“Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and Microsoft’s Bill Gates locked horns on countless occasions with the former famously slating the latter for ‘ripping off his ideas,'” Lee Moran reports for The Daily Mail.
But it seems Apple owes an enormous debt of gratitude to Gates’ firm – because the iconic iPad would never have been created had a Microsoft employee not boasted to Jobs over dinner that they had a revolutionary tablet in production,” Moran reports. “‘This dinner was like the tenth time he talked to me about it, and I was so sick of it that I came home and said, ‘F**k this, let’s show him what a tablet can really be,” Jobs said.”
Moran reports, “His anger drove him to create the seven-inch touchscreen iPad – launched in April 2010 and now in its second incarnation, which has sold a combined total of 39.8 million units.”
MacDailyNews Take: Bzzt. Wrong. All iPads to date have sported 9.7-inch screens, not a “seven-inch” screen against which Steve Jobs himself famously railed a little over one year ago:
One naturally thinks that a 7-inch screen would offer 70% of the benefits of a 10-inch screen. Unfortunately, this is far from the truth. The screen measurements are diagonal, so that a 7-inch screen is only 45% as large as iPad’s 10-inch screen. You heard me right: Just 45% as large.
If you take an iPad an hold it upright in portrait view and draw an imaginary horizontal line halfway down the screen, the screens on these 7-inch tablets are a bit smaller than the bottom half of the ipad’s display. This size isn’t sufficient to create great tablet apps in our opinion. While one could increase the resolution of the display to make up for some of the difference, it is meaningless unless your tablet also includes sandpaper, so that the user can sand down their fingers to around one quarter of their present size.
Apple has done extensive user testing on tough interfaces over many years and we really understand this stuff. There are clear limits of how close you can physically place elements on a touchscreen before users cannot reliably tap, flick, or pinch them. This is one of the key reasons we think the 10-inch screen size is the minimum size required to create great tablet apps… The 7-inch tablets are tweeners. Too big to compete with a smartphone and too small to compete with an iPad.
These are among the reasons we think the current crop of 7-inch tablets are going to be DOA. Dead On Arrival. Their manufacturers will learn the painful lesson that their tablets are too small and increase the size next year, thereby abandoning both customers and developers who jumped on the 7-inch bandwagon with an orphaned product.
Sounds like lots of fun ahead. – Steve Jobs, October 18, 2010
Moran reports, “The true inspiration behind the iPad is one of many extraordinary revelations contained in Walter Isaacson’s authorised biography ‘Steve Jobs’, published yesterday.”
Read more in the full article here.