The site grew, so did the team, and the technological landscape was flipped several times like a pancake. Covering tech over two decades means seeing empires born and promises buried that we thought were indestructible. It’s having held objects in your hands that still felt new, and sometimes knowing from the first hold that they were going to change something. Not always what we imagined. But something.
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This two-part retrospective does not claim to draw up a definitive ranking. It tells the story of an era through the objects and ideas that passed through it, those that we talked about, debated, dreamed of and sometimes regretted. The first part covers the years 2004 to 2014, a founding decade where the rules of the game were rewritten several times in a row.
Nintendo DS – 11 mars 2005, 149 €
Two screens, a stylus, a plastic hinge that creaked slightly under the fingers. The Nintendo DS didn’t seem like a revolution. She was one. At 149 euros, it was accessible where its competitors were not, and by democratizing touch in video games, it opened the portable console to a much wider audience than just teenagers. Nintendogs, Brain Training, Mario Kart DS, so many titles that have brought millions of non-players into the world of gaming. The kind of machine whose impact we underestimate because it doesn’t scream.
iPod nano – September 7, 2005, à partir de 199 €
Steve Jobs took it out of his jeans pocket. The gesture was worth all the speeches. The iPod nano condensed a thousand songs into a format so fine that it seemed like a magic trick, starting at 199 euros for the 2 GB version. It did not invent the MP3 player, the original iPod had already changed everything, but it embodied it with an elegance that made the competition suddenly obsolete. The nano put music in the pocket of an entire generation before the iPhone made the issue obsolete. It remains, in our memories, the most perfectly useless and most absolutely necessary object of its time.
Nintendo Wii – December 8, 2006 (in Europe), 249 €
The Wii was not the most powerful console on the market. That was the point. At 249 euros, half as much as the PS3 launched a few weeks earlier, Nintendo took a risk that no one in the industry really understood: giving up on the polygon race to bet on movement. The result was clear, millions of living rooms transformed into improvised gyms, grandparents awkwardly holding a Wiimote, families gathered in front of Wii Sports on a Sunday afternoon. The Wii demonstrated that a console could appeal to everyone. It took the industry ten years to learn all the lessons.
Zune – November 2006, $249
The story of the Zune is that of an object that had everything to succeed and that no one expected in the right place. Priced at $249, the exact price of a 30 GB iPod, Microsoft produced an honest, well-built player with a neat interface and a vision of music sharing that foreshadowed streaming. It arrived two years too late, in a market that the iPod had already locked down culturally as well as commercially. The Zune never took off. It remains a faithful marker of a time when Microsoft was still searching for its mainstream identity, and sometimes searching for it with real ambition.
BlackBerry Curve et Bold – 2006 à 2008, autour de 400 à 500 €
Before the iPhone, there was the BlackBerry. And for many professionals, that was all there was to it. Between 400 and 500 euros depending on the model, the physical keyboard, the trackball and the small flashing light for new messages defined a certain idea of connected mobility. The Bold embodied a discreet luxury, that of raw efficiency. Research In Motion ruled the enterprise smartphone market with quiet arrogance. We know the rest. But before the fall, the reign was long and real.
iPhone – présenté le 9 janvier 2007, commercialisé à 399 € en France
We could write a book. We have written dozens of them. On January 9, 2007, from the stage of the Moscone Center in San Francisco, Steve Jobs presented an iPod, a communicating phone with apps and the Internet, all combined into a single device. At €399 when it was launched in France, it didn’t seem cheap at the time, but it single-handedly redefined what a phone was worth. The iPhone did not invent the smartphone, but it defined what a smartphone should be, and forced the entire industry to meet this definition. Sixteen years of updates later, the object in your pocket is a direct descendant of this first model. Few products in the history of tech can say the same.
Amazon Kindle – novembre 2007, 399 $
The Kindle arrived in a world where everyone agreed that digital books had no future. At $399, available only in the United States at its launch, Amazon has nevertheless proven the opposite with remarkable obstinacy. The e-ink screen, the battery life measured in weeks, an entire library in a device thinner than a paperback novel, the Kindle has converted millions of reluctant readers. He did not kill the paper book, contrary to the prophecies of the time. He simply added an option. Which, basically, was enough to change the publishing market permanently.
Asus Eee PC – October 2007, €300
At less than 300 euros, the Asus Eee PC was an anomaly in a market where entry-level laptops easily exceeded 600 euros. Small, slow, delivered under Linux, equipped with a keyboard on which adults typed with two fingers, it had nothing to seduce. And yet it launched the netbook category and demonstrated that there was a massive appetite for affordable laptops. The segment was swept away a few years later by tablets and Chromebooks, but the Eee PC had asked the question that no one dared to ask: why did a computer have to cost so much?
Windows Vista – January 2007, from 199 €
Vista is the canonical example of what not to do. Announced with great fanfare, sold from 199 euros in the basic family version, it was delivered years late, weighed down by crazy hardware requirements and catastrophic compatibility. Millions of users preferred to stay on Windows XP or switch to Mac. The Aero interface was beautiful, the User Account Control unbearable, and the system’s reputation was damaged before it was even released commercially. Vista wasn’t just a commercial failure. It’s a textbook case on technical debt and the importance of releasing a product when it’s ready.
MacBook Air – présenté le 15 janvier 2008, à partir de 1 799 €
Steve Jobs took it out of an envelope. The image went around the world before the product even arrived in stores. At €1,799, the 2008 MacBook Air was too expensive and too limited for the vast majority of buyers, lacking an optical drive at a time when this was still shocking. He was also the future. By betting on finesse and lightness to the detriment of connectors, Apple announced a vision of the portable computer that the rest of the industry would take five years to adopt. The Intel ultrabook, the Chromebook, all their descendants owe it something.
Spotify – launched October 7, 2008, free or €9.99/month
In 2008, the music industry was waging a war against piracy and losing. Spotify did not solve the crisis, it made the issue less urgent by offering legal access to all the world’s music for 9.99 euros per month, or free with advertising. The freemium model, synchronization between devices, algorithmic playlists, so many innovations that have reconfigured our relationship with music. The artists had less to gain than expected. Listeners, much more. And the record companies learned, painfully, that distribution was now in other hands.
HTC Dream / T-Mobile G1 – octobre 2008, environ 400 €
The first Android phone was unlike anything known. Sliding physical keyboard, prominent chin, ungraceful design, the HTC Dream was sold for around 400 euros in the United States, exclusively at T-Mobile. It didn’t have the elegance of the iPhone, but it carried something more important: an open, modular system, intended to be adopted by any manufacturer. The rest is history. Android now equips more than 70% of smartphones in the world. It all started with this unphotogenic terminal.
Palm Pre – June 2009, $199 with subscription
The Palm Pre could have changed the course of history. At $199 with a Sprint subscription, WebOS was generally agreed to be the most elegant mobile operating system of its time: fluid multitasking, intuitive gestures, exemplary contact integration. Palm had neither the resources nor the distribution network to keep up with Apple and Google. Le Father disappeared in two years. What remains is the tenacious nostalgia of those who used it, and the certainty that in another context, the story could have been different.
Drones DJI and Parrot – 2010, starting at 299 €
In 2010, a drone was still a military machine or an expensive toy reserved for model aircraft enthusiasts. Parrot put the first consumer drone in the hands of ordinary people with the AR.Drone, launched for around 299 euros. DJI then industrialized vision with a quality that transformed aerial photography forever. Regulation followed, painstakingly, and drones became a professional tool, a hobby, a privacy issue and a threat to airport security. All this in less than ten years.
GoPro HD Hero – janvier 2010, environ 180 €
Nick Woodman wanted to film his surfing sessions. He invented a category. The GoPro HD Hero, marketed at around 180 euros, popularized the action camera by making accessible what was until then professional production equipment. Attached to a helmet, handlebars or surfboard, it produced millions of hours of first-person footage that changed the way adventure and sport are told. The adrenaline filmed didn’t sound the same after the GoPro.
Netflix – 2010 in Europe, €7.99/month at launch
Netflix had existed since 1997 as a mail-order DVD rental service. Its arrival on connected screens from 2010, at a subscription price of 7.99 euros per month, marked a break of another order. The platform first killed Blockbuster, then reinvented television, then produced series that traditional channels would never have commissioned. In 2014, Netflix was already the world’s leading television network. Few industry transformations have been so rapid and so complete.
Windows Phone and Lumia – October 2010, from 450 €
Microsoft understood everything too late. The Windows Phone Metro interface was original, consistent, and pleasant to use. The Nokia Lumias that came with it, starting at 450 euros, had remarkable cameras. The application ecosystem, on the other hand, never took shape. Developers went where users were, and users went where applications existed. This vicious circle condemned Windows Phone to a slow death, announced in 2013 and consummated in 2017. One of the most beautiful mobile interfaces ever designed, dead for lack of apps.
Samsung Galaxy Note – octobre 2011, 699 €
When Samsung presented the Galaxy Note for 699 euros with its 5.3-inch screen, the tech press unanimously sneered. A phone that large was absurd, unusable, a clear error of judgment. Consumers thought differently. The Note created the phablet category and demonstrated that the industry was consistently wrong about what users wanted. The S Pen stylus, also mocked, has become a popular creative tool. Samsung was right when everyone was looking elsewhere.
Raspberry Pi – 29 février 2012, 35 $
35 dollars. The size of a credit card. A complete computer capable of running Linux. The Raspberry Pi Foundation wanted to put programming in the hands of children and hobbyists. It triggered something much larger: a renaissance of DIY computing, a global maker culture (DIY), thousands of projects ranging from home servers to arcade machines to weather stations. The Raspberry Pi has not changed consumer computing. It changed those who wanted to understand how it worked.
Bitcoin – 2013 bubble, from pennies to $1,000
Bitcoin had existed since 2009, but 2013 was the year it came out of obscure forums and into the collective consciousness, with its price rising from a few dollars to over $1,000 in just a few months. The first major speculative bubble, the closure of Silk Road, the first cryptocurrency millionaire, so many events which transformed a cryptographic curiosity into a cultural phenomenon. We discussed Bitcoin at family dinners. We didn’t yet understand what it really was, but we talked about it. Blockchain, altcoins, Web3, it all comes from there.
3D grand public printer – 2013, from 500 €
The promise was complete: soon, we would print everything at home. Starting at 500 euros for the first general public models, the 3D printer has won over makers, designers, engineers and schools. It did not revolutionize domestic manufacturing as announced. It has transformed professional practices, accelerated prototyping, and made design accessible. The medical industry is now using it in ways that go beyond the fantasies of 2013. The promise was too big to be kept. The impact is very real.
Sony PlayStation 4 – 29 novembre 2013 en Europe, 399 €
Sony had learned the lessons of the PS3, too expensive, too complex, launched at the wrong time. The PS4 came in at 399 euros, a deliberately aggressive price compared to the Xbox One, which was 100 euros more at the same time. It was powerful, accessible, focused on players rather than the multimedia ambitions of its manufacturer. It dominated an entire generation with a regularity which was as much due to the quality of the hardware as to an exemplary editorial line of exclusive games: The Last of Us, God of War, Horizon. The PS4 did not redefine video gaming. She played him with rare conviction.
Womanizer – 2014, autour de 100 €
Including the Womanizer in this list is a deliberate choice. In 2014, sextech did not exist as a category, the word itself was not yet in use. This German object sold for around 100 euros, with its pressure wave stimulation technology, introduced questions into the tech debate that the industry pretended to ignore: the body, pleasure, and the legitimacy of an innovation that did not primarily concern men. He opened a breach. Dozens of brands followed. The CES now includes a sextech section, just like the Journal du Gee. Twenty years of geek culture without mentioning that technology has also changed the bedroom would be an incomplete retrospective.
We Love Geek
These twenty-three objects and ideas do not summarize a decade, they reveal its tensions. The race for pockets and touchscreens, the war of mobile operating systems, the democratization of uses, the big losers who were right too soon. Between 2004 and 2014, the world shifted towards mobile, permanent connection and streaming. The rules of the tech industry have been rewritten, sometimes by companies that didn’t exist ten years earlier. The second part of this retrospective covers the years 2015 to 2025, a decade where artificial intelligence began to question everything. Continued in the next episode.
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