Feeling Good About the iPad
Neil Cybart, writing on his site Beyond Avalon a few months ago.
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.
— Read on www.aboveavalon.com/notes/2020/2/27/dont-feel-bad-for-the-ipad
I’m not one of those people who feels that the iPad was a failure – or that it failed to live up to its potential.
In fact, how anyone can describe a platform that sells 45 million units each year, 20 million of which are to new iPad users, as anything less than a rousing success is somewhat baffling to me.
From what I can tell, there are a few common themes:
- The iPad wasn’t/isn’t the revolutionary device that the Mac and the iPhone were.
- The iPad hasn’t spawned the app ecosystem it needed to be revolutionary.
- The iPad suffers from software that isn’t good enough.
There’s a lot to unpack there and a previous draft of this post racked up 2600+ words which I then realized was me rambling. There’s a more cohesive MacStories-like article somewhere in the depths here, but I feel like I want to address this general sense of disappointment about the iPad with a rebuttal.
…