Jan 27, 2010 — The First iPad Was Presented
January 27, 2010
Steve Jobs took part in reinventing several categories of devices: personal computers, music players, and smartphones.
On January 27, 2010, he did it one last time — he truly reinvented an entire category of devices. At the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, he walked onto the stage, sat down in a leather chair, and showed the world the iPad.
Why was the iPad needed?
Netbooks. Cheap, plastic, and painfully slow laptops. Jobs hated netbooks. He believed that between a smartphone and a full-fledged computer there should be a device that handles simple tasks — email, web browsing, and photos — better than either a smartphone or a netbook.
The first iPad had no camera. Yes, that’s hard to imagine now. At the time, Apple positioned it as a device for consuming content, not for creating it or making video calls (FaceTime would only appear with the iPad 2).
Nevertheless, the first iPad was far superior to any netbook:
a high-quality touch display
10 hours of battery life (more than most netbooks)
an accelerometer for games and screen orientation
A new screen size
In the three years of the iPhone’s existence, thousands of apps had been created for smartphone screens. The emergence of a new device category forced developers to create user interfaces oriented toward tablets. Not all apps did this right away, and some popular apps still have not made proper iPad versions to this day.
But the development of adaptive designs for apps and websites became one of the important tasks that developers are still solving for their products.
The role of the iPad and tablets today
The iPad pushed forward the development of tablets. And just as happened with the iPhone, many other companies released their own tablets that looked and were used much like the iPad.
At the beginning, it was not clear to users why they needed a “big smartphone,” except for a few tasks that truly made sense on tablets. Today, there are many genuinely important things where tablets are indispensable.
With the arrival of the Apple Pencil and similar devices, the iPad and its competitors began to be used by artists to create their work. Photo editing and simple video editing are now also done professionally on tablets. Styluses also help users take notes and draw structures, which is much more convenient than doing so on a phone.
iPad presentation, Steve Jobs on stage: https://youtu.be/zZtWlSDvb_k?si=jb6gqPqbbvxLLqJX