Apple’s iPad turned 10 years old today. Yes, this is the 10th anniversary of Steve Jobs’ unveiling of the iPad at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, one of the last major products that he unveiled before his death in 2011.
“iPad is our most advanced technology in a magical and revolutionary device at an unbelievable price,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “iPad creates and defines an entirely new category of devices that will connect users with their apps and content in a much more intimate, intuitive and fun way than ever before.”
Jobs argued that there was room for a new device category between the smartphone and the laptop, but only if that device was superior at some tasks. He then introduced the iPad as exactly that, referring to it as a “magical and revolutionary device” for browsing the web, reading and sending email, viewing photos, watching videos, listening to music, playing games, reading ebooks, and more.
The original iPad featured a 9.7-inch display, a single-core Apple A4 processor, up to 64GB of storage, 256MB of RAM, an advertised 10 hours of battery life, Bluetooth 2.1, a 30-pin dock connector, and a headphone jack. Wi-Fi-only models started at $499 in the United States, while models with both Wi-Fi and 3G cellular connectivity started at $629. Notably, the original iPad lacked cameras.
MacDailyNews Take: Long live Apple’s revolutionary iPad!
Unfortunately, Safari on the iPad at the time was the not the best browsing experience. I should know, I have owned five iPads.
Apple is now advertising that the new iPadOS provides a desktop browsing experience. Kind of ironic.
You may choose to believe me or not. There were some qualities of Jobs I admired, and others that made me rage with contempt. This was one of them. The utter bullshit spouted that day was of Jobsian proportions.
All computers are “magical”, censored ones less so.
I pity you if you can’t see how revolutionary the original iPad was and how it opened up computing to so many people who couldn’t use traditional PCs without constant frustration. Bringing computing to more people is magical. Your constant rant about censorship is utter drivel. You are the only one who buys your BS. Have fun shovelling it.
When I shovel I will at least use a shovel, not my hands…
Polite applause.
The issue with the iPad, for me, is that it is still not ready to be used without a MacBook – because of the software.
Using MS Word for the iPad remains frustrating – changing a table cell or even paragraph numbering or indents is very fiddly and complicated and sometimes not possible at all. Outlook for the iPad is near impossible to use for serious work – changing fonts is not possible and the search function can feel worse than (and as slow as) a manual search of a paper filing cabinet. Apple Pages and Mail are also inadequate but in different ways. None of this software has adequate undo. There is also nothing close to the power of Adobe Acrobat DC – I use PDF Expert but it has no OCR function and (even on the Mac) is basic and stripped-down.
Text selection remains a lottery – sometimes it works, sometimes is does not, sometimes text can be selected, sometimes only the entirety of whole chunk can be copied. When I am forced to use my iPad for tasks, trying to select and copy text can be intensely frustrating, counter intuitive and slow. The Smart Keyboard is very good – but the lack of a forwards delete (forward arrow and delete is not easy and one has to press both buttons each time rather than just keeping the arrow button depressed) and my continually hitting the ‘world’ key in the left hand corner is aggravating.
Those are two of the most important functions that people use on their computers – word processing and email. And yet the iPad still is a poor device for those functions – save for personal, undemanding, personal tasks. It is disappointing that Apple has not built its own word processing, email and PDF applications that can fulfil the iPad’s full potential. The iPad has sufficient power to handle applications that are as powerful as those on a MacBook – but this promise has yet to be realised.
My Original iPad still holds a good charge and functions remarkably well after 10 years, as a music player, video streamer, and player of children’s games and educational programs that were downloaded at the time. Stuck on IOS 5 Safari can’t surf and no new Apps are available, but for Pre-school grandchildren it is still a fun machine!
My iPad 1 still works well and my kids use it all the time. It is rock solid. That hard glass surface feels like it was built to be rugged, unlike the flimsy (but wonderful) iPad Air.
The frustrating thing is, several apps that were working recently on my iPad1 don’t work anymore because something my kids did (many apps are its stuck in some kind of update mode). They need to be reinstalled but I am afraid to backup and wipe & restore ever since Apple removed apps from iTunes. I don’t know what will happen with all these old iOS 5 apps that work fine but can no longer be installed from the app store. Need to figure this out.
I can’t believe its been 10 years ! Its still holds a decent charge, looks and sounds great for video and music. It even sat in a drawer for almost 2 years before kids started using it.
I remember how people mocked it at the time (iPad? Sounds like Maxi-pad), but whatever. I say this as someone that will never trade the toy iPad for a real workstation: the iPad was and is pretty much what most people wished they had in 1997 pr so when the web first became a thing. If most people hadn’t had to mess with PCs out of necessity then, they wouldn’t have.
That said, as a pro user, my iPad pretty much just plays Hulu (it does it well, too).There are different levels, people, and mobile devices are very suitable for a great many. For the rest of us, not so much. and a Mac Pro that only Hollywood elite can afford is not a solution. I am defending the iPad, but the rest of modern Apple can go to heck.If I tried to do my ‘real work’ on an iPad, everyone would fire me.
The iPad is great, but it ain’t the future.