Similar to how you [apparently] learn a lot about a person based on their record collection, I believe you can learn a lot about a person by the technology they love – both historically and currently.
Technology of the Present
The best laptop I’ve ever owned, consumers can finally fix their own laptops without voiding warranties or using a soldering iron.
For people inside the tech industry, the Raspberry Pi will go down as being as disruptive to the world as the iPhone. It provides an energy-friendly, low-cost, small computer – good enough for NASA, and I have four running in my house at this moment.
Password re-use was an inevitable from an internet without MFA and SSO. Until all sites offer them, Bitwarden lets families and companies set – and share – secure passwords for all their accounts.
I love teaching people that technology is fun and accessible. Few things accomplish this as well as the micro:bit. From building race cars to handheld video games, the micro:bit affordably makes this possible.
I love anything that keeps technology out of landfills, and the Rockbox has been doing that for twenty years – improving dozens of abandoned music players to keep the songs playing until the battery gives out.
Technology of the Past
This is the Boxee Box. It was a precursor to the Apple TV, had a gorgeous form factor, a great remote, and used software originally written for the first Xbox.
Although there are great stories explaining why the Ouya failed, I love the spirit of what it could have been. The Wii and Switch taught us that great games don’t have to be 4k 120fps, and disrupting the video game hardware monopoly was nine-levels of ambitious. Who knows – maybe playdate will take off…
I try to use DuckDuckGo, but its search quality is a far cry from Google’s. Neeva (at least when it didn’t failover to Bing) had good results, and I was happy to pay for it. Kagi tries to do the same thing, but I miss the spirit of progress that I felt with Neeva.
I loved my Pebble Watch, from its $10M Kickstarter campaign, because it was pretty, open, and had a great battery life. I’m always hunting for its spiritual e-ink powered successor.
This 2022 Techdirt article sums up my feelings of Google Reader’s demise – we took the democratization of the internet for granted, and its on us if we want it back.