Apple’s iPad has been one of its most revolutionary products, but it was not Steve Jobs’s idea. Microsoft invented the tablet a decade before Apple. So why did Steve Jobs succeed as the king of tablets?
According to Walter Isaacson‘s biography, we have the exact moment Steve Jobs decided to make the iPad.
Isaacson tells how one of the people building Microsoft’s tablet was a friend of Jobs’s wife, Laurene Powell. On his birthday he invited Jobs and his wife to his party. According to Isaacson, Jobs went very reluctantly. At some point during the party, between drinks, the Microsoft man started boasting about the project he had been working on, showing Jobs Microsoft’s tablet and bragging about how wonderful it was going to be in the market.
Jobs did not take kindly to this man’s grandstanding. According to Walter Isaacson, this is roughly how Steve Jobs put it:
The guy kept badgering me about how Microsoft was going to completely change the world with those tablets, and he wouldn’t stop saying they were going to wipe out laptops. So I said to myself, to hell with this, let’s show him a real tablet, because I quickly saw they were working on the wrong product. For God’s sake, Microsoft’s tablet even needed a pen. It was horrible.
Jobs says that the next day he got his team at Apple together to work on a proper tablet, one with no keyboard and a touch screen, because the moment a device needs a pen, you’re dead.
After several weeks working on the iPad, at some creative point, they shrank the tablet so much that they ended up developing the iPhone first, though without losing sight of the iPad, which they launched later.
See also: What Steve Jobs and Bill Gates really thought of each other
Featured image: Woookie, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
