Introducing iPad

The original iPad was essentially a handheld 9.7-inch XGA (1,024 x 768 pixel) screen with built-in storage (16GB, 32GB, or 64GB) but little else – not even a camera, at first. It was a mere half-inch thick, weighed just 1.5 pounds, and had an impressive ten hours of battery life. It wasn’t the first tablet computer, but it was revolutionary in one key respect: It didn’t require a keyboard or a stylus. Instead, you used your fingers. In this way, as Steve Jobs put it at the time, it created “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.”

Intuitive and invisible

As Apple’s 2012 ad for the 3rd-gen iPad put it, the technology became

“invisible” – “you’re conscious only of what you’re doing, not the device you’re doing it with.” An iPad is “just this magical pane of glass that can become anything you want it to be.”

TechRadar’s Gary Marshall sums it up: “Before the iPad, if you wanted to do something on a computer you needed to learn how to use the computer first. With the iPad, you just do what you want to do. Play piano? The iPad’s a piano. Write a letter? It’s a typewriter. Read a book? It’s a book. Fire exploding birds? It’s a catapult.”

What’s more, the world’s adopted iPad’s language: In this post-PC age, all brands of touchscreen devices use Apple’s vocabulary of gestures: Tap, swipe, pinch–to–zoom, and so on. Much as the Mac defined the computer GUI, iPad defined the way we all do things now, even on non-Apple devices.

We’ve even learned that, hey, Steve was right – despite the howls of outrage and dire predictions that iPad was doomed to fail because of this fatal lack, the internet can work just fine without Adobe Flash.