Technology
What We’ve Learned in Five Years with the iPad
Hayley Tsukayama, THE WASHINGTON POST
(The Washington Post)—On this day in 2010, customers lined up around the block to get their hands on the iPad, Apple’s then-new and somewhat perplexing gadget. Some mocked it as a simply a big iPhone, or a solution looking for a problem. Others saw its potential but didn’t know quite what it all meant.
To date, the company has sold more than a quarter of a billion of them.
The iPad, of course, wasn’t the first tablet the world had ever seen, but it landed at a moment, and with a set of features, that sent the tablet market on a wild growth curve. Within just 60 days, Apple announced it had sold two million of the devices — and other companies tripped over themselves to get competitors to market within the year. The tablet met a need in the computing space that just wasn’t getting met by ultra-compact netbooks that had previously filled the space between a laptop and a desktop computer. On a conference call in April 2010, just after the iPad’s launch, Apple’s then-chief operating officer. Tim Cook. said, “To me, it’s a no-brainer… I can’t think of a single thing a netbook does well.”
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