The Verge - Features

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The worst gadgets we’ve ever touched
10 reviews that defined The Verge’s first decade

Posted: 01 Nov 2021 05:20 AM PDT

The Verge has been committed to longform journalism since our very first day. We launched with a story called "Condo at the End of the World," and we've been publishing deeply reported stories about the world technology has created ever since.

As part of our look back at the last 10 years of The Verge, we wanted to highlight (and, in some cases, remaster) a number of those stories we're particularly proud of — pieces that had an outsized impact, exposed wrongdoing, or simply brought to life the complicated world behind our screens.

Making this list was both a delight — we have published a lot of terrific feature journalism in the past decade, and reading it all again brought back a flood of memories — and incredibly difficult, as we had to actually choose stories to put on the list. But as we looked back, it was striking to see how early we were to ideas that would go on to remake the world: the dilemma of social media moderation; online fandoms; politicians taking to platforms; the inner workings of our minds; the complicated relationship between our cameras and the social justice movement.

And, of course, Foxconn in Wisconsin. (It has been 934 days since Foxconn promised an update or correction to our story about its buildings in Wisconsin being empty, but we're not counting.)

Below, we've asked some of the people who worked on these stories to talk about them: where they came from, why they chased them down, the ideas that brought them to life. We're more inspired than ever to produce even more of this work in the future and to continue finding the big stories hiding just behind the obvious.

— Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief

Condo at the end of world

By Joseph L. Flatley | Nov 1, 2011, 10:00am EDT

It's 2021, and the world hasn't ended (yet), but I'm pleased to report that The Verge is still going strong 10 years after its launch. From the very beginning, we were thinking big. We wanted to tell big stories and make a big splash, which I think is exemplified by my feature "Condo at the End of the World." This look at doomsday bunker salespeople and other apocalyptic capitalists took me from the center of Ohio to the center of Kansas — two places I had never desired to visit — where I looked down into a 200-foot Atlas missile silo and asked myself, "Would I want to spend the rest of my life down there?" Of course I didn't. But the trip was well worth it. The story introduced readers to some far-out characters and presaged the very bizarre turn that American life would take with QAnon and COVID-19 a few short years later. I've been on that beat ever since, and I have to thank The Verge for giving me the opportunity.

Joseph L. Flatley — Journalist and publisher of Failed State Update

Fanboys

By Lessley Anderson January 21, 2014

I've been at Vox Media for almost 10 years, and to this day, this feature remains one of my favorite pieces of work I've done for this company. I don't remember much about the process of putting it together, but I do remember one of the earliest meetings we had about it. It was January 2014, and James Chae and I were in Las Vegas supporting The Verge at CES. Shortly before returning home, we met in the lobby of the hotel to discuss ideas for this feature with Josh Topolsky and a few other folks from the editorial team. At one point, James suggested having some sort of toggle so readers could choose the design they wanted, and I said, "What if, instead of a toggle, we do it automatically based on their OS, and more importantly, we don't tell anyone and let them figure it out in the comments?" I remember Josh's eyes immediately lit up and he was like, "Yes!" The next few weeks were a blur as James and I worked to put it together. I remember almost none of it, but I'll never forget how good it felt to see such a positive reaction to it, starting with The Verge editorial team that day in Vegas.

Guillermo Esteves — Senior Engineering Manager, Vox Media Product Team

The Internet is Fucked

By Nilay Patel Feb 25, 2014

I wrote "The Internet is Fucked" in a single burst after reading yet another judge's opinion about net neutrality that seemed utterly divorced from reality — more concerned with reciting magic legal phrases than the fact that most people didn't have real choices for internet access, allowing their ISPs to do all kinds of icky shit without any threat their customers would leave.

So I just wrote down the obvious things and said they were obvious. The piece blew up. It was one of the first Verge stories to get serious attention from policymakers on both sides of the aisle. The famous John Oliver segment came out a few months later, hitting many of the same notes. For a moment, net neutrality — broadband policy — was an actual political winner.

Lately, it's become fashionable to say that the net neutrality debate came to nothing — that the worst predictions of what broadband providers would do never came to pass after Trump FCC Chairman Ajit Pai rolled back net neutrality rules in a shady process that he almost certainly lied to Congress about. This take ignores the various state net neutrality laws on the books, most notably in California, and the lawsuits still underway.

But another big part of the reason the ISPs aren't trying harder to break the internet is because they know that people hate the idea of tiered internet pricing, and they know it because stories like "The Internet is Fucked" exploded. And when there is competition for internet access, it quickly leads to a situation that looks a lot like net neutrality: providers start giving certain services preferential treatment, then compete to add more and more preferred services, quickly arriving at the end state of giving every service the same treatment. The market works, when there's a market.

Nilay Patel — Editor-in-chief, The Verge

@MichelleObama

By Kwame Opam | March 14th, 2016

It was around the time of CES 2016 that I got tapped to write The Verge's Michelle Obama feature. I forget when exactly the discussions with her team in Washington started, but I distinctly remember sitting in that trailer in Las Vegas, going over what we could do, what we should do, how fast we needed to get it done, and how big of a deal it was.

If you can recall anything about 2016 other than that election, you'll remember that Vine was in full flower at that point. The former First Lady had made a splash on it — something about turnips — and her team was trying to attract youthful eyes to her initiatives. It was certainly a bit fluffy, but it mattered. After all, here was someone in the public eye trying to meet young people where they were and do some good.

We were going to blow the doors off the thing. I'd leave Vegas early and fly to DC to meet with her team. A week later, Nilay would interview her for the site's first 360-degree interview. James Bareham would conduct a photo shoot right there in the White House. It was all incredibly ambitious.

And I was not ready. Like, hilariously unready. I'd never written a 3,000-word feature before. Picture me standing in the East Wing in wide-eyed terror meeting functionaries of the Obama administration, not even Mrs. Obama herself. And when we did finally meet, my awestruck brain could only think, "Wow. She's really tall."

That line made it into an early draft of the piece. Nilay's note was something to the effect of, "Cut this. It's bad."

We got the thing where it needed to be. (Thank you, Nilay and Michael Zelenko, my editor at the time.) There were long, coffee-drenched weekends. Late nights. A few panicked texts and phone calls. By the time we hit publish two months later, I was at South by Southwest, an entirely different event. I don't think I ever slept quite as well as when it finally went live.

In the end, I'm proud to have my name on such a huge project. Up to that point, it was the hardest thing I'd ever attempted. It made me a better journalist. But honestly? Rest in peace, Vine. We didn't deserve you.

Kwame Opam — Senior Producer of Digital Strategy, The Problem with Jon Stewart

The Secret Rules of the Internet

By Catherine Buni & Soraya Chemaly | April 16th, 2016

Over the past five years, The Verge has established a great track record of platform moderation stories. These narratives often take us inside places like Cognizant, where we get a sense of what it's like to spend all day sanitizing the most rancid corners of platforms like Facebook and YouTube in the modern era. But when Catherine Buni and Soraya Chemaly — two journalists I've always admired — approached me with the pitch that would become "Secret Rules of the Internet," they proposed something I hadn't yet read: a vivid description of the very earliest days of the content moderation industry. We're talking untrained college grads in the mid-2000s, improvising rules as they saw fit, and who, through trial and error, would set the foundation for platform moderation as we know it today.

The story took more than a year to come together, but the result is one of my favorite pieces I commissioned for The Verge. It's jarring to read it now and see how so many of the challenges of the moderation industry — as well as the inhumane and harrowing working conditions of those doing the job — were baked in from the very start, back when YouTube was still run out of a small office above a pizza shop in San Mateo, California. I remember being concerned that the morose subject matter might turn off readers, but just the opposite — the story did well, and Catherine and Soraya won a Mirror Award to boot.

Michael Zelenko — Deputy Editor, Rest of World

Diary of a concussion

By Elizabeth Lopatto | Sep 27, 2017

I didn't really mean to write "Diary of a Concussion" at first. I just wanted to find something that would tell me what to expect; I'd seen a lot of clinical language about concussion symptoms — totally useless. I already knew what my symptoms were. I wanted to know what recovery was like.

Medicine does not rely on first-person reports, but if you are experiencing something, the first-person report is vital — it can also give you a guide to what to expect and how to understand your own experience. I found nothing. If you are a journalist, you know the sinking feeling: this story does not exist and therefore I guess I have to write it. But it was worse than that, because in order to write it, I was going to have to figure out how to write for more than 15 minutes without giving myself a headache.

Four years later, I have almost no lingering effects from the brain injury, except for one. My relationship with sound appears to have permanently changed. I listen to a lot less music and am still sensitive to loud noises.

Liz Lopatto — Deputy Editor, The Verge

The Internet of Garbage

By Sarah Jeong | Aug 28, 2018

I originally wrote The Internet of Garbage in 2015, when the issue of online content moderation was still a niche topic. The book is written mostly with an eye toward online harassment, since that was what the conversation around moderation and censorship was mostly centered around at the time. In a semi-ironic twist, when I was hired by The New York Times in 2018, some people (i.e., Fox News) became very mad about some old tweets of mine (i.e., about white people). I ended up receiving an onslaught of social media abuse, some fairly horrific emails, a lot of creepy calls to a phone number I promptly got rid of, and a few really weird messages from a guy who would later go on to mail bombs to Hillary Clinton, George Soros, and CNN. In the middle of all of this, my beloved colleagues at The Verge repackaged and republished The Internet of Garbage.

In many ways, 2015 was already a bygone era at the time, and even more so now. But to my regret, the book continues to be relevant. Although many things have changed — from the increasing prominence of fascism in American political life, to specific changes in the law such as the passage of SESTA-FOSTA in 2018 — the issues I tackle in the book have gone from niche to mainstream. My colleagues understood that — possibly because they themselves understood that The Verge, as a "tech" publication, had also gone from niche to mainstream.

Sarah Jeong — Journalist

The Trauma Floor

By Casey Newton | Feb 25, 2019

"The Trauma Floor" started with a direct message on Twitter: A Facebook content moderator working for Cognizant in Phoenix asked if we could talk about some of the issues they had seen in the workplace. When we got on the phone, they told me about awful working conditions, the incredible difficulty of applying Facebook's ever-changing rules, and the long-term effects the work was having on their mental health. A few weeks later, I was in Phoenix meeting with a handful of moderators, huddled in my hotel room, piecing together what would come to feel like the most important story I covered at The Verge.

Two years later, Facebook reached a tentative $52 million settlement with its American content moderators. A similar settlement seems likely in Europe. Cognizant has gotten out of the content moderation business altogether. From far enough away, it looks like progress.

But despite some improvements to working conditions, the underlying issues remain the same. Repeated long-term exposure to violence, child exploitation, and other harmful content can lead to long-term mental health problems, including post-traumatic stress disorder. The moderators I wrote about in Phoenix have moved on with their lives. But I still hear from moderators working for various platforms all the time.

"The whole 2 year period was really traumatic," a former Facebook moderator who worked for a vendor in Greece wrote to me in August. She said that she had gone on anti-anxiety medication while on the job. "I'm really happy that I don't work for Facebook any longer. But I still feel sorry for those people who are stuck in that dreadful workplace!"

Casey Newton — Contributing Editor, The Verge and Editor of Platformer

Fearing for His Life

By Chloé Cooper Jones | March 13, 2019

Finalist, Feature Writing, Pulitzer Prize 2020

Ramsey Orta was waiting to get dinner with his friend Eric Garner when the police approached. Orta took out his cellphone and hit record. In the video, which has been seen by millions and sparked outrage across the country, Orta narrates what we see. We can hear his voice move from frustration to anger to fear as he realizes the gravity of what he is recording. As Garner tells his killers that he can't breathe, Orta also whispers this from behind the camera — "He can't breathe" — as it becomes clearer that what he's recording is the death of his friend. Shortly after the release of the video, Orta was routinely harassed by police and later incarcerated. The video did not secure swift and meaningful justice for the Garner family as Orta believed it would. Did he regret recording it? I wanted to ask him this question, and I wanted to know who he was and how his life had led him to this decision.

I spent a year visiting Orta in various upstate carceral facilities in order to learn his story and the result is this piece. I was very fortunate that the team at The Verge saw the value of this story immediately and supported my work.

Chloé Cooper Jones — Writer

The Peace Reporters

By Verge Staff | Aug 31, 2020

After the tragic death of George Floyd, I was really struck by what happened to Darnella Frazier, the 17-year-old girl who filmed his traffic death on her cellphone. Not only was Frazier deeply traumatized and bothered by witnessing Floyd's death, but she later expressed that she was getting a lot of backlash for documenting the incident. As I followed her story, I kept going back to the central question we're asking in this piece: what compels someone to record police violence and what are the consequences for doing so?

As I had these conversations at work with other colleagues, it became clear that a lot of us were trying to reckon with the complex role of technology in police interactions. Our executive editor, TC Sottek, sent an all-staff message asking us to really think about what The Verge's platform and resources mean in moments like this. It was a compelling call to action that created one of our most ambitious and wide-reaching projects: Capturing the Police, a multimedia project that explores the documentation of police violence — what happens when you film the police; both the activism and trauma that result from videos of police brutality; and what police body cameras don't show.

It is a powerful thing to hit record at this moment in history, but it's also a powerful time to share what you're seeing online. Yes, this project is about those who choose to record police violence, but it's impossible to have a voice when you are siloed. So while many of these videos are from particular individuals, it took a community to amplify and share these stories for them to be seen. When you decide to share a video online, you are participating in shaping culture with the click of a button.

We published this project in 2020 and while, for many reasons, it feels like ages ago, so much of what we documented and began to unpack in the project are areas that continue to evolve and raise new questions in the aftermath of a global reckoning.

Mariya Abdulkaf — Senior Video Producer, The Verge

The 8th Wonder of the World

BY Josh Dzieza | Oct 19, 2020

In the spring of 2019, I drove around Wisconsin trying to figure out what Foxconn was doing in the state. It was immediately clear what it was not doing: building the fantastic factory it and President Trump had promised. But it was also not doing nothing. It had bought real buildings and put up signs. It had an office downtown, and after climbing a nearby parking garage, I saw there were actual people in it. What they were doing there remained an enigma.

That changed about a year later, when employees reached out to me to say that not even they knew what Foxconn was doing. Many were just sitting around, hired for jobs that didn't exist. Others were assigned wild boondoggles — self-driving golf carts, fish farming, glass orb data centers — then berated for pursuing them. They described a Potemkin village so chaotically mismanaged that those in charge often didn't seem clear on what the illusion was supposed to be.

A year later, Wisconsin has radically scaled down its contract with the company, slashing the subsidies for which Foxconn is eligible. But other damage is harder to undo. The employees I spoke to look back on their time at the company as a surreal, sometimes nightmarish detour in their careers. Many of the people who lived near the project are still furious about the way the city council pushed through the deal and forced people from their homes to clear space for a factory that the residents believed — and now they know, correctly — was never going to happen. Millions were spent to prepare the way for a factory that isn't there.

Foxconn still announces new plans, and they still fail to materialize. The latest was electric cars. Few people I speak to take them seriously. It did finish work on the orb, which stands alone in an empty field. No one is quite sure what it's for.

Josh Dzieza — Investigations Editor, The Verge

The worst gadgets we’ve ever touched

Posted: 01 Nov 2021 04:40 AM PDT

Over its 10-year history, The Verge has reviewed hundreds of products: smartphones that have changed the way that we communicate, take photos, and engage with the world; incredible laptops that pack the power of a gaming PC into a portable package; and consoles that have revolutionized how we play.

These are not those products, though. As The Verge turns 10, we've taken the time to look back at some of the highest highs of the world of consumer technology… but also the biggest duds that ended up on our desks.

Welcome to The Verge's gadget hall of shame. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

Red Hydrogen

What else could top this list other than the Red Hydrogen, which has the dubious honor of receiving the lowest review score The Verge has ever awarded? The phone was originally announced to breathless hype in 2018, with a list of specs so over the top, they almost sounded fictional. There was the "holographic display," the promise of modular accessories that would drastically change how the phone could be used, and even the ability to pair the Hydrogen with Red's cinema-grade cameras.

But after months of delays, what actually shipped was a gigantic, painful-to-use smartphone with outdated specs, mediocre cameras, and an awful-looking, blurry attempt at glasses-free 3D that bordered on painful to use — all of this while costing an astonishing $1,300.

The Hydrogen One was an attempt at making a unique kind of Android smartphone, but it only succeeded at making a uniquely terrible product from virtually start to finish: underpowered, overhyped, over-priced, late to market, and so bad that in its aftermath, the company's founder decided it was a good time to retire and ended off Red's phone ambitions entirely.

Samsung Galaxy Note 7

The Galaxy Note 7 is possibly the best gadget on this list; a herald of the success of big-screened smartphones, packed with the latest specs, top-tier camera tech for the time, and superb design and hardware… except for the fact that it had a tendency to burst into flames.

Yes, the Galaxy Note 7 is the phone that Samsung had to recall twice and never bothered to put back on sale again. We at The Verge took the rare action of pulling its review score once it became obvious that buyers should steer clear. It was an important moment in smartphone history, a lesson for Samsung, and a good look at how even the most thorough reviews can't account for every potential failing of a device.

Amazon Fire Phone

Unlike the Galaxy Note 7, the Fire Phone did not literally light things on fire. But that's one of the only positives about Amazon's costly smartphone misfire, which marked both the start and the abrupt end of its smartphone ambitions.

Ostensibly an Android phone, the Fire Phone was Amazon's attempt at translating the success of its Google-less Fire Tablets to smartphones, putting Amazon's services front and center. Its claim to fame — other than its aggressive attempts to get you to buy things from Amazon — was a bizarre quadruple front-facing camera system that tracked your head at all times. The goal was to give you a "Dynamic Perspective" system by tilting and twisting your head around, which would supposedly enable a new way to interact with your phone. Unfortunately, it was more or less useless in practice, good for shifting icons around on a homescreen and little else.

The lackluster software, over-reliance on Amazon's services, and lack of apps (especially Google's apps and its Play Store) all combined for a forgettable phone that wasn't worth the trouble, landing the Fire Phone up on clearance in just a few short months.

Amazon hasn't attempted a phone since.

Ouya

Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony have dominated the console landscape for decades. The Ouya bravely asked if there was another option. What if there was a fourth console, an indie success, a crowdfunding darling that took Kickstarter by storm, that could expand the world of mobile gaming to the big screen?

The Ouya, unfortunately, failed in those ambitions. It arrived not with a bang but with a whimper: unfinished, with too few games, not enough good games, awful software, and a dream that was too far ahead of its time. The only real bright spot was TowerFall, which has since been ported to other, actually good consoles — including the Nintendo Switch, which arguably succeeds at the sort of low-powered, indie success that the Ouya desperately wanted to be.

On paper, the Ouya had a lot going for it: an interesting Yves Behar design, an Arm processor (years before the Switch would take a similar tack), and big ambitions. But the Ouya was sold to backers (and customers) on a pile of promises and unfulfilled potential, of big things it could accomplish sometime in the future, if only it had the support, the time (and the money) to pull them off. But time was one thing microconsoles like the Ouya didn't have, and even a Razer acquisition and a spiritual successor in the Forge TV couldn't stave off the inevitable.

Google Nexus Q

Google makes a lot of great products these days: Nest speakers and Wi-Fi routers, the Chromecast, its Pixel phones. But the company's first in-house device, the Nexus Q, was not one of them.

What was the Nexus Q? All these years later, it's still hard to pin it down. A bizarre media streamer that predated the Chromecast, the Nexus Q was given out to attendees at Google I/O for free ahead of what was supposed to be its grand debut — but then, after reviews (including The Verge's) called out the shortcomings of the odd sphere, it was shelved entirely before ever making it to market.

The Nexus Q was strangely useless as a standalone box: like the Apple TV's AirPlay, content streamed to it had to be started on a different device — an idea that Google turned into the original Chromecast later on. But, unlike the Chromecast, which had a wide range of content and a small, dongle-shaped footprint that was easily concealed behind a TV, the Nexus Q only worked with Google's YouTube, Play Music, and Play Video services and was a massive, melon-sized sphere that you had to somehow blend into your living room. Oh, and it was intended to cost $299, which is an ambitious price point for a streaming box that didn't actually stream anything by itself.

The Nexus Q is a valuable lesson, both of the power of a good gadget review and of how not to make a set-top box.

The shitty early Android tablet trilogy:

Galaxy Tab Note 10.1

Motorola Xoom

Droid Xyboard

On February 24th, 2011, Engadget's Joshua Topolsky reviewed the Motorola Xoom, the first officially sanctioned Android tablet. Sixteen days later, he left to co-found The Verge, where we continued to review shitty tablets.

Honestly, it was hard to pick just one terrible Android tablet to include on this list because there have just been so many. This trio, however, represents some of The Verge's earliest forays into the pit of despair that was (and in many ways, continues to be) the state of Android slates.

It's shocking to look back and see that Android tablets like the Xoom 2 were once considered contenders to Apple's iPad lineup. Plenty of companies have tried, like Motorola (which certainly gave it its all), Samsung (which bravely still is trying to make the Galaxy Tab a thing), and even Google itself. None have managed to make much of an impact due to poorly designed operating systems and even poorer app support.

The Verge's reviews have gotten considerably more polished since these early days. The same, sadly, cannot be said for Android tablets.

Blackberry Playbook

The BlackBerry PlayBook would have been an excellent place to close the book on BlackBerry's chapter in the world of smartphones. An iPad also-ran that was meant to not only fight back against Apple's tablets but also Android, which (in 2011) was still a young upstart steadily eating away at the market share that BlackBerry once held in mobile.

The seven-inch PlayBook boldly tried to shore up BlackBerry's place in the industry, establishing itself as a major player in the modernized, big-screen, and App Store-powered iOS and Android. Gone were the iconic physical keyboard and the email, calendar, and contacts applications — the main business-focused features on which BlackBerry had built its empire. Instead, the PlayBook offered a unique QNX-based OS and a smattering of basic games and media apps, which collectively turned the PlayBook into a smash success, catapulting BlackBerry back into the cutting-edge relevancy that it maintains to this day.

Just kidding. BlackBerry's utter failure at software and its attempt to launch a brand-new mobile OS and app store in late 2011 (an even worse start than Microsoft's Windows Phone 7) doomed it before it began. Not even a hasty 2.0 software update to add Android apps could save RIM's last, best shot at relevancy. The PlayBook was consigned to the scrap heap of history, along with BlackBerry's good name.

The PlayBook was the last major failure RIM's BlackBerry would endure; despite some additional flailing, the BlackBerry brand was sold for parts and only persists today as a zombie-like licensed brand for companies like TCL, though even TCL doesn't necessarily have the rights today.

Microsoft Lumia 950

Oh, Windows Phone.

The Lumia 950 was Microsoft's swan song for flagship Windows Phone devices, released in the surprisingly late year of 2015 with "Windows 10 Mobile" on board. Microsoft had once dominated the pre-iPhone smartphone market with its business-focused Windows Mobile OS; but as Android and iOS gained momentum, Microsoft zagged where Apple and Google zigged, going off into its own direction with the stylish, blocky Windows Phone instead.

Microsoft definitely tried: it spent years reworking Windows Phone 7 (and its Windows Phone 8, Windows Phone 8.1, and Windows Phone 10 successors). It partnered with and eventually bought Nokia entirely to beef up its hardware chops, offering brightly colored flagship phones with unparalleled camera systems.

But it was all for naught. Microsoft just had too late a start, its also-ran app store practically empty of software. Despite its best attempts, developers just couldn't be convinced to come over to the Windows side of things, and customers never really bought them. The Lumia 950 was doomed for the same reasons. Perhaps things would have been different if Microsoft had embraced Android apps years ago instead of waiting until now.

There were other Lumia phones after the Lumia 950, but its failure feels like the final nail in the coffin for an era of Nokia devices, Windows Phone, and Microsoft's own smartphone ambitions.

That MacBook keyboard

(butterfly keyboard, 2015-2020)

You know the one. As part of Apple's 2010-era sprint toward making its devices as slim and sleek as possible, damn the consequences, the butterfly keyboard's badness crept up on users the same way that writer John Green once described falling asleep: "slowly, then all at once."

The thinner, crisper keys weren't bad at first: an adjustment compared to Apple's old scissor switches, sure, but not inherently better or worse. But as time went on, the butterfly switches turned out to be as frail and fragile as their namesake. The switches could jam, clog, or break entirely at the hint of the merest presence of dust or debris; attempting to remove the caps to fix them would usually just make things worse, shattering the delicate plastic.

Sadly, we were unable to review the MacBook's butterfly keyboard (circa 2015 through 2020) as an independent piece of hardware. The god-awful design had the good fortune to be attached to otherwise great computers and avoided widespread detection for a time; nevertheless, Apple's keyboard mistake stands out as not only one of the worst pieces of hardware of the last decade but one of the most widespread.

Apple would try and try and try again to fix the butterfly keyboard, with new membranes to stop dust and tweaked designs over the years, but eventually, the only solution was the obvious one: go back to the old, thicker keys and pretend the whole thing never happened (except for an expanded repair program, that is). Whereas many of the devices on this list lived and died short, niche lives, Apple inflicted the butterfly keyboard on millions of customers for years, giving it the dubious distinction of causing the most tangible badness of anything we've ever reviewed.

Every technological product that Will.i.am touches:

Will.i.am is good at music. Great at music, even (who doesn't love blasting some classic Black Eyed Peas bops?).

The same can not be said about his varied and horrible forays into consumer technology, which are, simply put, terrible. Like a reverse Midas, everything that Will.i.am's startup touches turns to coal: oversized earbuds, an illegal car, the Puls smartwatch ("the worst product I've touched all year"), the Dial smartwatch (because one wasn't enough), smart home platform Wink (which nearly ran out of money and then straight into the ground), a line of overpriced iPhone cases.

The Verge has technically never reviewed a finished Will.i.am product — largely due to the fact that most of them did not pass muster to get to that point — but the ones that have crossed our path are excessive, gaudy, and just plain bad products that no one should ever have bought.

I've gotta feeling he should maybe stop trying to make consumer electronic devices.

10 reviews that defined The Verge’s first decade

Posted: 01 Nov 2021 04:16 AM PDT

Reviews have been part of The Verge's DNA since the very beginning. Before the beginning, actually — in the site's prehistory as This Is My Next, reviews were one of the core elements of continuity in the months before we launched The Verge for real. In those days, we were tackling terrible Android and BlackBerry tablets, evaluating the first wave of Intel ultrabooks, and heaping praise on the then-revolutionary Galaxy Nexus.

Since then, we've been there for the rise of drones, VR, smartwatches, foldables, OLED screens, mirrorless cameras, voice assistants, video doorbells, and streaming media boxes, not to mention the best smartphones and the most impractical laptops. From the beginning, The Verge has picked the products that looked like they'd make a difference and told you the truth about each one.

As we look toward the next decade of setting the bar even higher for product reviews, we've taken a look back at the 10 most important and influential ones: reviews that didn't just say whether a product was good or bad, but helped define the product space and move the industry forward in ways that go far beyond simple buying advice.

Here are the gadgets and reviews from The Verge's first ten years that really mattered.

Surface RT

7 / 10, October 12th, 2012

The website known as This Is My Next officially launched as The Verge on November 1st, 2011, which means that The Verge proper missed out on reviewing nearly all the major fall tech releases of 2011.

2012, though, was a very different story, with the "Tech-tober" fall season bringing not just the usual pile of iPhones, Android phones, and laptops, but one of the most important new devices of the last decade: the Microsoft Surface. After years of taking a back seat on Windows hardware, the Surface was a bold entry by Microsoft into the world of building its own PCs — showing both the world and its own hardware partners what the future of Windows could look like. Microsoft was trying to follow in Apple's footsteps, combining its hardware and software experience together for the ultimate mobile computer.

The sleek hardware, with its colorful covers that housed their own keyboards, were meant to put bulky PCs to shame; their custom version of Windows intended to outclass the iPad's mobile software sensibilities by showing what a real productivity tablet could look like.

Unfortunately, as The Verge's review showed, the original Surface was a misfire. The hardware, while nice looking, was underpowered; the lighter, more portable version of Windows half-baked. Microsoft was out of its depth with getting Windows to work on ARM (something it still continues to struggle with), it confused customers and employees with what the Surface could actually do, and eventually the company wrote off $900 million worth of unsold tablets.

Microsoft's PC hardware has gotten a lot more polished since the original Surface — and so have The Verge's reviews of them. But this first slate was the biggest, most anticipated product review in the first year of our website and remains, to this day, the single most commented-on article ever posted to The Verge. — Chaim Gartenberg

Nokia Lumia 920

7.9 / 10, November 1st, 2012

In 2012, Windows Phone needed a big win. Microsoft's revamped software was still rapidly losing ground to iOS and Android, and Nokia's Lumia 920, the first Windows Phone that caught everyone's attention, looked like the answer. The striking colors, top-notch specs, and even wireless charging (a rarity at the time) were second only to the PureView camera that made the Lumia 920 stand out from its Android and iOS competition, boasting optical image stabilization and the promise of revolutionary low-light performance.

It was a controversial addition at first due to some misleading marketing images that were purportedly shot on the smartphone but were actually taken on a DSLR — something first spotted by The Verge. That discovery in turn led us to venture out to Central Park in New York City to test Nokia's camera claims for ourselves: it was The Verge that shared the first real photos taken by the phone as well. The PureView camera on the Lumia 920 did eventually hold up in our actual review — despite the initial deception, its low-light performance and OIS were legitimately ahead of the pack for the time, leading one to wonder why Nokia felt obligated to fake the shots in the first place.

Windows Phone primarily failed due to a lack of apps and software support, despite legitimately interesting hardware like the Lumia 920. But the Lumia 920 will always be remembered as the Windows Phone camera that truly leapfrogged the competition. It successfully steered the smartphone camera conversation toward image stabilization and low-light performance, which are the main things we look for in modern devices almost a decade later. Perhaps the Lumia 920 was just a little too ahead of its time. — Tom Warren

Samsung Galaxy S6

8.8 / 10, March 31st, 2015

Samsung's Galaxy S6 represented a monumental step forward for the company's craftsmanship of smartphones. Shifting away from the plastic and faux leather that had become a staple of its mobile devices, the S6 upgraded to a design that was all glass and metal. So it only felt appropriate to shoot our review at a glassblowing plant — marking one of The Verge's most over-the-top productions at this stage in the site's history. We've continued to try to one-up ourselves every year since for our major reviews.

The S6 was a turning point for Samsung — instead of being the cheap plastic copy of Apple's more premium-looking metal and glass smartphones, it was suddenly at the top of the playing field. In fact, thanks to its tight tolerances, seamless curves, and attention to detail, the Samsung Galaxy S6 was a phone that felt better to hold than Apple's competing iPhones at the time. It wasn't just style, either: the S6 was packed to the brim with specs, including a gorgeous OLED panel, a top-notch processor, and the sorts of weird experiments that Samsung tends to skip these days (including an IR blaster, a heart rate monitor that doubled as a shutter button, and no fewer than two wireless charging standards).

These refinements and additions didn't come without sacrifice: with the S6, Samsung said goodbye to removable batteries — and the phone even lost its water resistance rating. Thankfully, the latter would soon return the next year, and after taking such big strides in build quality, Samsung never looked back. — Chris Welch

Apple Watch

7 / 10, April 8th, 2015

The Apple Watch might not have been the most important thing Apple released this decade, but as a rare entry into a new product category, it was certainly the most anticipated. The first new product of Tim Cook's tenure as CEO, an innovation that was promised to be as important and new for both the company and the world as the Mac or the iPhone. Expectations were stratospheric.

The Verge review, too, was our most visually striking and extravagant yet. Subtitled "A day in the life," we pulled out all the stops for the review, which used a custom scrolling layout with video backgrounds to tell the story of what it was actually like to use this futuristic — and as it turned out, unpolished — device from morning to evening.

Behind the scenes, there are often more people involved in the production of a Verge review than you might expect. But the Apple Watch review was such a colossal undertaking that it warranted a full-on credits section listing a total of 31 people, including stylists, extras, and contributors from other Vox Media sites. And the conclusion holds up: as Nilay wrote, the first-gen Apple Watch was an incredibly ambitious product that suffered from poor performance and a lack of focus.

Needless to say, we don't review the Apple Watch (or anything else) like that every year. Last year's Series 6 review was titled "minute improvements," a pun that underscores how the Apple Watch has grown into a refined, category-owning, and even kind of boring product. For better and worse, that was not the case in 2015. — Sam Byford

Oculus Rift

8 / 10, March 28th, 2016

Virtual reality wasn't invented this decade. (It also never truly died out in the '90s, Virtual Boy jokes aside.) But you can divide the whole medium into two periods: before and after the Oculus Rift. Oculus launched in 2012 with a prototype literally held together by duct tape, but it jumped into 2016 with a meticulously crafted consumer edition that was like nothing we had ever reviewed — and it remains one of the best VR headset designs ever sold. It was the first time The Verge evaluated VR as a product, not just a dream.

Even figuring out how to photograph the Rift was an exhilarating experience. How did you convey the experience of using something with a screen nobody else could see? Where was the line between capturing the Rift's awkwardness — wires, tracking cameras, the fact that you weren't even supposed to use it standing up — and its sci-fi coolness? What did you wear for a shoot where representing how a device interacted with your body was so important? (Confession: the answer is "a puffy Uniqlo outerwear vest I wore for a few hours with the tag tucked in and returned." Sorry about that. It was like sixty dollars and really not my style.)

At the same time, using the Rift — the first VR device I spent long, sometimes lonely stretches in — helped clarify the challenges the medium would face. Combined with the experience of the contemporary HTC Vive, it set the benchmarks for how we evaluated practically every headset afterward. It's the reason we still have a dedicated studio space labeled the "VR Room," although after the rise of use-anywhere headsets like the Oculus Quest, the name became a lot less accurate.

Headsets have improved a lot since 2016. But Oculus' influence — and the Rift's — is still absolutely unmistakable. — Adi Robertson

iPhone XS

8.5 / 10, September 18th, 2018

A decade of Verge reviews has made one thing clear: every phone review is a camera review. It was true in 2011 when the iPhone 4S began to make point-and-shoot cameras obsolete, and it's true in 2021 as the iPhone 13 Pro takes a massive lead. The camera is still one of the biggest places handset manufacturers can make their devices meaningfully better than the competition — but as we pointed out with a Verge review, Apple dropped the ball with the iPhone XS in 2018. We vividly showed that despite adopting a computational photography pipeline that combines multiple frames into a Smart HDR image, Apple's $1,000+ camera couldn't compete with Google's $650 Pixel 2.

That's something few others dared to even mention, much less show, and while some publications later tried to explain it away as the new normal of computational photography, Apple seems to have taken our criticism to heart. For the iPhone 11 Pro and Pro Max, it drastically changed its entire image processing pipeline at the same time it upgraded the camera hardware. We called it the best camera you can get on a phone, and Apple hasn't fallen behind since. — Sean Hollister

iPad Pro

8.5 / 10, November 5th, 2018

I knew this review would be controversial when we published it — a lot of people love their iPads, and nothing about this particular new iPad Pro was necessarily bad. But Apple had announced it with a lot of direct comparisons to laptops, especially around performance. It felt important to clearly say that iOS 12 itself hadn't really been changed at all, and that the limitations of the iPad were still the same as ever, even though the price and that USB-C port made it seem more like a laptop. Sometimes saying the most obvious thing is the most useful thing you can do in a review, even if you know it's going to make some people unhappy.

Of course, the next year Apple introduced iOS 13 for the iPad by going down my list of issues almost verbatim and addressing them: More sensible multitasking? Check. Better file management? Check. Desktop-class browsing? Check. A lot of people noticed, and I got a few notes about it, which was nice. Sometimes reviews really do help push things along. — Nilay Patel

Samsung Galaxy Fold

4 / 10, 5 / 10; April 19th, 2019, October 30th, 2019

Samsung's original Galaxy Fold was supposed to usher in a new era of mobile devices on its planned launch date of April 26th, 2019, an era that would force us to rethink how, when, and for what we used our phones. All eyes were on the ambitious new device — and on the early reviews of the phone, which revealed critical flaws in the durability of the Fold's flexible screen that almost ended not just Samsung's first foldable, but the entire product category before it could even get started.

Three days after we published our review of the very first Galaxy Fold, Samsung canceled the initial launch and delayed the release until it could fix the very things we brought up, including issues with the nonremovable protective screen layer and a broken screen from random debris that made its way inside.

It was a fundamentally flawed product that Samsung would have sent out to thousands of customers if reviewers hadn't caught (and suffered with) the issues first. It was also an intriguing product which, in its very design, suggested we could change our relationship with our phones. Samsung would go on to address many of the Fold's issues in October 2019, a few months after our initial review, making it one of the rare products to receive a re-review on The Verge (although the revamped first-gen Fold still was a fairly fragile phone).

Two years later and Samsung is already on its fourth iteration of the Fold, having figured out most of the durability issues. But the rest of us are still figuring out what our relationship with our phones should be. — Dieter Bohn

Asus ROG Zephyrus G14

8.5 / 10, March 3rd, 2020

Just a few years ago, if you were buying an AMD-powered laptop, it was probably a budget laptop. Intel had so thoroughly dominated the PC landscape that the first Verge review of an AMD-powered machine came in 2019 with the Surface Laptop 3.

Now, the era of bargain-basement AMD laptops is over. Intel vs. AMD is now one of the biggest stories in the PC sphere, and the battle extends from the budget sector up through powerful and popular flagships. AMD processors are now in budget laptops, gaming laptops, business laptops, and every other device you can think of — and they're superior to Intel on efficiency, power, and price. There's really and truly a new chip in town.

That all started with the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14. After my first day testing the G14, I emailed Asus to ask if the listed price was a typo. I had never seen the performance the Ryzen 7 4900HS was delivering at anything close to the G14's price point. I had never seen it packed into such a lightweight chassis. I had never seen it combined with such exceptional battery life — this was the era when five hours was a decent result for a gaming laptop.

The G14 turned our expectations for powerful, portable laptops on their heads. It was a signal that AMD's Ryzen 4000 series wasn't just ready to contend with Intel's best; it was ready to run Intel's best out of the room. It was a sign that the world of laptops was about to change. — Monica Chin

MacBook Air M1

9.5 / 10, November 27th, 2020

We had a lot of hesitancy and trepidation going into this review — could it really be as good as Apple claimed? History was certainly not on the side of emulation software for providing a good experience. Surely there would be a show-stopping problem or incompatibility that would put some big cracks in Apple's carefully crafted image of the Air.

And yet, all of our expectations were basically shattered. Performance? Shockingly good, even when running emulated x86 apps using Apple's new Rosetta 2 framework. Battery life? Astonishing, completely blowing away anything comparable in size and weight. Comfort and ergonomics? It ran cool and was completely silent thanks to its lack of a fan. Even the newly revised keyboard was a treat to type on and didn't have any of the reliability concerns of Apple's prior butterfly models. And in typical Apple form, the trackpad is best in class.

So what kept the Air from getting the illustrious perfect 10 out of 10 score, something we've never given out at The Verge? Well, Apple's integration of iOS apps into macOS was perhaps the only software stumble, though most people could happily ignore that. Since this was an entirely new platform architecture, there are some older applications that wouldn't yet run, even with Apple's excellent emulation layer. The webcam remains bad, a particular pain point during a global pandemic. And it would really be nice to have more than just two measly USB-C ports, or at the very least put one on each side for more convenient charging.

Tally up those faults, though, and you can see they really don't add up to much, and as I write this nearly a year later, the score we gave to the M1 Air still holds up today. The traditional clamshell laptop may not have too much longer for this world, as we eventually transition to touchscreen devices that are more flexible and can be used in a variety of ways. But the M1 Air is perhaps the best thin-and-light laptop ever made, thoroughly earning its 9.5 / 10 score — the highest rated product in The Verge's 10-year history. – Dan Seifert

Monday, November 1, 2021