Looking Back Into The History Of The iPad

Undoubtedly, the Apple iPad is one of the most desired tablets ever made. All the iDevices from Apple such as iPad, iPod, and iPhone have made quite a mark in the tech industry. Truly, Apple brought the tablet PC market to life. Now, leading brands like Samsung, Asus, Acer, etc have all plunged into the tablet PC arena. However, iPad easily outperforms all the other tablets thanks to the large sized display and its various features. Let's go back in time to learn about the history of the iPad.

Before the launch of 1st gen iPad

In 2007, Apple released its first smartphone named iPhone running on Apple iOS operating system. In 2009, there were strong rumors about the release of iPad. At that time, experts thought that the device would be named something like iTablet or iSlate. Finally, Steve Jobs announced the release of 1st gen iPad on 27th of Jan, 2010. Jobs claimed that even before the release of iPhone, Apple was working on iPad but the project was shelved temporarily for releasing a mobile phone with similar features.

The First Generation iPad

The pre-orders for the 1st generation iPad began on March 12th, 2010 for customers in the US. On the 3rd of April, 2010, the Wi-Fi edition of iPad was released and on the 30th of the same month the Wi-Fi + 3G edition of the iPad followed up. The iPad could only be purchased from the Apple Store on the internet and their retail outlets.

After some time, iPad was made available through popular retailers like Amazon, Walmart, BestBuy and so on. On May 10th, 2010, pre-orders for other countries began. On the 28th of May, 2010, iPad was launched in other countries like the UK, France, Australia, Canada, and Japan. By September 1st, 7.5 million iPads were sold. It was reported by Best Buy that the sales of iPad brought down the sales of other laptops by 50 percent. Before the release of iPad 2, 15 million first generation iPads had been sold already.

Second generation iPad – the iPad 2

On March 2nd, 2011, CEO of Apple – Steve Jobs unleashed the second generation iPad. The device is 33 percent thinner compared to its predecessor and 15 percent lighter. It was powered by the Apple A5 chip: a dual-core 1 GHz cortex-A9 processor. It even had a powerful GPU that was 9 times more powerful than the first generation iPad.

It came with one front-facing and one rear camera, and around 10 hours of battery life. Since the 11th of March 2011, the iPad 2 was made available for purchase at the Apple Store and retail stores. On March 25th, 2011, it was released in 25 countries such as Mexico, UK and Australia. The iPad was not launched in Japan on the scheduled date because of the big earthquake that year.

Third generation iPad – the new iPad

Just a year after the release of iPad 2, the new CEO of Apple, Tim Cook announced the release of the third generation iPad. Against the expectations of many, the third gen iPad is not called iPad 3 but its official name is 'new iPad'. The notable features of the new iPad include A5X dual core 1GHz Cortex-A9 processor, quad-core graphics, Retina Display (1536 x 2048 pixels), high performance camera (supports HD 1080p recording at 30 fps), and 4G LTE compatibility. It is available in two editions namely, Wi-Fi only edition and Wi-Fi + 4G LTE edition.

It's been just a few years since the release of the original iPad and there are currently three versions available on the market. With increasing popularity and tens of millions of units sold, Apple has succeeded in creating a new market niche and introducing a new and innovative computational tool. The future looks promising for the iPad, and we are obviously curious to see what will come next.

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-By Dominic

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