The first iPad went on sale thirteen years ago

The iPad was the last One More Thing of Steve Jobs, who took the stage at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco andl January 27, 2010 to confirm what rumors and leaks had been advancing for months: Apple was working on a device with a tablet format that would reproduce a good part of the functions of the iPhone but, of course, with a larger screen. Some were waiting for it with open arms, others, however, wondered about the usefulness of such a device.

The presentation, like many of Jobs’s keynotes, it was a resounding success, and quickly began to count down the clock until the arrival of the first iPads on the market. They would do it first, as was and still is common, to the United States, although the expansion to international markets would be much less delayed than with other devices, as had previously happened with the iPhone, to give a particularly remembered example.

So if the iPad unveiling took place on January 27 (just a day after my birthday, which I clearly took as a sign), just over two months later, on April 3, 2010, the American Apple Stores, stocked with iPads, opened their doors to make way for the legion of users who had been queuing hours before to get hold of a new type of device that had arrived for… it was still not very clear why, but it became, from day one, a resounding success.

Steve Jobs during the presentation of the first iPad. Image: Matt Buchanan

iPad technical specifications: then and now

We divided the view to, at the same time, observe the first-generation iPad, the one that went on sale on this day in 2010, and compare it with its great-great-grandson, the tenth-generation model that we can currently find on the market (and that coexists with that of 9th). As you can see with the naked eye, the evolution of the Apple tablet in these ten years is simply spectacular.

After the first generation iPad came its iterations, but also the iPad Mini and iPad Pro, which have also continued to evolve over the years, and which today have very consolidated positions in the market, something that many predicted would not happen, since, well, they did not see the point of tablets . It would be interesting to know what those people say today, ten years later. Although well, in all honesty, it would also be interesting to know what Jobs would say before such an expansion of the catalog.

We remembered, a few hours ago, that today marks fifty years since the first call was made with a mobile phone, a milestone that we must undoubtedly locate in the timetable of technological evolution that led to the arrival of the iPad, 37 years after.