Ten years ago, former Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad – he called it a device that sits in between a smartphone and a laptop. The event to unveil the iPad was held just a couple days after the Consumer Electronic Show (CES) had ended. The tech industry was all into netbooks at the time, thinking it was the “mobile” equivalent of the laptop. Of course, they were wrong and netbooks are now dead.
“They’re slow, they have low quality displays, and they run clunky old PC software,” said Steve Jobs in reference to the netbooks. “They’re not better than a laptop at anything, they’re just cheap laptops.”
On 27th January, 2020 the iPad turned ten years old. It has been a great ten years with the iPad going through phenomenal changes. The goal with the iPad was to create a device that was better than the smartphone and the traditional (sitting down) desktop computer. The iPad was easy to use, it did/does not have any complicated options of traditional PCs.
Back in 2010, the rumours had built up a good amount of enthusiasm towards the iPad. The people who attended CES were expecting a touch enabled “slate” and they got exactly that. In early 2010, Windows 7 was relatively new, the operating system had some touch support but it was nowhere near what the iPad was about to offer.
Microsoft had tried building a lot of iPad type of devices with a special version of Windows XP and a completely new software in 2006 but none of them worked. Before the unveiling of the iPad, The Verge reports that Microsoft employees had laughed off the rumours surrounding the iPad.
The iPad is now mature. The iPad can do a lot more than what it could do back in 2010 and it is also faster than many PCs. Looking forward to the next ten years of the iPad.