During the 2010 media event unveiling the iPad, Steve Jobs revealed much of Apple’s strategic thinking behind the product. However. as an editorial on AppleInsider, points out, much of the industry ignored it.
It was as if Jobs were giving the industry a Xerox PARC style tour of the secret labs inside Apple. He not only revealed the next big thing that would radically change the computing landscape but also detailed exactly what was going to make it commercially successful. To compete for relevance and fill a valuable niche between a regular PC and a phone, Jobs said iPad would need to be much simpler to use than a PC. And to stand apart as useful next to a smartphone, it would be critical to have tablet-optimized mobile apps that were more sophisticated than a phone. These ideas may seem obvious today, but were once opposed and defied by competitors and critics.
Check It Out: How Everyone Ignored it When Steve Jobs’ Shared The Secrets of iPad Success
Charlotte:
Many thanks for this link. This was a great read.
SJ was exactly right to focus on simplicity as a critical piece of the iPad’s success, which indeed it was. Anyone can use one, including an illiterate mum from the village in a recent LMIC I visited. That’s its brilliance.
It has been a marvelous feat of engineering for Apple then to expand the capacity and power of iPadOS whilst preserving that characteristic simplicity.
For all of these reasons, my iPad Pro has become my MVP in my device lineup, now becoming my workhorse for most routine tasks, leaving me to reserve my MBP for more specialised heavy duty work (manuscripts, data analysis). It’s faster to startup and get to work, is fast, and remarkably more reliable than macOS as a platform.
The iPad Pro and now its dedicated iPadOS are working examples of SJ’s visionary genius.
Lots of gems in this article.
It is particularly interesting (and somewhat sad to me) how Apple views the iPad Mini as a transition configuration, even though for many users it has found its own niche place in our lives. I’d not trade mine for a larger iPad even if I got a larger phone (unlikely). To me, the gadget basked of iPhone SE, iPad Mini, MBA and desktop machine is the perfect mix; but that’s just me.