DON’T MISS THE NEXT ISSUE! ON SALE 16 APR
h my, the bezels. I can’t take my
eyes off of them. They’re huge!
That chunky screen surround
demonstrates that, although this
ten-year-old tablet is recognisably an iPad,
Apple has not stood still. Its first crack at the
form factor also lacked a camera, and had a
reflective screen with a lowish resolution that
today feels like the pixels are slicing into your
eyeballs. Still, it was user-friendly; you could
hold the internet in your hands and make the
iPad ‘be’ anything via apps. But yes, it now
feels its age next to the iPad Pro, which fully
made good on the platform’s promise.But you still can’t do proper work on it, eh?
It’s just a blown-up iPhone!
That jibe hasn’t aged any better than its
subject. Dismissing the iPad as a giant iPhone
was always odd, since that was its strength:
dispensing with cruft. The message was clear
when the device was first revealed: a relaxed
Steve Jobs sat in an easy chair, thumbing
through the internet, casually ignoring broken
Flash containers while Adobe execs raged in
their offices. As for ‘proper work’, you got a
bigger canvas for finger-painting in Brushes
and getting organised with Things – although
typing on glass was never much fun.Hence why PC makers finally won this war
with touchscreen laptops! The end!
Only if you’re a masochist. Most touchscreen
laptops offer a miserable tablet experience
that feels tacked-on. They lack focus because
they’re trying to be all things to all people.
Ironically, that’s a problem Apple also now
faces, given the emergence of iPadOS,
increasing complexity due to pro-orientated
user demands, and ludicrously convoluted
multitasking gestures. The company’s battle
over the next ten years will be figuring out
how to propel the iPad into the future without
ditching the accessible elegance of its past.
[^ WordsC
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]RANDOM ACCESS MEMORIES 2010Apple iPad (1st gen)
O
Born
this weigh
The original iPad weighed
in at 680g, or 730g if you
got a 3G-enabled one. Even
the current 12.9in iPad Pro
is lighter. Those bezels
must have been filled
with lead...