Ten years ago today, Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad to the world at the Yerba Buena Center, San Francisco. This was over a year before he passed away in September 2011 and already he was looking ill, the sofa was on stage where we sat for most of the iPad demo.
Before the iPad was launched, the rumour mill was in full force, everyone new Apple was unveiling a new tablet computer of some kind, the speculation was on how much it was cost, with the big thought being it would cost $1,000 but it was much less than that, at $499 for the 16GB version.
“Apple today introduced iPad, a revolutionary device for browsing the web, reading and sending email, enjoying photos, watching videos, listening to music, playing games, reading e-books and much more.”
Apple (2010)
At this time, the operating system was also renamed from iPhone OS now that the iPhone, iPod touch and the iPad were running a very similar operating system. The 1st generation iPad shipped with iOS 4.
iPad going forward
The iPad line has come a long way since the early days, the iPad sold in vast numbers throughout the first and second generation, heck people are still using the iPad 2 from 2011 and it works fine for them. The third generation in 2012 saw the addition of a Retina Display, which was launched first on the iPhone 4 a year earlier. Later that year in October, the iPad line expanded to with the iPad mini and the fourth generation iPad, which had more power.
Since then, Apple launched the iPad Air, iPad Pro in two sizes, revisited the iPad Air last year and has a new less expensive line of iPad models called ‘iPad’. The iPad now has its own skew of iOS with iPadOS which supports multi-windowing, Apple Pencil and much more.
Who knows where the next ten years will take the iPad, will it replace our Macs? Or will it become its own thing – we’ll have to find out.
