The iPad was a great device, but I am afraid its time is reaching an end. With bigger screen smartphones, and more capable laptops being magazine thin, no mechanical components, and 10hr battery life time the iPad place in the consumer market has been squeezed. Its really niche now unless you have specific use case for it.
I like the iPad and would keep one around, but its a luxury and hardly justifiable for the average user to add it to their daily used devices. Maybe it has a use case in a business scenario...
I remember that everybody made fun of the name, saw memes of attachable magnifying glasses for your iPhone to turn it into an iPad and the general feeling of “why would you buy this, this is just a large iPhone you can’t even call with”.
And as always, Apple proved us all wrong and i love my iPad for exactly the reasons Steve Jobs had told us we would love it for.
That’s vision!
To be fair, it was a giant iPhone. The whole thing was a misunderstanding. Consumers were waiting for a touch screen MacOS device, akin to the modern Surface, and Jobs came out with a giant screen iPhone. Jobs idea was "its not a touch screen MacOS" it was a new consumption device that no one asked for. The idea of "If I asked what people wanted they would have asked for faster horses" applies here. Its like a microwave or videogame console, a new type of product that no one visioned or asked for.
And its not Apple proved us wrong, its Jobs proved us wrong. Steve Jobs shinning merit was that he could see the future with which products consumer want and will pay for. This is what made Jobs different than everyone else. He made the iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, MacOS, Apple, Apple Sores, and visioned the computer as a home appliance after it was a business machine. Thats what made Jobs different from Cook, Gates, Michael Dell, Sundar Pichai, and Nadella.
BTW... I've been watching old reviews of those "other" tablets and it's crazy that "has Flash" was one of their biggest selling points back then.
How times have changed!
To be fair, Flash was an integral part of the web back then. While not exactly like it, but its as if to say, you will release a web device that will not run Google products. There were complete websites made in flash, many services that worked on flash, including YouTube videos. It was a very brave decision by Jobs, and yes Flash support was a selling point.
The huge build up of iOS users, along with the continuous heavy demand on hardware and security threats lead to the demise of the Flash plugin as more and more businesses decided to opt for the more stable and wider supported HTML5. But Flash remained for many years on going even after Jobs abandoned it in 2007 or 2010, in fact Adobe will abandon it only this year 2020, after a full decade which shows you how big part of the internet it was.
People like to hate on Flash, but for its time, there was nothing like it and people were happy using it. Just like VHS tape, it has outlived it purpose and we are off to better things.
