All eyes may be on the Apple Watch, but it's worth remembering the first iPad went on sale five years ago today in the US, and changed the tablet market forever
"iPad," Steve Jobs said, as he held the tablet aloft on stage in California, "is our most advanced technology in a magical and revolutionary device at an unbelievable price." Someone in the crowd had wolfwhistled when he'd initially picked it up, to general laughter, but the atmosphere had taken on a gravitas not felt since the first iPhone launch three years previously.
That was five years ago, and as ever within the world of technology, a lot has changed since then. The patent for a touchscreen tablet-style device was filed in 2004, but it was a further six years before Apple announced it, as the iPhone took priority.
In 2010 the tablet market was sparsely populated - netbooks were all the rage. Jobs notoriously hated netbooks, saying they "weren't better at anything." "They're slow, they have low-quality displays, and they run clunky, old PC software," he said. "They're not better than a laptop at anything - they're just cheaper."
The concept of browsing the internet and sending email with greater ease than on a smartphone, but without the confines of a desktop computer or weight and bulk of a laptop was a foreign one. But just as Jobs wanted the iPhone to redefine what a smartphone was and could do, he had high hopes for the "magical" iPad.
Typically, Bill Gates had a thing or two to say about that. “It’s not like I sit there and feel the same way I did with iPhone where I say, ‘Oh my God, Microsoft didn’t aim high enough,’" he told CBS News shortly after the iPad' announcement. "It’s a nice reader, but there’s nothing on the iPad I look at and say, ‘Oh, I wish Microsoft had done it.'”
The iPad waged war on the netbook - and won. Customers flocked to Apple stores in their millions - by March 2011 Guiness World Records named it in fastest-selling consumer electronics device in history, selling around 311,666 units per day at the time.
The rest, as they say, is history. The iPad, through its multiple generations, thicknesses and sizes, has sold more than a quarter of a billion units within five years, and spawned more than 725,000 optimised apps. Often imitated but never bettered, it's still head and shoulders above its rivals. And given just how quickly the shape of the tech world is wont to change, that's something really quite magical.
Apple's iPad turns five
Steve Jobs announced the first iPad on April 3 2010, the product which came to redefine the tablet market. Read on for the highlights of its first five years
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