October 18, 1985. It helped revitalize American gaming after the 1983 crash and pioneered the now-standard business model of licensing third-party developers. The 10NES lockout chip enforced that in silicon: no approval, no cartridge, no game. Every console maker since runs some version of the arrangement.

Ten months after iTunes reached the Mac, the first version arrived on November 10, 2001 with a mechanical scroll wheel that let one thumb walk a thousand songs without a menu tree. Its article puts the consequence plainly: popularizing digital music storage let listeners abandon whole albums for single tracks, hastening the end of the album era.

Motion control went mainstream on November 19, 2006 in North America. Accelerometers in the Wii Remote recognize its orientation once it moves from rest and translate that into gesture recognition for a game. The consequence is stated outright in its article: the popularity of its motion-controlled games led Microsoft and Sony to develop the Kinect and PlayStation Move.

October 2008, $179 on a two-year T-Mobile contract, and the first commercially released device to use the Linux-based Android operating system. Its screen slides along a curved hinge to reveal a five-row QWERTY keyboard, with a clickable trackball underneath for scrolling and selecting. The touchscreen-only Android phones that followed carried the platform this one opened.

Depth sensing arrived in living rooms on November 4, 2010. An infrared laser projector paired with a monochrome CMOS sensor captures video in 3D under any ambient light, with nothing to hold. Robotics labs then dropped the games entirely: the same depth-sensing let robots work out the shape of obstacles and the distance to them, then manoeuvre around them.