Last month marked the tenth anniversary of Apple unveiling the iPad. The occasion took on a somber feel as the most common reaction in tech circles ended up being sadness and disappointment for what the iPad had failed to become. While some are convinced that the iPad is in some way a victim of neglect, mismanagement, or even worse, such feelings are misplaced. We don’t need to feel bad for the iPad.

Anniversary Reactions

Apple unveiled the iPad on January 27th, 2010. To mark the tenth anniversary of the unveiling, a few publications had articles recapping the iPad’s first decade. Some of the reactions were complicated, to put it gently.

Here’s John Gruber, over at Daring Fireball, in a post titled, “The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10”:

“[Steve] Jobs’s on-stage pitch was exactly right. The iPad was a new class of device, sitting between a phone and a laptop. To succeed, it needed not only to be better at some things than either a phone or laptop, it needed to be much better. It was and is.

Ten years later, though, I don’t think the iPad has come close to living up to its potential. By the time the Mac turned 10, it had redefined multiple industries. In 1984 almost no graphic designers or illustrators were using computers for work. By 1994 almost all graphic designers and illustrators were using computers for work. The Mac was a revolution. The iPhone was a revolution. The iPad has been a spectacular success, and to tens of millions it is a beloved part of their daily lives, but it has, to date, fallen short of revolutionary.”

Ben Thompson, over at Stratechery, agreed with Gruber and went further in his own article, “The Tragic iPad”:

“It’s tempting to dwell on the [Steve] Jobs point — I really do think the iPad is the product that misses him the most — but the truth is that the long-term sustainable source of innovation on the iPad should have come from 3rd-party developers. Look at [John] Gruber’s example for the Mac of graphic designers and illustrators: while MacPaint showed what was possible, the revolution was led by software from Aldus (PageMaker), Quark (QuarkXPress), and Adobe (Illustrator, Photoshop, Acrobat). By the time the Mac turned 10, Apple was a $2 billion company, while Adobe was worth $1 billion.

There are, needless to say, no companies built on the iPad that are worth anything approaching $1 billion in 2020 dollars, much less in 1994 dollars, even as the total addressable market has exploded, and one big reason is that $4.99 price point. Apple set the standard that highly complex, innovative software that was only possible on the iPad could only ever earn 5 bucks from a customer forever (updates, of course, were free).”

There were then tweets (lots of tweets), regarding the current state of iPad. Here are two:

Riccardo Mori: “What I believe is that the iPad and its OS could have been so much more than a reinvention of the computing wheel adapted for a touch interface.”

Loren Brichter: “[T]he App Store is what killed the iPad.”

You get the point. There was no shortage of writers, pundits, and industry analysts using the iPad’s 10th anniversary to give eulogies for the product in terms of its inability to be revolutionary, grab momentum, or even just meet expectations.

A handful of people talked highly of iPad on its anniversary. However, such perspectives were few and far between. Interestingly, the articles that were published still ended up including noteworthy disclaimers and qualifiers. For example, here’s Om Malik in “iPad at 10. An affair forever”:

“A decade after its introduction, I think the iPad is still an underappreciated step in the storied history of computing. If anything, it has been let down by the limited imagination of application developers, who have failed to harness the capabilities of this device.”

My Reaction

I hold a very different view of the iPad at 10 years old. In recapping the 2010s, I went so far as to position the iPad as one of two most important tech products of the decade (the iPhone being the other one). The iPad has become ubiquitous in various industries and sectors, and in the process, it has altered modern computing.

How can there be such a dramatic difference in opinion when it comes to iPad?

Different perspectives.

To see how important perspective becomes in this discussion, we need to go back to the iPad unveiling in January 2010.

Selling a Problem

A closer look at the iPad unveiling reveals it wasn’t that Steve successfully made the sales pitch for a new product category. Instead, Steve successfully sold consumers on a problem they weren’t even aware they faced.

A few daily tasks like email, web browsing, video watching, and mobile games could be better handled on a large piece of glass with multi-touch than on a small piece of glass with multi-touch (iPhones) or a non-multi touch device (MacBooks). Such juxtaposition elevated the iPad at the expense of the iPhone and Mac. The iPhone was positioned as a tiny device designed for portability while the Mac was positioned as a heavy beast blown out of the water by iPad when it comes to handling simple tasks.

Consumers agreed with Steve that there was an indeed a problem and that the iPad was a genuine solution to the problem. The iPad became Apple’s best-selling product out of the gate with the company selling 22 million devices in just the first 12 months. Ten years later, it is difficult to envision a new Apple product that will be able to grab that kind of adoption so quickly.

The iPhone

In January 2010, the iPhone was more of an idea and a promise than anything else. When the iPad was unveiled, there were only about 30 million people using an iPhone. Apple now sells that many iPhones in about two months. In 2010, it was the iPad, not the iPhone, that was considered to be the more important product in the future.

Given such lofty expectations, maybe it shouldn't have come as a surprise that the iPad’s tenth anniversary was met with awkwardness, sorrow, and even sadness as some look at the product as a promise that wasn’t kept. However, the early promises found with the initial iPad were met. There was just an unexpected twist.

The iPhone ended up carrying the vision found with a larger piece of glass supporting multi-touch that Steve unveiled on stage in January 2010. As iPhone screens became larger over the years, the product leveraged the inspiration found with the initial iPad and turned it into something consumed by nearly a billion people. There are 32x more iPhone users in the world today than there were when the iPad was unveiled in 2010. The iPhone became an iPad that fit in one’s pocket. Based on the iPhone’s resounding success, it is fair to say that those early calls that the iPad would turn into something very big ended up being true.

A Pivot

Instead of raising the white flag and letting the iPad set sail into the sunset after being replaced by the iPhone, Apple pivoted the product category to accomplish two things:

Serve as a content creation machine (Apple Pencil for drawing / keyboard accessories for typing).
Represent a low-cost entry point into the Apple ecosystem ($329 starting price).

Those two changes gave the iPad a very successful second chapter. Unit sales have stabilized at 45 million per year with approximately 20 million new people entering the iPad installed base each year.

The iPad is currently shaping industries far more than some people are giving the product credit for. There are at least 350 million people using an iPad in some capacity. The iPad has indirectly added billions of dollars of market cap to companies ranging from Slack and Microsoft to Square when considering the product’s widespread adoption and influence in enterprise settings.

A Line in the Sand

The iPad has become a line in the sand between those who grew up on laptops and desktops and those who never felt comfortable with such devices. Apple finds itself walking a thin line when it comes to adding functionality to the iPad for some users while keeping the device’s simplicity and intuitiveness front and center for other users.

Multi-tasking is a great example of this battle. For instance, some Mac users are not pleased with Apple’s implementation of multi-tasking on the iPad. These users find multi-tasking on an iPad to be a mental exercise. Meanwhile, a portion of iPad users have no need or desire for multi-tasking on iPad. These users are also likely to view multi-tasking on a laptop or desktop as not intuitive. Going a week with no laptop or desktop usage will do interesting things to one’s perception about computing and intuitiveness. When returning to a laptop or desktop, the machines feel like taking a step back. Our brain has to be rewired to handle something that is inherently less intuitive.

The iPad’s Problem

Apple doesn't sell perfect products. There will always be room for improvement, refinement, and new thinking. In some ways, the lack of perfection is what serves as motivation for Apple to keep pushing. When defining the problems now facing the iPad, my criticism is a bit unconventional.

The iPad’s primary problem is that it is viewed by some as needing to be a laptop replacement in order to have any value. This unrealistic viewpoint has resulted in a type of expectational debt being placed on the device. The iPad is expected to become more like the Mac and macOS over time. This is problematic as the iPad is not a laptop replacement.

MacOS should not be positioned as inspiration for where to bring the iPad or iPadOS. This isn’t meant to belittle macOS. Instead, touch-based computing has blurred the line between consumer and professional devices. When debating content consumption versus content creation and the broader definition of work, there is a habit in tech circles to not consider how such terms have dramatically different meanings for hundreds of millions of people.

The takeaway is that the iPad has become a different kind of product, and it should be allowed to stand apart from the iPhone without being forced to replace macOS. Hence, there is iPadOS and things like Apple Pencil support. Instead of asking how best to handle multitasking on an iPad, a better question is to wonder what multi-tasking should even mean on an iPad. Such questions present new challenges regarding user interfaces and design.

Being Itself

Apple’s product strategy is to push all of its major product categories forward at the same time. This is different from pushing the iPhone forward and trying to have the iPad and Mac come along for the ride. Positioning the iPad as a content creation platform for the masses, designed to handle some tasks given to laptops and desktops while also handling completely new tasks, is a winning strategy. It allows the iPad to be itself while not forcing the product into a corner in order to satisfy certain segments of the Apple installed base.

A lot has changed during the iPad’s first 10 years. Some may be disappointed with how the iPad has evolved, even to the point of thinking Apple lost a great opportunity. However, I wouldn’t feel bad for a device that revealed the iPhone’s true potential and then became a different kind of content creation tool now used by more than 350 million people.

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For additional discussion on this topic, check out the Above Avalon daily update from March 2nd: The iPad’s First Decade, The iPad’s Second Decade.